A recovery plan is useful only if people can carry it out in the right order with the resources they have. Business Recovery & Rehearsal Desk turns one defined disruption — a payment-service outage, a failed order system, a power cut at a depot — into a sequence of actions with an owner, a contact reference, a duration, prerequisites and the time each step should be finished. It is built for a shop preparing for a service outage and for a medium-sized organisation coordinating recovery across departments and locations.

Plan the order. Actions are connected through explicit prerequisites, and the tool calculates the earliest completion estimate and whether it meets the recovery target (RTO) you entered. Parallel steps are treated as an unlimited-resources estimate: when two actions need the same person or team — the same resource label — you get an overlap warning instead of a silently reordered “optimal” schedule. A circular or missing prerequisite blocks the calculation and is named.

Test the plan. Record when each action actually started and finished in a rehearsal, with its cost. Incomplete critical steps stay incomplete — never zero minutes — and a recovery time is shown only when every critical action has a valid recorded completion. A completion recorded before its prerequisite is flagged as an error. The rehearsal comparison shows planned and recorded times in separate columns, so the report never claims a recovery merely because a document was created.

Worked example from the fictional demo: a 30-minute first action is followed by parallel actions of 20 and 40 minutes and a final 10-minute check, so the earliest estimate is 80 minutes against a 60-minute target — a 20-minute gap. Both parallel actions need the IT lead, which raises an overlap warning. In the rehearsal the 40-minute step took 50 minutes, so the recorded recovery is 90 minutes, not 80. The last backup was 90 minutes old at the start against a 60-minute RPO: 30 minutes over — an age check, not proof that the data can be restored.

Understand the business effect. The tool separates elapsed outage hours from the hours when the site was open, using each site's own opening calendar and time zone. Four open hours at $100 of contribution per hour plus $20 of extra cost per elapsed hour and a $50 fixed incident cost give $530 when the sales are lost. If the orders wait instead, the same outage costs $130 and creates a backlog of 40 orders; with 10 orders of spare hourly capacity it clears in 4 open hours. With no spare capacity the model shows no finite catch-up time rather than an invented one.

For medium-sized businesses, sites and departments stay visible: up to 25 sites and departments and 2,000 actions per scenario, filters by department, criticality and shared resource, and batch import of sites, scenarios, actions and rehearsal times from CSV or XLSX with every error and duplicate shown before anything is saved. A central team that looks fine in each site's plan becomes visible as the bottleneck it is. No AI guesses: every result shows its working, with the formula and inputs one click away.

Try the two fictional demos — a home-goods store with eight staff and a distributor with three sites and six departments — then buy once for the full online tool and the offline file, or open it with an active PRO subscription.