We have all experienced the minor inconvenience of a loss of power and its effect on your business which relies on communication with your customers and vendors via phone and internet. But are you prepared for a major disaster that keeps you from doing business for weeks or months at a time?

According to the Institute for Business and Home Safety, an estimated 25 percent of businesses do not reopen following a major disaster. Will you be one of the 25 percent if disaster strikes you and your business?

The following recommendations from the U.S. Small Business Administration can start you on your way to creating a disaster recovery plan for your business:

• Employees should know where all the emergency exits are located. A safety coordinator could be appointed to develop evacuation plans and safety drills.
• Meet with your insurance agent. Business interruption insurance replaces income lost when a business suffers downtime and should be a consideration. Make sure you know what your insurance does and doesn't cover.
• Backups of vital business records should be stored offsite. Paper and Computer records should be copied, saved and stored offsite at least 50 miles away from the main business site.
• Create a "recovery communications" plan. Assign key employees as spokespersons who will contact suppliers, creditors, other employees, customers, media and utility companies to get the word out that the business is still viable. Also, that spokesperson can keep the public informed of rebuilding efforts, if necessary.

For more disaster recovery plan recommendations and information about disaster assistance, check out the U.S. Small Business Administration website at: http://archive.sba.gov/services/disasterassistance/disasterpreparedness/index.html and FEMA's website at: http://www.fema.gov/plan/index.shtm

To find out the risks in your area, check out the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety's website at: http://www.disastersafety.org

To keep your old orders without slowing down your system, use dump order history to move older orders to a different location on your hard drive.

Dump order history has a field for a cutoff date. All orders in your order history with a date prior to the cutoff date will be moved to the location you select.

After moving older orders to a different location, your ProfitMaker software will have to search through less data to find the information you need.

The increase in system speed will depend upon your computer hardware and how long you have been using ProfitMaker. You can learn more about this and other system maintenance functions for ProfitMaker here.