Church Cashbook Maintenance Manual

Fast-response checklist for unexpected outages, prioritising data integrity and safe restoration of service.

Emergency / unplanned outage procedures

Purpose

This procedure is used for unexpected failures or service disruption. The priority order is: protect data integrity, stop further writes if needed, restore safely, then communicate and document.

Immediate response (stabilise first)

• ☐ Confirm the issue and its scope (all users vs single page vs single church).
• ☐ Check server and PHP error logs for the root error.
• ☐ If there is any risk of data corruption or uncontrolled writes, enable maintenance mode immediately:
  • ☐ Create maintenance.on in the web root.
  • ☐ Confirm the site returns HTTP 503.

Diagnosis and containment

• ☐ Identify likely cause (deployment error, schema mismatch, config issue, resource exhaustion, DB availability).
• ☐ If a recent deployment occurred, consider immediate rollback.
• ☐ If database integrity is in doubt:
  • ☐ Stop all writes (keep 503 enabled).
  • ☐ Take an immediate backup snapshot before intervention (if possible).

Recovery

1. Apply corrective action (rollback, patch, restore, config fix).
2. Validate database health and schema completeness (if relevant).
3. Check logs again to ensure errors have stopped.
4. Smoke test core workflows:
   • ☐ Login
   • ☐ Dashboard
   • ☐ Add a transaction (and void/remove if appropriate)
   • ☐ Reports
   • ☐ Gift Aid (if applicable)

Restore service

1. Delete maintenance.on.
2. Confirm normal routing resumes (HTTP 200).
3. Confirm login and dashboard access.
4. Perform a final quick verification that the incident condition is resolved.

Post-incident review (required)

• ☐ Record incident details (time detected, duration, impact, root cause, fix applied).
• ☐ Confirm backups were valid and available.
• ☐ Identify prevention steps (monitoring, deployment safeguards, tests, documentation updates).
• ☐ If any data impact is suspected, document what was verified and how.

Emergency incident log template

Date: ____________________________

Time detected: ____________________    Detected by: ____________________

Issue summary: ________________________________________________________

Impact scope: _________________________________________________________

Was maintenance mode enabled? ☐ Yes ☐ No

Root cause: ___________________________________________________________

Corrective action: ____________________________________________________

Rollback used? ☐ Yes ☐ No

Data integrity verified? ☐ Yes ☐ No

Follow-up actions:

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