What a small team actually needs
Most documentation advice is written for organisations with a compliance function. At five people the constraints are different and most of the apparatus is waste.
What a company of five actually needs, as distinct from what a documentation system for two hundred people looks like.
What is different at five people
Everyone can see everyone. Questions get answered by asking across the room, and nothing is lost in a handover because there are no handovers. That is a real advantage, and it is why most documentation advice — written for organisations with a compliance function and an intranet — reads as bureaucratic here.
The exposure is different too. At five people, one person leaving removes a fifth of everything the company knows how to do. That is the actual risk, and it is not solved by a documentation system. It is solved by writing down a small number of specific things.
What a small team genuinely needs
Procedures for work only one person can do. If a single person is the only one who can run payroll, close the month, deploy the release or handle the regulator, those are the documents. Nothing else on this list matters as much.
Procedures for work that is rare and consequential. The annual filing, the insurance renewal, the thing done once a quarter where a mistake is expensive. Nobody remembers these, including the person who did it last time.
Anything a customer or a regulator can ask you to produce. If someone external has the right to see it, it needs to exist and be findable.
Onboarding. The one document that pays for itself immediately, because at five people the sixth hire is otherwise trained by interrupting everybody. The onboarding SOP is the template for it.
What to skip until you are bigger
An approval workflow for documents. At five people, the owner writes it and one other person reads it. That is the review.
A documentation platform. A shared folder that everybody actually opens beats a system nobody logs into. The tool is not the control; the number, the owner and the review date are.
A policy library. Most policies exist to communicate a rule to people you cannot talk to. You can talk to everyone. Write the two or three that have legal or contractual weight and leave the rest.
Documenting everything. This is the most expensive mistake available to a small team, and it is the failure mode covered here: too many at once, none maintained, all abandoned within a quarter.
The format that survives
Two pages, maximum. A control block at the top — number, revision, owner, last reviewed — then purpose, then the steps, then what to do when it goes wrong. If it will not fit on two pages it is probably a process rather than an SOP, and the distinction matters.
Written by the person who does the work, not by a manager describing what they believe happens. This is worth insisting on even when the manager writes faster.
Kept where the work happens. A procedure filed somewhere separate from the tools it describes is a procedure nobody opens.
Numbered from the start. It costs nothing at document one and it is painful to retrofit at document forty — that is the whole argument in document control basics.
A realistic order
Write one. The single procedure where one person is the only one who can do it and the business stops if they are away. One document, two pages, this week.
Have somebody else follow it, without help, and fix what breaks. This is the step that turns a document into a working one, and it is the step most often skipped.
Then write the next one, in a month. Not five this weekend. A small set that is current and used is worth more than a full library that is eighteen months stale.
Review when something changes, not on a calendar you will not keep. At this size an honest trigger — “we revise it when the process changes” — is more truthful than a quarterly cycle nobody performs.
Every template here is free, blank and worked, and needs no account. Start with the SOP template, or read how to get the procedure out of the one person who knows it if that is the harder half.
Editor's notes
Written by Free Biz Docs about the document above — not reader submissions.
The skip list is deliberately longer than the do list
Approval workflows, platforms, policy libraries, documenting everything — four things to leave alone against four things to write. Documentation advice is overwhelmingly written for organisations that have a compliance function, and applied to five people it produces a system nobody maintains.
The proportion is the argument. If the page had listed twelve things to build it would have been recommending the failure it describes.
"Review when something changes" is honest and it fails quietly
It is preferred here over a quarterly cycle because a cycle nobody performs is a review date that lies. The cost of the honest version is that it has no trigger of its own: nothing prompts anyone, so a procedure can drift out of date without any moment at which that becomes visible.
The cheap mitigation is the one the post already recommends for a different reason — have somebody follow the document. A procedure that someone actually used this quarter is a procedure you know is current.
A template site telling you to write fewer documents
This site exists to hand out document templates, and this post's central advice is to write one of them this week and the next one in a month. More templates downloaded is the outcome the site benefits from; fewer documents, maintained, is the outcome that works for a team of five.
The two disagree, and the page is written for the second. It is worth knowing that is the case when reading anything else here.
These documents are starting structures for you to build on, not professional or legal advice. Anything that will have legal or contractual effect, or that varies by jurisdiction, should be reviewed by someone qualified in the relevant place.
Common questions
- Does a five-person company need SOPs?
- A few, not a library. The real exposure at that size is that one person leaving removes a fifth of what the company knows how to do — so the documents worth writing are the procedures only one person can perform, and the rare consequential ones nobody remembers.
- What should a small business document first?
- The single procedure where one person is the only one who can do it and the business stops if they are away. One document, two pages, this week. Then have somebody else follow it without help and fix what breaks.
- What can a small team skip?
- Approval workflows, a documentation platform, and a policy library. Most policies exist to communicate a rule to people you cannot talk to, and you can talk to everyone. A shared folder people actually open beats a system nobody logs into.
- How long should an SOP be?
- Two pages at most: control block, purpose, steps, and what to do when it goes wrong. If it will not fit, it is probably a process rather than an SOP, and it should be split.
- How often should a small team review its documents?
- When something changes, rather than on a calendar nobody keeps. At this size an honest trigger is more truthful than a quarterly cycle that is never performed — and a review date that has passed is itself a finding.