You were terrified by the dystopian universe of The Hunger Games. But now comes an even bleaker vision of the future.

Imagine a world in which you’ve lost control of all your business passwords. Email, gone. Your Facebook account, vanished. Your website domain name, snatched from your arms while you scream at the cold and uncaring sky. Your whole business falls apart while you watch, only able to wonder how it got to this point. For many, the nightmare is real and it’s here.

But don’t worry, it can be prevented! All you have to do is volunteer as tribute and get your act together. This means putting together a password sheet that contains every single one of your business passwords, even if someone else set up the account for you. Why is this so important? Let’s hit a few top reasons:

• You could part ways with the company who set up those accounts. If the terms aren’t good, you might never get access again.
• Someone could suffer an injury that leaves them unable to find, remember, or retrieve lost passwords.
• You could simply never write them down in the first place and thus, when it’s time to renew your domain name two years later, you’re out of luck and spend hours of your time fighting with the registrar because you can’t remember which email address you signed up with.

I have personally seen each and every one of these scenarios happen. They are not fun to deal with, but the solution is so simple: Write. It. Down. Or, you know, use a Word doc or an Excel sheet. It doesn’t matter as much how you do it, as long as you do it. Once you’ve got your passwords in order, it’s time to duplicate, duplicate, duplicate. Have a version of your password sheet saved to your business server, your home computer, the cloud,  your locked file cabinet, your safety deposit box, filed with your will. No, I’m not joking about that last one; could your business run if something happened to you and no one knew where to find the passwords? As a business owner, you have to consider these contingencies.

Please, please, don’t neglect this crucial step. In today’s world, your business passwords are maybe even more important than the keys to your front door. Protect them, take care of them, and hope for a future free from password loss.