When it comes to commercial insurance, as you can imagine, there are many more facets available to you than private or personal insurance. Why? Because there are so many more things that could go wrong. Commercial insurance is the insurance you would use for a business.
Property Insurance
To start with, you have your basic property insurance. This covers the building that you own or lease and what is in the building. Laptops, computers, servers, furniture, and more. This does not mean it has to be destroyed by fire or flood. This could also be theft, vandalism, accidental damage, or any other weather-related event.
If the property damage occurred because of a natural disaster, your equipment won’t generally be covered unless you have an endorsement that specifies natural disaster coverage.
If your equipment is destroyed because of an electrical issue such as power surges or a short circuit, you will also not generally be covered unless you have an endorsement for equipment breakdown.
What commercial property insurance does NOT cover is employee injury, cyberattacks or data breaches, vehicles used by the business, or forced closure due to property damage.
Liability Insurance
This type of insurance is used solely for injuries caused to third parties. If someone was injured on the premises of your business or someone sues you for personal injury, your liability insurance policy would come into play.
Malpractice Insurance
Malpractice, which is actually a type of liability insurance, is where a professional’s performance falls below the professional standard of care and that professional is being sued because of his or her malfeasance, the malpractice insurance would cover defense costs and settlements incurred.
Although you usually hear of doctors and dentists having this type of insurance, professionals like lawyers, accountants, architects could carry this piece of mind.
Workmen’s Compensation Insurance
This is for your business if an employee gets hurt on the job to get them medical care. This insurance will also ensure you will not get sued by the employee for some type of negligence situation.
Automotive Insurance
Simply stated, this insurance covers all motorized vehicles used by and for your business. The professionals at https://www.lopriore.com/commercial-auto-insurance/ explain that if an accident occurs when there is a delivery being made by either your driver or a third party, this insurance will come into play. Auto insurance is legally required in most states, so make sure to check what type of insurance you need.
Tenant’s Insurance
In many cases, a store or business owner does not own the building or piece of a building that they run their business in or from and will be leased from a property management company.. This commercial lease may require the tenant to carry their own insurance to cover all or part of the section they use for their business.
Builder’s Risk Insurance
If you are into construction and have a building that has been damaged by a windstorm or tornado or such while in the process of being built , this type of insurance will cover your losses.
Business Interruption Insurance
On the flipside of that, if you have to close the doors to your business due to a fire that affected the whole building that you lease from, this insurance can alleviate the sting of closed doors. Such things as salaries, lost business profits, taxes and other things can be covered by this insurance.
Law or Ordinance Insurance
If you have to rebuild after losing part of your structure that you own and you have to upgrade to meet current code this insurance is key. For instance, more than half of your business structure is destroyed by a tornado and local rules state since it is more than half destroyed, you have to rebuild the whole structure, this insurance will kick in. Your regular property insurance will most likely not cover the cost of the upgrades to get to code, just the damages incurred.
Errors and Omissions Insurance
In business nowadays, there is a lot of paperwork and red tape to deal with. A lot of i’s to dot and t’s to cross, as it were. Sometimes this paperwork is not filed correctly or not filed at all due to failure in communication or just exorbitant workload. That is where this insurance is valuable if there is damage to a third party due to this type of accidental oversight.
Data Breach Insurance
This insurance is broader than you may expect as some carriers not only just cover the damages from a cyberattack like the communication and public relations with the third parties and employees who may have been affected. This insurance can cover finding the source of the breach and diminish the attack. Some carriers will even cover the cost of education of information technology security so the specific type of breach and other such cyberattacks don’t occur again.
Umbrella Insurance
There are occasions when the coverage you have bought for a specific event just doesn’t cover the event happening. Maybe you just did not comprehend the multitude of costs associated. That is where umbrella insurance comes in. It covers above and beyond what liability policies will not. A business will find this coverage vital in recovering from a lawsuit that leaves them financially impoverished.
Key Employee Insurance
Do you have that one executive or manager who runs the ship? If that person was to be hurt or killed, the company would be crippled. Key Employee, or key man, insurance is actually a life insurance policy that the company pays the premiums for to help the business recover from this key employee being gone.
To Conclude
There are many other types of commercial insurance not even listed and described here due to its specific nature. This list however gives you a brief overview of what is available to you if you are a brick and mortar business owner.
