Commercial insurance for your property, vehicles or business

What would it cost to put the property back? What a builder would charge to rebuild it, at today's costs and compliance requirements, not what you paid or what it would sell for. If your sum insured is short, you pay the shortfall when you rebuild.

How long would you be out, and what does that cost you? A rebuild can involve make-safe work, assessment, design, approvals and finding a builder. Construction can then take 12 to 18 months. Sales may stop for all that time while the bills keep coming.

Who could you hurt, and what would they claim from you? A customer, a tenant and a client who relied on your advice can claim under different covers, and the wrong one does not respond just because you have a policy. A contract can also set the limit you have to hold.

What is on the road in your name? How your utes, vans and trucks are insured changes as you add more of them. We can keep the utes and the trucks on separate policies, because their claims differ.

What comes with being the one in charge? Employing people, holding customer data, signing contracts and directing a company all create claims outside property and vehicles. The business packs we place generally carry no cyber section, and only some offer management liability. Those covers usually sit on policies of their own.

If one pack holds everything you need, start with Business Insurance. If you own commercial property, run vehicles in numbers, hold liability across multiple sites or need a section the pack cannot carry, you are in commercial territory. Where a pack cannot carry the cover, property risks may suit an industrial special risks policy, and liability can be arranged on a general liability policy.

If you trade from a building you own, you are tenant and landlord in one. The building's owner and the trading business each need insuring in the right name. One policy can name both, with the insurer's approval, or each can have its own. Your circumstances and the quotes decide which. For Business Owner-Occupiers covers that overlap.

Property and premises

• Commercial Building Insurance - the building, at its rebuild cost.
• Commercial Property Insurance - the fit-out, contents and stock, and which parts are yours to insure.
• Equipment Breakdown Insurance - machinery that fails from the inside.
• Commercial Strata Insurance - the body corporate of a commercial or mixed-use scheme.
• Commercial Landlords Insurance - a building or strata unit you let, and its rent. The lease decides who insures what.

Profits

• Business Interruption Insurance - your profits when insured damage interrupts the business.

Liability

• Public Liability Insurance - injury to a person or damage to their property, connected to your operation.
• Professional Indemnity Insurance - a client's financial loss from your advice, design, report or service.
• Management Liability Insurance - employment disputes, regulator attention and allegations against a director or manager.
• Property Owners Liability - owning the premises, a different exposure from trading in them.
• Product Liability Insurance - harm caused by something you make, import or supply, once it has left your hands.

Vehicles

• Motor Fleet Insurance - a genuine fleet, generally 15 or more vehicles, under one policy. A business with 1 to 14 vehicles sits on commercial motor, a policy of its own.
• Truck Insurance - heavy vehicles, which insurers price and accept on their own terms.
• Transport Operators Insurance - the load as well as the vehicle, for businesses that move goods for a living.

Data and systems

• Cyber Insurance - a data breach, ransomware or a scam inside your systems, including the cost of notifying the people affected.

Not sure which apply? The Insurance Needs Finder walks you through the questions.

On a building, the sum insured can be well short. When MCG Quantity Surveyors reviewed more than 2,000 of its own valuations, it found buildings underinsured by an average of 24 per cent, rising to 31 per cent for industrial property. In a 2015 survey, around one in ten small businesses that supplied both figures reported assets worth more than their sum insured. The survey used the owners' own figures. Underinsurance in Commercial Buildings has the detail.

In our experience, many new clients with a trading business come to us with no business interruption cover. Properly arranged, this cover can be one of the dearer sections of a business pack. Cost is a significant reason clients decline it, and some choose to carry the risk.

The indemnity period is the time the policy keeps paying after the damage. The payments stop when that period runs out, whether or not your trade has recovered. We recommend 18 months of business interruption cover. The period is yours to choose, and the longer it is, the stronger your position at claim time.

Before your renewal reaches you, we go back to the market. We explain your options and any change in price by phone or email.

Where you own a commercial building, we put a rebuild figure on it at new business and at every renewal. We commission a desktop building replacement estimate for you, free. It is worked out from aerial and street imagery rather than a site visit. We commission it for our purposes as your broker, to inform the advice we give you. For Commercial Property Owners is built for the owner of one building or ten.

We also run roof condition monitoring, more than 1,200 aerial checks a year. The imagery cannot certify a roof or find every defect. Where it shows a concern, we send you the images and explain what it could mean for your cover. Roof damage is the most common commercial property claim we see. In our experience, pre-existing damage is the biggest thing roof claims get reduced for.

We put your risk to a panel of competing insurers and negotiate the sections, the limits inside them and the terms to suit your business. What is agreed goes on your schedule, the part of your policy that lists your covers and figures. And we tell you what we are paid, in dollars, on every invoice.

We work from two Queensland offices, New Farm in Brisbane and Bundaberg, and look after commercial clients in every state by phone and video.

The claims manager will keep you informed. The insurer makes the decision, and we press for what the policy and the evidence support.