Commercial insurance. Cover built around what you actually own, not what fits on a form.

Five questions decide the programme.

What would it cost to put the property back? It is not what you paid or what it would sell for. It is what a builder would charge to rebuild it, at today's costs and compliance requirements. That number decides whether a claim leaves you whole or leaves you funding the difference.

How long would you be out, and what does that cost you? A commercial rebuild takes months, often more than a year once you count approvals, demolition and trades. Every one of those months has an income figure attached.

Who could you hurt, and what would they claim from you? It could be a customer, a contractor, a passer-by, a tenant or a client who relied on your advice. Different people need different covers, and the wrong one does not respond just because you have a policy.

What is on the road in your name? Vehicles you use for the business need a separate contract from a private motor policy. How they are insured changes as you add more of them.

What comes with being the one in charge? Employing people, holding customer data, signing contracts and directing a company all create claims that have nothing to do with property or vehicles. The covers for them are the ones owners most often discover they never bought.

As your business grows, what changes is how the cover has to be built. A packaged policy is a container with sections. In many packs, each section has a ceiling the insurer will write to. Once you outgrow a ceiling, that cover generally moves out into a policy of its own.

Underwriting changes too. Smaller risks are commonly rated from a form. Larger ones are generally underwritten individually, from a schedule of every location with its sum insured and construction, your claims history and an underwriter's questions. That takes longer, but it is where the cover starts fitting your business instead of the category.

Here is the practical test. If the covers you need all fit inside one packaged policy, business insurance is the conversation, and Business Insurance is the plain-language map of it. 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.

Plenty of businesses hold both. If you trade from a building you own, you are tenant and landlord in one. That is a property risk and a trading risk that do not merge, usually on two policies with two different renewal dates. For Business Owner-Occupiers covers that overlap, which most generic advice misses.

Property and premises

• Commercial Building Insurance - for the building itself, insured at what it would cost to rebuild.
• Commercial Property Insurance - the wider property programme, including the contents, stock, fitout and equipment.
• Commercial Strata Insurance - for a lot in a commercial scheme, where the body corporate insures the common property, not your part.
• Commercial Landlords Insurance - for a building you lease to another business, where the rent is as much at risk as the roof.

Income

• Business Interruption Insurance - replaces the income an insured event stops you earning, for the period you nominated.

Liability

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

Vehicles

• Motor Fleet Insurance - for a genuine fleet, generally 15 or more vehicles, under one policy. Below that, a handful of work vehicles is commercial motor inside a business pack, and it is worth setting up deliberately rather than by default.
• Truck Insurance - for heavy vehicles, which are rated and underwritten on their own terms.
• Transport Operators Insurance - for businesses whose product is moving goods, where the load needs cover as well as the vehicle.

Data and systems

• Cyber Insurance - for a data breach, ransomware or a scam inside your systems, including the cost of notifying the people affected and getting back to trading.

Not sure which apply? The Insurance Needs Finder walks you through the questions in a few minutes. Or call 07 3292 1111.

Around 1 in 10 Australian small-to-medium businesses consider themselves underinsured (ICA/Woolcott 2015). That figure relies on owners knowing their cover is short. When valuers measure underinsured properties, the average gap is around 24 per cent, higher again on industrial buildings (MCG Quantity Surveyors). The gap turns up at the worst moment, when the sum insured is already fixed. Underinsurance in Commercial Buildings has the detail.

Income works the same way. In our experience, most business pack policies we review have no business interruption cover at all, or a period too short to survive a rebuild. The policy stops paying on the date you nominated, not the date you reopen.

None of this is fixed by buying more. It is fixed by someone checking, once a year, that every number in your programme still matches your business.

Commercial building owners. If you own the building, you own the rebuild cost, whether or not the sum insured reflects it. Everything else in your programme is smaller. For Commercial Property Owners is built for that starting point, one building or ten.

Commercial landlords. You insure an asset and an income stream at once. The lease decides who insures what. Get that boundary wrong and you and your tenant can both pay for the same thing while something else sits uncovered.

Fleet operators and businesses with vehicles. You might run four utes on a business pack or a yard full of trucks. Motor Fleet Insurance sets out where the fleet line sits.

Larger operations, and businesses that have outgrown the pack. You may have multiple sites, staff on payroll, contracts that set limits you have to hold, stock that moves, and equipment that stops the job when it breaks.

If you run a smaller business from leased premises, the packaged route usually serves you better. Business Insurance is the honest starting point.

An online quote accepts whatever rebuild figure you type, whether it came off a rates notice, a bank valuation, the last renewal schedule or a builder's guess from six years ago. Only one of those is right.

So we go and get the right one. If you own a commercial building, we commission a desktop building replacement valuation at no cost to you, for our purposes as your broker, to inform the advice we give you: a registered valuer's desktop assessment of what the building would cost to rebuild. We also run roof condition monitoring for clients, more than 1,200 checks a year. The roof is where commercial property claims most often start, and where insurers most often push back.

We put your risk to a panel of competing insurers. That matters more on commercial risk, where the differences between wordings are bigger and the sums involved make them expensive. 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. Commercial Building Insurance answers the interstate question.