Your office is worth more than the desks in it.

Contents and fit-out, which the policy calls Contents and Stock. On the business packs we place, the contents, fit-out and any stock in your office sit in one section, with one sum insured. In an office that figure is the professional fit-out first. Then the workstations and monitors, the computers, the server or comms cabinet, the photocopiers, the furniture and kitchen, and any stock, including anything in a warehouse room out the back. It has to be the full replacement cost of all of it, which makes it the wrong place to go small.

Fit-out is the part people miss: partitions, joinery, flooring, ceilings, lighting, data cabling and electrical work done for your tenancy. If it would take a tradesperson to remove it, it is fit-out, insured at what it would cost to build again today.

The gear that leaves the office. Laptops, phones, cameras and sample kits need a separate section, called general property on every wording we place. It has to be selected, with anything above a modest value listed by name. At least one of the wordings we place expressly excludes laptops and mobile phones from the extension that covers contents temporarily away from the premises. For most offices we would normally arrange general property as its own standalone policy, because it is the cover most likely to be claimed on, and it is generally inexpensive.

Working from home. Most of the wordings we place cover equipment at an employee's home, but cap it, commonly at a share of the contents sum insured. For a hybrid team, that cap matters.

Glass, theft and money. Glass is a section of the pack, not an automatic inclusion, and most leases require the tenant to carry it. Theft is its own section too. Where nobody forced their way in, the wordings we place fall back to a capped benefit, commonly around $20,000, and only where the theft section was taken. Some pay the higher of $20,000 and your schedule, one fixes it at $20,000 flat, and others cap it against your contents sum insured. What business insurance theft cover actually pays for sets out the triggers. Money is a section on every wording we place, worth ticking only if someone handles cash or cheques.

Business interruption and liability. Business interruption replaces lost income and fixed costs when damage makes the office unusable, never a quiet month. Public liability responds if a client, courier or contractor is injured at your office. Only two of the nine insurers on our platform write management liability as a pack section, so it is usually its own policy.

Cyber and professional indemnity are not in the pack. An office generally needs cyber cover as well, and the business packs we place do not include cyber as a section, so it is a separate cyber policy. If your office sells advice, design or reports, professional indemnity covers the loss your work could cause a client.

On the nine business pack wordings we place most often, breakdown is excluded from the property section and needs its own optional section. That matters if you own your office, or if your lease makes the air conditioning your job.

Take a system installed for about $10,000 twenty years ago. Replacing it today with a modern, energy-efficient equivalent can cost about $30,000 to $40,000. Breakdown cover is often capped at about $10,000, and sometimes the section is not on the policy at all. The cap sits on your policy schedule, not in the policy booklet, so a higher figure asked for at quote is not your cover until the schedule says so.

What we check: who your lease makes responsible for the air conditioning and the switchboard. Then whether breakdown cover is on the policy, and the cap on your schedule against what the system would cost to replace today. How breakdown cover works is on Equipment Breakdown Insurance; the landlord's side of the same question is on Commercial Landlords Insurance.

Offices grow quietly: a wall goes in, a team of eight becomes fourteen, the cabling is redone. None of that prompts a call to an insurer, so the schedule keeps saying what the office was worth the last time anyone asked.

Co-insurance then reaches a contents and fit-out claim just as it reaches a building one. On a partial loss, the insurer can cut what it pays by the same proportion your figure fell short. On a write-off, you are paid the figure in full and then discover what fitting out again actually costs. See The Co-Insurance Clause for the maths.

If you lease, make-good at the end of the term is the cost almost nobody realises is coming, and it is usually expensive. What a lease asks you to insure is on For Business Owner Tenants. If you own the building, it is a third figure, at what it would cost to rebuild. See Commercial Building Insurance, and every building type we insure on commercial property insurance.

We start with your lease and what you want the insurance to do, then work through the sections one at a time.

The fit-out gets priced, not estimated. You walk us through the space and we cost what it would take to build it again today.

You see what we are paid. We show our commission and our broker fee in dollars on every invoice, and have done since we started in 2010. The fee is charged in addition to, or in place of, insurer commission.

Mostly professional services: accounting and legal practices, consultants and engineers, medical and allied health rooms, real estate and finance offices, agencies, and the head office of a business whose work happens elsewhere.

If you own an office building and lease it to somebody else's business, start at Commercial Landlords Insurance instead. If your office is a room in your home, most home and contents policies limit or exclude business equipment and business related liability. Call us and we will tell you whether a policy is worth it at your size.

1. Insuring the contents for what they would fetch, not what they would cost to replace.
2. Leaving the fit-out out of the figure. The partitions, joinery, flooring and cabling are often the larger number.
3. Assuming the laptops are covered because the office contents are.
4. Leaving the air conditioning to a breakdown cap nobody checked.
5. Treating renewal as a formality after the office took on more space, more staff or a bigger fit-out.