Small Business Insurance
Small Business Insurance : Premises Insurance Claims Handling
No-one likes to have to make a claim, but in the end it is why you take out insurance.
Knowing something about claims management at the outset can make areal difference to how and why you buy the insurance, and how effectively you manage the claim if one arises.
Most people buy insurance of any kind on a sort of premise that they pay a premium, cover themselves against everything, and if they need to claim, their insurers should just pay up immediately regardless.
The real world of insurance doesn’t work like that, and when it is your business at risk, it is worth understanding something if the mechanics of property/premises insurance.
Your livelihood, your safety and possibly the safety of your family/employees could be at risk.
Small Business insurance : Premise/Property Physical and Liability Damage
The first thing is to understand the nature of what you are insuring.
The more specific your understanding of the risks involved, you will know what your insurance policy covers you for.
As a rule of thumb, for property/premises insurance there will be two specific areas you need to understand.
One is what is known as physical loss – this will be for risks such as fire, flood, criminal activity, what are known as ‘ Acts of God’ that can have a physical impact on building.
This can include plant and machinery. The second will be property/premises liability insurance, which will be the risks associated wit being held liable for damages, either to staff, the general public , suppliers etc.
Knowing what you are liable for in terms of risk and cover, allows you to manage the risk more effectively.
The second area of effective claim management is preventative risk management.
There is an explicit, sometimes implicit duty of care on the employer to generally do all he/she can to reduce the level of risk, and subsequent claim to the insurers.
The best example of this is someone who leaves their keys in their car, and it gets stolen.
An insurer could argue they are not liable because the motorist didn’t do all they reasonably could to reduce risk. Obviously this depends a lot on individual circumstances, but it is a principle worth bearing in mind.
Know what your risks are, both in terms of potential physical loss and liability, and do what you reasonably can to prevent them.
The third thing is what to do if you have an an incident that could lead to a claim.
Have a system in place before it happens.
This can involve allocating specific tasks to specific people, having off site documentation, having an accident/ incident reporting system, keeping details of what happened, including photographs.
The more information you can gather at the time, the easier it will be to make a claim at a subsequent date if you need to.
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