Looking for SME Insurance? Let us explain the different types of SME insurance available for your business.
Types Of SME Insurance
There are various types of SME Insurance, including the following:
- Buildings & Contents Insurance
- Business Interruption Insurance
- Employers’ Liability Insurance
- Key Man Insurance
- Professional Indemnity Insurance
- Public Liability Insurance
Buildings & Contents SME Insurance
If you work from premises or have expensive materials to allow you to do your work, such as laptops, office furniture or other equipment to allow you to undertake your services, you should have buildings and contents insurance so that these items will be replaced for you should they be damaged, lost or stolen.
Business Interruption Insurance
Following the Covid 19 pandemic, there was a lot of discussion about business interruption insurance. Many of the SME Insurance market decided that their business interruption insurance should not be required to pay out for Covid 19 because it was such a rare and unexpected thing.
Thankfully, sense prevailed and the courts ordered that these SME Insurance companies should pay out to their clients who had been paying their premium for many years and suddenly lost a lot of income (for some businesses their income disappeared completely overnight as they were ordered to close by the Government due to lockdown.
If your business has good turnover, and to lose all or a part of that turnover would cost you or your business substantially, you should obtain some business interruption insurance quotes for your business.
Employers’ Liability SME Insurance
If you have employees, it is compulsory for you to have Employers’ Liability Insurance. This insurance will ensure that if your employees suffer any injury at work due to your negligence, the insurance will indemnify you for the compensation that is payable.
As personal injury claims can lead to compensation claims amounting to many millions of pounds, not only is it compulsory but it will allow you to sleep better at night, knowing your employees will be compensated by an insurance company should they suffer an injury.
Key Man Insurance
If you or someone else in your company is absolutely vital to the profitability of your business, you should have key man SME insurance in place to cover the lost income that your business experiences if they are injured or otherwise out of action for any length of time.
Professional Indemnity Insurance
If the services that you provide, if performed badly, could lead to your clients or customers losing income, for which they could sue you, you should absolutely have professional indemnity insurance in place.
You could soon wipe out some or all of your business profits or turnover and turn an otherwise good business into an insolvent one, forcing it to close.
For the price of an annual insurance premium, you can protect yourself from this happening.
Public Liability Insurance
Whilst employer’s liability insurance protects your employees if they are injured on your premises or at their place of work, public liability insurance protects anyone visiting your premises.
If a visitor sustained an injury on your premises due to your negligence, your business will be responsible for the compensation payable.
As explained above, these compensation claims can run into the millions of pounds, so it is wise to protect your business with public liability insurance if you have premises which members of the public visit.
You should also have public liability insurance if you work on site at client premises, in case your actions on a client’s site causes injury to anyone else there.
If that happens, your public liability insurance will pay any compensation due.
SME Insurance Summary
Whilst you may find that your business needs several different insurance policies, the costs of each policy are generally reasonable in relation to the turnover of your business, and many SME insurance companies will offer monthly instalments rather than payment in full.
The peace of mind having all of the SME insurance policies that yous should have in place should be well worth the investment.