How Important is Insurance in Business?
There are 2 answers to this question – the long version and the short version.
The short version is – absolutely YES you need insurance both for business and personal.
When you run a business, you automatically take on responsibility for the well-being of a range of people.
These include employees to customers.
In the course of doing your business, you have the potential to affect these stakeholders in serious and costly ways and business insurance protects you financially from some of these consequences.
Putting it simply, it is very important to have business insurance because the financial consequences of a potential mishap could easily wipe out the assets of a small business.
In the case of your customers or even those who may merely pass by your business, insurance provides protection in case some harm or injury is caused to the as a result of your business.
And of course, your business can be harmed as well – think fire, flood, theft etc.
Normally people think of insurance as something that protects them – it’s also important to note that proper insurance can help protect others.
For example, if you own a food business and a customer falls sick after eating one of your products or if you own a delivery business and one of your vehicles hits a pedestrian, you need to be able to pay for the damage you've caused.
In many cases, your business may require insurance as a pre-requisite in order to work with another company.
Types of business insurance
Nowadays, there are numerous insurance products available in the market, however, many of them may not a be applicable for the vast majority of small-medium businesses.
It can be overwhelming in deciding what to insure given the choices.
The easiest way to look to look at it, is to categorise the insurance, i.e. what areas of the business need coverage.
The key business areas are:
Assets and revenue
Liability
Personal and workers
You can then decide what insurance is needed within each of these areas, e.g.
Assets and revenue:
building and contents
glass breakage
motor vehicle
fire and other damage
equipment breakdown
goods in transit
fraud and dishonesty
money
theft
business interruption
Liability:
public liability
professional indemnity
products liability
Personal and workers:
workers’ compensation insurance – this is mandatory when employing staff
personal accident, illness and life insurance
income protection insurance
Finally, given the digital age we now live in, Cyber Insurance is gaining in popularity among many businesses.
Cyber-insurance is an insurance product used to protect businesses and individual users from Internet-based risks and more generally from risks relating to information technology infrastructure and activities.
This form of insurance is not just for large companies – any business who stores sensitive information such as names, addresses, credit card details etc needs to strongly consider this form of insurance.
Any form of data held by a business can be subject to a cyber attack.
So, you can see, the world of insurance is not as simple as having life insurance and workers compensation.
There’s a lot more to it.
At Aperture Accounting, we have access to insurance specialists who can help decide what insurances are needed for your specific business.
Our aim is to ensure the right help is available for our clients.
This is what we do – we work with our clients to understand their financial needs and we work to figure how best to meet these needs and in the process, we help our clients to better understand their financial world.
At Aperture Accounting, we feel our job is to help shape and design a better financial future for our clients.
To find out more, call 1300 APERTURE or 1300 273 788.
