Hard word and creativity guarantee business success. Entrepreneurial initiative is normally compensated by beneficial operations, but a sudden liability may cause irreversible damages in your business. In such event, all the danger, time and money invested disappear unless the appropriate insurance coverage is purchased.

Business insurance policies provide protection against several risks that are related to the business sector. Narrowing down the broad role of business insurance, the several types of insurance policies could be listed as follows:

a) Property Insurance

Property insurance covers unexpected loss or damage to a business’s building and assets, namely inventory, supplies, equipment, machinery, furniture, computers, money and securities, automobiles and trucks, but also trademarks. Property insurance insures only against a specific risk. For example, a tornado insurance policy insures only against tornado damages and cannot cover for a loss from fire.

b) Casualty Insurance

In some cases, casualty insurance may be lumped under property insurance. In fact, casualty insurance is a supplementary insurance that does not cover for fire or flood damages, but covers for burglary, terrorist attacks, and fraud. Typically, casualty insurance covers both damages to people and property. For instance, if a casualty insurance policy is purchased for a yacht and a person is injured on board, the insurer is responsible for covering the medical expenses. At the same time, if a burglary attempt results to yacht damage, the insurer will also cover for the expenses incurred by the unexpected event.

c) Liability Insurance

Liability insurance protects business owners from a broad variety of liability exposures. A business may be sued for negligence that results to accidents at workplace, accidents during business operations, malpractices in product sales and contractual liability, among others. A very common gain of liability insurance is professional liability that, in fact, covers the insured for any loss incurred as a result of an error or oversight on his part. Typically, professional liability aims at the protection of those professionals, who are experts in their field and who, by omission or negligence, malpractice their expertise. In this case, general liability insurance is not applicable because these professionals are seen as held to a higher professional standard and hence, are considered to hold greater liability towards their clientele.

d) Workers Compensation Insurance

Employees need to be insured against accidents and injuries at workplace. Insurance laws and regulations are different in each state, but in the majority of states a worker’s compensation system is in force. Under this system, a worker is not allowed to sue their employee for injuries that occur at workplace. In return, the employer should agree to participate in a system that provides automatic payments to the employee for medical expenses incurred from on-the-job injuries.

e) Business Interruption Insurance

Business interruption insurance covers for taxes, debt payments, salaries, and loss of cash paddle due to interruption of business. Business owners are protected against losses of profit incurred from a temporary interruption of operations when an insured damage occurs. For instance, when a critical portion of machinery breaks down and operations have to cease, machinery repairs will be covered by property or casualty insurance, but the losses of profit will be reimbursed by business interruption insurance.

f) Commercial Auto Insurance

Personal automobile policies do not provide coverage for business vehicles such as vans, pickup trucks, sport utility vans and so on. Commercial auto insurance offers protection against liabilities that arise out of the operation of the business vehicles and covers property damages to these vehicles caused by third parties.

g) Health Insurance

Health insurance provides coverage for medical expenses such as surgical operations, micro-surgeries to private medical offices, benefit for supplies or medicines, coverage to outpatient offices, chemotherapy & radiotherapy and others. Typically, health insurance coverage is offered by employees as employee succor so that business owners pay lower insurance premium.

Apart from the above described types of business insurance, there are other types such as life and disability insurance, umbrella (supplemental liability), directors & officers, marine, travel, key person life and many more. Each type of insurance is addressed to cover particular business risks. Business owners should thoroughly review the needs of their business and decide on the best insurance policies to cover these risks.