As a contracting business, there are plenty of different aspects of a project that you’ll need to consider when it comes to working with your customers and clients. Of course, during every job or contract, you’re going to need to invest in insurance to make sure that you’re covered for if something goes wrong.
But what can go wrong? What insurance do you need, and which ones are essential, and which might be irrelevant to you? There are so many variables when it comes to contract work, but today we’re going to narrow down the three important areas you need to be thinking about.
(Commercial) General Liability Insurance (CGL)
While there’s a range of different types of insurance you can sign up for during the duration of your construction project, it’s important to remember that things can still go wrong after the job has been completed.
Mistakes can be made, or details can be overlooked which may not cause a problem immediately, but it can always come back to bite you if you’re not careful. For example, imagine you’ve fitted a water tank into a roof, andwhile everything looks and works great, it has a leak which, over time, causes the roof to weaken, break up, and potentially falls down.
General Liability Insurance for Contractoris designed to protect you in the event that something goes wrong, such as this. You’re responsible for whatever happens at your job site, even after you’ve left it, so make sure you’re covered.
Installation Floater Policies
If you deal with installation jobs, or you’re installing something as part of a job that you’re working on, you’ll already know the frustration that can come from something being damaged for whatever reason.
Take the water tank example again. Everything’s been purchased, and you’re ready to do the installation, yet something happens along the way that results in the unit becoming damaged. This is where installation floater insurance policies come into play.
With this kind of insurance, you’re covering the materials and units against things like loss or damage, and that even covers things like fire, vandalism, and theft. This will vary depending on your chosen policy, so make sure you read the small print.
(Commercial) Property Insurance
Hand in hand with the insurance variant above, situations like a fire, theft of tools or materials or vandalism to anything on site can be a problem that you can’t expect nor plan for, despite using appropriate safety and security measures. Accidents happen.
Commercial Property Insurance is designed to help you cover the costs of events like this occur. This means you can replace your tools and materials quickly and get back to what you are doing.
Commercial Property Insurance is slightly different to Installation Floater Policies, and although they cover similar things, this one can cover your entire site, and is thus more expensive, whereas the Installation Floater is more affordable, and unit/material/tool related.
Summary
It goes without saying that contractors have a lot of things to think about and manage. Unfortunately, even when you’re on the ball 100% of the time, things can still go wrong, andbad things can set you back.
Making sure you have the correct and most appropriate forms of contractor insurance can help you minimize the negative effects of problems and help you to keep the ball rolling.
