What is a Certificate of General Liability Insurance?

As insurance policies go, general liability coverage can do a lot. It can cover financial claims and losses from third-party accidents, property damage, and bodily injury.

To break that down a bit more, general liability insurance typically covers costs that result from your products, services, or business operations, such as:

• Third-party bodily injury
• Third-party property damage
• Personal and advertising injury
• Claims arising from product defects
• Medical expenses

However, general liability insurance usually does not cover theft of your equipment, tools, and other business property.

What Types of Insurance Can Cover Theft?

While your general liability policy may not cover theft, there are options that protect your business assets financially if they’re stolen or damaged. Three we recommend are:

• Cyber insurance
• Inland marine insurance
• Business personal property insurance

Inland marine insurance.

This type of coverage is sometimes called “tools and equipment insurance.” An inland marine policy can financially protect your business property from both damage and theft. 

Here’s an example from one of our blogs:

After discovering a break-in to an onsite storage shed, a contractor contacted the police and filed a report. He also shared the report with his inland marine insurer when he filed a claim (there can often be a requirement to do this within 30 days).

Inland marine insurance can make a lot of sense if, like the contractor, you have movable property (such as your tools and equipment), or you store the property at different locations.

Inland marine insurance also can cover theft or damage done to someone else’s property (such as a portable cement mixer that you may have rented for a job).

Whether it’s property you own or not, an inland marine policy may cover repairs and replacements, up to the policy’s limit.

Business personal property insurance.

This coverage is similar to inland marine. The key difference is that business personal property (BPP) insurance typically protects equipment and contents inside your workspace. 

Let’s go back to our blog for another example:

An accountant is greeted by police officers when she arrives at her office in a professional building. There’s been a break-in. Can she help determine if anything has been stolen from her office? Yes, laptops, a printer, and an espresso machine.

Fortunately, the accountant has BPP coverage. That means she likely will be covered for the costs to replace the laptops, printer, and that oh-so-important espresso machine (up to the policy’s limits).

Cyber insurance.

Cyber insurance — which is also known as cyber liability insurance — covers the costs of claims associated with stolen customer data, cyberattacks, breaches, and fraud. It’s worth considering if you have customer data stored on your computers.

Even if you don’t electronically collect and store customer information, your business could still be in the sights of a cybercriminal. The use of ransomware and denial of service attacks are two other types of cyberattacks that could hurt your business.

Ransomware incidents often require extortion payments to regain control of your information and computer systems. Denial of service attacks can overwhelm your system with too much traffic, which can shut down a machine or system and affect your ability to conduct business online.Here’s a potential example of what could happen from another of our blogs:

Kendall is a business consultant. It’s another busy day at the office when he responds to what appears to be an email from his credit card company.

Unfortunately, the email was actually sent by a team of hackers, and the information he provided allows them to install ransomware that locks his computer systems. The cybercriminals demand an extortion payment to unlock them. 

As you’ll discover in the blog, recovering from a ransomware attack can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Cyber insurance can help cover those costs, up to the limits of your policy.

How to Protect Your Business from Theft

There are security measures you can take to reduce the risk of theft or break-ins and enhance security at your business. Here are some to consider from another of our blogs: