Business Insurance Advice

Public Liability insurance and professional indemnity insurance would be the two you need most.

Public liability - covers you if your negligent acts or ommisions result in sombody being injured or damage to property. This includes things like spilling stuff on a customers carpet or scratching furniture with the PC case perhaps.

Professional indemnity covers you if a customer relies on your advice and then tries to claim that this was incorrect advice that cost them money. Example would be a firm of accountants who ask you to spec a computer system / software package for them. They implement your advice and then find it is unsuitable for what they wanted and they claim lost revenue as a result.

Products liability - you ought to consider this. Say a customer asks you to source a PC and then upgrade the graphics card. You do this but in subsequent use the PC catches fire and causes damage at their premises. They will initially make the claim against you. Your insurers would look to divert claims to the PC supplier but they will claim your actions caused the fault that led to the fire. It gets very complex, very quickly. For complex, also read expensive.

Price wise - everything is rated to your turnover. Most commercial insurers tend to have a minimum premium level of between £100 and £250 in this market sector, below which it isn't worth their while setting up the policy.

You also need to let your motor insurers know that you are using your car for business use. You should also tell your household insurers that you are running the business from home as well. Some insurers do not like this but many are happy to carry on giving cover for the household contents, excluding the business contents.

Products is a tricky area. I work for a large Lloyds syndicate and carry out products liability surveys and also see the claims. Type of stuff I deal with is automotive components manufacturers and other, similar high risk items. The benefit at this end of the market is that things tend to be fairly clear cut.

With some small enterprise work things can get a little fuzzy. For example:-

As you know, the SOGA means the customer contract is with the supplier of the goods and they are the first in the firing line if a claim is made. Lets suppose a PC has caught fire. Unusual I know but there have been battery issues with some laptops.

Initially the claim is referred to the suppliers, lets say PC World as this is who the customer had the contract with. Their insurers look into the matter and say, this is a manufacturing fault so it all goes back to Dell or HP or whoever and their insurers can deal with it. This is called a right of subrogation. Although the insurer has no contract with say Dell, they can pursue in their policyholders name.

So, the claimant is suing everyone in sight, PC World, Dell etc. PC Worlds insurers deal with the claim and then say to Dells insurers, your client was responsible for this, please reimburse us. We are pursuing this claim in the name of PC World, using our subrogation rights.
In reality it gets even more complex because Dell will then involve the component supplier as well.

Now, lets say you go to PC World with a client and he decides to buy a Dell PC but they do not have quite the spec you wanted in stock. Fair enough the client says, I'll get it anyway and you can stick another RAM stick in for me and then install it for and configure the PC etc then deliver to me tomorrow. You go ahead and do this and then the PC catches fire a week later.

Did the fire result from a manufacturing defect or something you did when you put the memory in? Being a bit of a PC geek I understand that it would be pretty difficult to screw this kind of thing up and that the fault probably lay with the PSU. However, you are still likely to get dragged into matters since the customer may see you as the supplier.

In reality, it is your public liability policy that should pick this up. They are saying the fire arose from your defective / negligent workmanship in installing the memory. However, the client may see it that you have supplied a product in the form of an upgraded PC.
Clearly the financial position - changing of money / terms of trade etc will help to deflect this argument but such claims are incredibly costly to investigate and in terms of legal fees.

A specialist PC contractor insurance scheme like the ones suggested by Dacouch will be aware of these issues and will have tailored a policy to cover these contingencies accordingly. Mainstream insurers (Aviva, RSA etc) tend to offer a one size fits all approach that might not fit.

dacouch wrote: »

Matty I bet your gagging for someone to come on MSE and ask a nice indepth question about complicated Contractors or Product Liability to get your teeth into

I'm just a surveyor Dacouch. I don't give clients policy cover advice on site but have to know it so I can gauge the exposures of my employers.
I get to see some interesting stuff though - it was the roof deck of the Excel extension yesterday. They wouldn't let me go today for some reason .

Quite interesting being around 20 metres up looking at the planes come into land at London City and watching all the police preparations. Premium on that case is around £250k.