Getting insurance for your small business in Canada is very important. Insurance helps to keep you losing all your hard-earned work to fire, theft, or other types of risk.
So what type of insurance does your small business need?
Most important types of small business insurance
These three types of small business insurance are the most important for Canadian entrepreneurs to have.
- Fire Insurance — This covers for any damage caused by fires. You should also look at coverage for storms, smoke damage, floods or any other disasters.
- Theft Insurance/Burglary Protection — No matter what type of business it is that you run, you need to cover yourself from theft.
- Liability Insurance — Should be obtained to cover your business for any type of injury sustained by anyone while on your premises.
Other types of small business insurance in Canada
In addition to fire, theft, and liability insurance, you may want to investigate other types of insurance for companies in more specific industries or situations. These include:
- Business Interruption or Loss of Income Insurance — Protects you from any losses due to a temporary interruption or shutdown of the business.
- Business Premises Insurance — Covers for damage from a variety of causes to your business premises.
- Business Travel Insurance — Can cover medical expenses during travel, trip interruption/after departure insurance, flight and travel accident insurance, as well as baggage and personal effects insurance.
- Business-Use Vehicle Insurance — Covers motor vehicle accidents involving any company vehicles.
- Credit Insurance/Accounts Receivable Insurance — Protects against the non-payment of outstanding accounts receivable balances, and losses from currency inconvertibility or transfer risk.
- Crime Insurance — Covers money losses due to counterfeit money orders or paper currency, credit card fraud, forgery or employee breach of trust.
- Disability or Accident and Sickness Insurance — Covers disability, accidents or sicknesses of company employees or owners.
- Dishonesty Insurance — This will cover thefts that might occur by employees of your business. You should discuss insurance requirements for your business with a qualified and experienced insurance agent.
- E-commerce Fraud — Necessary for companies that do business online. Includes protection over spammers, websites being hacked and online service functionality.
- Fidelity Insurance — Protects from loss of securities, money or inventory resulting from crime.
- General Liability Insurance — Covers your business’ assets if your company is sued due to injury or property damage.
- Health Insurance — May be necessary if you’re not covered by a spouse’s plan.
- Identity Theft — In order to protect yourself and your business from identity theft.
- Key Person Insurance — Required if there’s a key person or people within your business. The insurance is used to help cover the replacement of knowledge and expertise of the key person/people in the event of death. This allows the company to keep running and avoid dissolution.
- Partnership Insurance — Required in the case of a partnership to protect partners from the demise of another partner.
- Product Liability Coverage — Important if you’re starting a food-related business.
- Professional Liability Insurance — Important for those providing a service like consulting or coaching.
- Surety Insurance — Provides surety companies with 100% reinsurance capacity.
- Workers’ Compensation — Required if you have employees or contracted workers.
With these types of business insurance, you can rest easier knowing that you’ll be protected!
