Printers and Printing Business Insurance

This is the single most useful thing a printer can understand about their insurance, because it is counter-intuitive.

If you print fifty thousand brochures with the wrong date, the cost of printing them again is your own. Defective workmanship is excluded on practically every policy, deliberately, as a trading cost rather than an insurable event. That is the bill printers assume is covered and it is not.

What may be recoverable is the consequence: the customer's mailing that missed a deadline, the event that happened without its programmes, the promotion that could not run. That is a financial loss caused by your work, and whether it is covered depends on whether the policy includes financial loss cover and at what sub-limit. So the useful conversation is not about the reprint, which you will carry, but about the customer's loss, which can be very much larger.

Operationally the control is sign-off. A proof approved in writing by the customer, against the file they supplied, is the whole defence on a content error, and the discipline of never running without it is worth more than any policy wording.

Printers understand their presses as assets and frequently underinsure them as risks.

Two things get missed. The replacement figure, which needs to include installation, commissioning, calibration and sometimes the civils or power supply work, not the machine price. And breakdown, because the likeliest thing to stop a press is a mechanical or electronic failure rather than a fire, and that is not damage by an insured peril at all.

Then the indemnity period on business interruption, which for a single-press business is the number that decides survival. Sourcing, delivering, installing and commissioning a replacement press is a long process, and twelve months is frequently optimistic. Meanwhile the work goes to competitors who may keep it. Pair a realistic period with increased cost of working so you can subcontract production out and keep the customers.

A print works is one of the more combustible commercial premises there is, and the policy conditions reflect that whether or not anybody reads them.

Paper in bulk, board, finished stock awaiting collection, waste trim, and in litho and screen work flammable solvents, inks and cleaning fluids. The result is a building that will burn quickly and completely, which is why insurers impose conditions on how much solvent may be held, that it is in proper cabinets, that waste and oily rag go in metal bins with lids, and on smoking and hot works.

These are the conditions tested after a fire, and they are mundane enough to drift. A quarterly walk round against your own schedule, checking solvent quantities, bin types and housekeeping around the press, takes an hour and is the difference between a paid claim and an argument at the worst possible time.

Printers occasionally find themselves on the receiving end of a rights claim about content they had no hand in creating.

A customer supplies artwork containing a stock image used beyond its licence, a font embedded without the right permission, a trade mark they do not own, or copy lifted from a competitor. You print it. The rights holder, or more often a rights enforcement business, approaches whoever is easiest to pursue, and a printer with an address is easier than an overseas supplier.

A clause in your terms saying the customer warrants they hold the rights is necessary and is not a shield against a third party. What helps is having the warranty in writing and signed rather than buried in terms nobody accepted, keeping the supplied files so you can show what you were given, and checking whether your policy includes infringement cover. On variable data and mailing work, add the data protection dimension, because you are then holding somebody else's customer database.

The property cover is usually the easy part. We are an FCA regulated broker and will not tell you we are the best choice. These are the questions that decide it.