What information will I need to give when getting a quote?

Are you a sole trader, a limited company or a partnership?

Sole traders don’t need to be registered with Companies House but the latter two business types do.

If you’re a sole trader but you’ve chosen a business name, you should use your own name when filling in your details.

If you’re a limited company or partnership, you'll need to know your registered business name as we’ll ask you to search and select it.

This means the industry you work in or the main responsibility in your role.

You can enter multiple business activities. So, if you work in marketing but you also design gardens from time to time, you can search and select marketing as well as garden design.

Entering this information helps us to understand which covers are most relevant to your business needs.

Your turnover is the total amount of money your business receives from sales, without deducting things like VAT or discounts.

We ask this as it's a key performance metric and is a way for us to assess the risk level of your business. Businesses with a higher turnover are often considered more high risk as they will either have a larger client base or more assets, meaning there's a higher chance of a claim or there's more value to be lost.

For instance, a tradesperson with a higher turnover will typically be doing more work/volume of jobs/higher value jobs. Alternatively, a professional who has a higher turnover will have either a higher volume of or higher value transactions, which increases the volume or severity of loss.

We don’t need to know the exact figure – the nearest £50k is great.

If you want to know how to calculate it, read our business turnover guide.

This question relates to certain covers such as cyber, professional indemnity and directors' and officers' insurance.

If more than 25% of your business is in the US, and you need one of the mentioned covers, your premium may be higher. This extra cost extends your coverage to include the US and Canada, which are usually excluded from our policies.

This helps us determine whether you need employers' liability cover or not.

It doesn't matter if you have someone working for you part time, full time, temporarily or voluntarily, if you have employees, you're legally required to have employers' liability insurance in the UK.

The greater the number of employees you have, the more your premium will be. This is because the risk level increases with each person that's added to the business.

If you already have business insurance and you know when it's up for renewal, you can set the date when your policy will expire on our quote builder and we'll email you around that time to set up a new policy with us.

This includes your name, email address and phone number (the last bit is optional). We use this information to email you a personal link to your quote so that you can go back to it whenever you like.