How to prepare a commercial insurance submission.

What a submission actually is

Underwriters do not visit your building. They read a file. That file is the submission, and for the purposes of the quote it is your business.

A clean submission describes one coherent company. The operations description, the payroll, the sales figure, the property detail and the loss history all point the same direction. A messy submission describes a company the underwriter cannot picture. That does not doom an account, and good risks get written off imperfect files every day, but it makes a higher number, a narrower offer, a long list of follow-up questions or a decline more likely than they needed to be.

None of that requires anything clever from you. It requires the information to be accurate, specific and consistent. That is the whole discipline.

The information an underwriter needs

The groups below are what most commercial submissions are built from. Not every line applies to every business. Gather what applies to yours.

Business identity

• Legal entity name exactly as it is registered, plus any DBA or trade name you operate under.
• Entity type, FEIN, and the state of formation.
• Years in operation. If the entity is new but the owners are not, say so and give the history.
• Ownership: who owns it, in what proportions, and whether any owner has other related businesses.
• Mailing address, physical locations, website.

Operations

This is the section businesses underwrite themselves out of, and it is also the easiest one to fix. Describe what the business actually does, in the words you would use with a client, not in the words of a generic class description.

• What you do, concretely. "Commercial tenant improvement carpentry, interior only, no structural work" is a description. "General contractor" is a label.
• Percentage splits if you do more than one thing. If a third of the revenue comes from a different kind of work, the underwriter needs that from the submission rather than discovering it at audit.
• What you subcontract out and what you do with your own employees. For subcontractors: whether you require certificates and limits from them.
• Where the work is performed: your premises, client premises, job sites, residential, commercial, heights, roofs.
• Out-of-state work, and roughly how much of it. This changes which carriers can write you.
• Anything you specifically do not do. A limit you can state is a limit the underwriter does not have to assume.

Exposure basis

Premiums are built on a measure of how much activity there is. Which measure depends on the line of coverage.

• Payroll, split by class of work, and separated between owners, clerical staff and field staff.
• Annual sales or receipts, and the figure for the coming year if it will be materially different.
• Square footage occupied, and whether you own or lease.
• Vehicle schedule: year, make, model, VIN, garaging address, radius of use, and what each vehicle is used for.
• Driver schedule: names, dates of birth, license numbers and state, years of experience.
• Equipment schedule with values, identifying anything scheduled individually against anything carried as a blanket limit.

Property

• Full address of each location.
• Construction type, year built, number of stories.
• Roof type and the year of the last full roof replacement. Also the approximate ages of the wiring, plumbing and heating systems.
• Square footage, and the occupancy of the building if you share it.
• Sprinklers, central station alarm, fire extinguishers, security.
• Building value if you own, and contents and business personal property values if you do not.
• Stock, inventory, and anything stored outdoors or off premises.

Loss history

• Currently valued loss runs from your prior carriers. The number of years requested varies by carrier and by line of coverage, so ask your carriers for everything they will release and let your agent decide what to send.
• Loss runs printed recently, not pulled from a file. Open claims move.
• A short written narrative for any large or still-open claim. More on that below.
• If there are no losses, say that plainly rather than leaving the section blank. A blank section reads as missing information.

Contracts

• Any contract that imposes insurance requirements on you: client contracts, vendor agreements, leases, lender documents.
• The insurance and indemnity language itself, not a summary of it.
• Any obligation to add a party as additional insured, to waive subrogation, or to carry specific coverages or limits.

Those requirements shape the program, not just the price. If you are not sure whether your current coverage satisfies one, that is what a contract insurance review is for. Related: what a certificate of insurance proves, and what it does not.

Prior insurance

• Expiring carrier for each line, with limits, deductibles and premium.
• Your expiring declarations pages. These answer more questions than a form will.
• Any gap in coverage, with the dates and the reason.
• Any non-renewal, cancellation or declination, and why. Underwriters find these anyway. Explaining one is a far better position than having it surface later.

Why a submission gets declined or delayed

The usual reasons are mundane and avoidable.

• Missing loss runs. Many underwriters will not price an account without them. The file sits.
• An operations description that does not match the class code. The description says one business and the class code says another. The underwriter has to resolve it before quoting.
• Exposure figures that contradict the loss runs. A modest payroll alongside a claim pattern that implies a much larger crew is the kind of inconsistency an underwriter spots at once.
• A gap in prior coverage with no explanation. The gap itself is often forgivable. The silence around it is not.
• Stale loss runs. Figures the underwriter cannot rely on are figures the underwriter will not rely on.
• The same incomplete package sent to several markets at once. Where clearance applies, a weak first impression can be the one that holds the market. See how multiple agents can block your access to markets.

Timing

Start before the renewal, not at it.

There are three reasons. Underwriters need time to read a file, ask questions, and get a second opinion on anything unusual. Loss runs have to come from a prior carrier, which is outside your control and outside your agent's. And accounts that need more than one market need the time to approach them in sequence rather than all at once.

Thin and late together is the combination with the least room in it. The file cannot be improved before it is read, and there is no time to approach anyone else if the answer disappoints.

The large-claim narrative

If the loss history includes a significant or open claim, the loss run gives the underwriter a date, a reserve and a cause code. It does not give them the story. Write the story yourself, in a short paragraph, covering three things:

• What happened. Plainly, without defensiveness and without minimizing.
• What changed afterwards. The specific decision, procedure, training, equipment or personnel change that came out of it.
• What is in place now so that it does not recur, and how you know it is working.

An illustrative example of the shape, not a real account: a business has a large claim from a vehicle backing incident, then adopts a written no-reverse-without-a-spotter rule, fits backup cameras across the fleet, and has had no similar incident since. Three sentences, and the claim reads as a problem that was solved rather than a problem that is still there.

The claim itself is history. The narrative is the part the business controls, and underwriters read it.

Where to send it

Documents can be sent through the secure document upload page. If you would rather talk it through first, the office is open Monday to Thursday, 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Pacific, at (541) 681-8793.

Vantage Point Risk is an independent agency in Eugene, Oregon. This guide is meant to be useful whether or not you work with us. Take the worksheet to another agency and it will do the same job.