Some comments on insurance claims:
All insurers have the ability to pay any amount within 3 working days. Most delays are caused by administration bottle necks and policy holder complacency. Its your claim, so stay in charge.
A vast number of commercial claims are rejected due to inaccurate policy details or incorrect information supplied by the policy holder. Oddly one of the most common is policy applicants failing to declare a criminal record (which includes driving offences).
An even greater number of claims are rejected due to insurance broker incompetence (miss-selling or incorrect preparation of the policy) and represent one of the largest professions to be litigated against in the country. Ironically you should always take legal protection to cover this issue.
Another is insurers/brokers claiming they never received the completed policy, even though they may be taking payment, always return them by recorded delivery and keep the stub safe. This actually happened to me with Nat West (selling AXA). They were made to pay back 18 months of premiums.
In the event of stock or asset lose, never ever inflate the value of the loss disproportionately to the overall amount of cover. This is the classic mistake people make every day and I have watched businesses go under because of it.
(A very simple explanation not to be taken literally).
If you have insured an amount of stock for say 10k and you loose 50% (5k) in a fire but make a claim for 7.5k you then become 50% underinsured.
If you are declared underinsured , insurers can then use the Applied Average rule which equates to only 50% of the policy value less the underinsured value of 50% = a final payment of only 2.5k.
The same applies when you increase your stock or asset value and forget to increase your premium which can also extend to various aspects of BI cover.