Ravi’s Gadgets

As a businessman you might have public liability insurance and you insure your buildings, stock and vehicles. You may even have professional indemnity insurance and legal cost insurance. Is that all? What about your other primary assets – your key staff?

Key staff represent the heart of every businesses but no more so than the UK’s 3.9 million small, often family, businesses that have up to 4 employees. Prolonged absence through serious illness or even death can be terminal for some of these enterprises. The risks are the same for limited companies, a partnerships and sole traders.

In this context Keyman Insurance is a must. Keyman Insurance represents a group of insurance plans all designed to financially protect business from the affects of prolonged illness or even death of staff who are central to the prosperity of the business. The insurance can’t replace people but it can provide cash to buy time and cover the costs of temporary staff, recruitment, loss of profits or provide a cash injection.

The insurance falls into four categories – insurance to help your business recover during the extended period when your key personnel are unable to work or to train or recruit a replacement, insurance to protect profits, insurance to protect shareholders or partnership interests, and insurance for anyone involved in guaranteeing businesses loans or banking facilities.

Keyman Insurance on those who are central to your business.
Who are your key people? They are the ones who steer, create and drive your business. The people without whom your business would lose sales and profits or without whom even the basic viability of your business would be shaken. Look at the Directors, Partners, owners and beyond. Consider the roles of senior managers in sales, technical development and operations – the roles will change in every business but the candidates are sure to jump out at you.

Insuring these people will provide the extra cash needed to take on temporary staff or recruit and train a replacement.

Keyman Insurance to protect your Profits.
The effect of losing key staff goes well beyond simply the cost of their salaries and the cost of replacement. As they’re central to the businesses prosperity, their loss will knock on to the bottom line. You can insure for loss of profits too!

Keyman Insurance to protect Shareholders or Partners.
Here we are talking about insurance to protect interests in the event of long-term illness or death. Families may want to sell their stake in the business but the remaining members in the business may not want those stakes held by newcomers. Keyman insurance schemes can be implemented which provide the necessary finance to buy the shares from the original shareholders or their estate.

Keyman Insurance insuring those who provide personal guarantees.
When a business takes out a loan or raises bank finance the lender is quite likely to require a personal guarantee or a charge on their personal property. This especially applies to small and new businesses. So what happens if these guarantors become seriously ill or die? The lenders may well be in a position to call in the loan. What happens then? Again, Keyman Insurance is the answer. Insurance can be structured to pay-off the loan and thus free the business and the guarantor’s family, from major worry.

Most of the UK’s leading insurance companies offer Keyman Insurance as a development of their Life and Critical Illness Insurance interests. They have all the necessary paperwork available to implement the cover you need and ensure the taxman is kept at bay.

So, can your business afford to ignore Keyman Insurance? You’ll be either a brave or foolish man to say NO!

Starting a business is a stressful endeavor. There is so much to consider regarding basic operations and so many forms to fill out and papers to file. It is truly a wonder that businesses are able to get off the ground at all. If you are a new business owner, you know that insurance of all types is very much part of the equation in the development and opening of your business. However busy you are with the basic operations of business, you must take time out to implement a strategy to keep your business secure. To be sure, an essential ingredient to this security is taking out “key person” insurance (also known as Business Life Insurance).

Key person term life insurance is taken out on the life of the key executive or the business owner. All firms or small businesses depend on the key people or business owner to manage and keep the business running. These head people are critical for the success of the business and therefore the insurance is actually taken out for the benefit of the business. Businesses take out the policy on the key individuals and so the business also pays for the policy premiums. The monies that are paid to the business upon the death of the key executive or business owner allows that firm or business the time to figure out what direction to take. Those left to run the business can strategize as to how they can save the business. Will they hire a new head executive? Will they restructure operations? Will they need to eventually sell off assets or sell of the business altogether? What debts need to be paid? No matter the case, the monies paid out by the term life insurance buys a business much needed time to make the important decisions that need to be made.

What Value to Place on a Key Person

To be sure, any business operation would feel displaced upon losing its key person — especially when considering how to replace him/her with someone just as competent. In small firms, it is usually the founder who holds responsibility for keeping the books, managing employees, handling key customers and running all basic operations. Losing the key person leaves any company with much uncertainty and instability. There is no easy formula for determining the value of a key employee as each circumstance is unique. The company must consider anticipated profit losses, replacement costs and a compensation-multiple formula. These are typical methods of estimating a loss and subsequent policy value. The best thing to do is to shop for rates from several different life insurance agents as they can help you estimate how much of a policy to buy. You may also get term life insurance quotes online. Most agents agree that buying term life insurance instead of a whole or variable life is better as the premiums will be much lower.

Sole Proprietorships

Keep in mind that one-man operations do not need to take out key person term life insurance. If you are a business with zero employees there is no need to worry as your assets transfer to your family (family employees do not count). If your family depends on the income from your business, it is advisable that you take out personal life insurance.

You do not want to overlook the importance of an investment such as key person term life insurance. It can mean the survival or closure of your business legacy.

Accounting has been defined as, by Professor of Accounting at the University of Michigan William A Paton as having one basic function: “facilitating the administration of economic activity. This function has two closely related phases: 1) measuring and arraying economic data; and 2) communicating the results of this process to interested parties.”

As an example, a company’s accountants periodically measure the profit and loss for a month, a quarter or a fiscal year and publish these results in a statement of profit and loss that’s called an income statement. These statements include elements such as accounts receivable (what’s owed to the company) and accounts payable (what the company owes). It can also get pretty complicated with subjects like retained earnings and accelerated depreciation. This at the higher levels of accounting and in the organization.

Much of accounting though, is also concerned with basic bookkeeping. This is the process that records every transaction; every bill paid, every dime owed, every dollar and cent spent and accumulated.

But the owners of the company, which can be individual owners or millions of shareholders are most concerned with the summaries of these transactions, contained in the financial statement. The financial statement summarizes a company’s assets. A value of an asset is what it cost when it was first acquired. The financial statement also records what the sources of the assets were. Some assets are in the form of loans that have to be paid back. Profits are also an asset of the business.

In what’s called double-entry bookkeeping, the liabilities are also summarized. Obviously, a company wants to show a higher amount of assets to offset the liabilities and show a profit. The management of these two elements is the essence of accounting.

There is a system for doing this; not every company or individual can devise their own systems for accounting; the result would be chaos!

LONDON, Sept. 29 (UPI) — British regulators seized Bradford & Bingley Monday, taking control more than $90 billion in assets, and engineering a partial sale to a Spanish bank.
[UPI]
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