Business interruption

Property insurance pays to rebuild the factory. Business interruption pays for the money the business did not make while the factory was being rebuilt. That is the whole idea, and it is why the two are almost always sold together against the same premises and the same perils.

The distinction matters because the two policies are settled completely differently. A property claim is settled against the cost of physical things. A business interruption claim is settled against accounts: what the business would have earned, minus what it did earn, over a defined period.

Page	What it holds
Business interruption: data model	The entities, fields, enumerated values and relationships
Business interruption: API	The endpoints, the flow that binds a policy, the lifecycle and the error paths

How the model is shaped

One entity, businessInterruptionCoverage, and it looks like a property policy with a financial exposure base bolted on. It reuses propertyType and propertyPeril from property, because the events that stop a business are the events that damage its premises.

Three concepts carry this module, and none of them appear in any other.

The indemnity period. IndemnityPeriod is the number of days the policy will keep paying after the interruption starts. It is not how long the policy lasts. A twelve-month policy can carry a 24-month indemnity period, because rebuilding takes longer than the policy year. This is the field most often set wrongly, and setting it too short is how a business is underinsured without anyone noticing until the claim.

The exposure base. grossAnnualProfit, netAnnualProfit, grossAnnualTurnover, totalPayroll and fixedExpenses are the accounts the loss is calculated from. The policy pays the shortfall against these, which is why business interruption is underwritten from financial statements rather than from a survey.

Increased cost of working. icwLimit covers money spent specifically to keep trading through the interruption: renting temporary premises, paying for express delivery, running an extra shift. It is separate from the lost-profit cover because spending it reduces the eventual claim. The typeBusinessInterruption enumeration distinguishes three forms: standard business interruption, increased cost of working alone, and contingent loss of profit, which covers an interruption at a supplier or a customer rather than at the insured’s own premises.

denialOfAccessLimit and closureByPublicAuthority cover the case where nothing is damaged at all and the business still cannot trade, because access is blocked or an authority has ordered it shut.

What to watch

propertyRef links this policy to the premises it protects. The property record itself is created through property, and this module only references it. Bind the property and its own coverage first.

deductible is in days here, not money. There is a separate deductibleAmount for the monetary excess. A time-based excess means cover starts only once the interruption has run past a waiting period, which is standard for this line.

One field name contains spaces at source, closure by public authority. It cannot travel as written, and this module uses closureByPublicAuthority.

IndemnityPeriod is PascalCase where every other field on the entity is camelCase. It is kept as written rather than corrected.

Market profiles

This module is market-neutral. Nothing it defines varies by market, so no profile constrains it.