It’s no secret that nonprofit organizations operate on limited budgets, but liability insurance coverage is a necessity that ensures the physical, monetary, and reputational protection of the organizations, their hardworking employees, and their loyal crews of volunteers. Decide which policies work best for your organization, while keeping in mind a few of the most important coverages to have on hand.

1. General Liability

Although it’s considered a standard insurance policy, general liability is undoubtedly one of the best nonprofit liability insurance coverage options. It helps cover the costs of any ensuing damages should an employee or volunteer cause injury to another person or another person’s property while on the job.

2. Workers’ Compensation

Like general liability, workers’ comp is a basic coverage option that has earned its spot as a necessary policy. In addition to being, in many states, a legal requirement, workers’ comp protects your company as well as employees if they obtain injury on company property or while conducting company business.

3. Property Insurance

While property insurance is often considered a desired policy rather than a required one, it’s vital to the success of most organizations. If your organization contains any special equipment, including technological property like computers and phones, it’s unwise––and often illegal––to not possess any coverage for the property.

Before choosing policies, investigate all liability coverage options, as some may be more or less suitable for your specific needs. Adequate research affords the best available options without breaking your budget.

When most people think of employees stealing from their employment, they imagine someone raiding the supply closet and hauling boxes of pens and stacks of legal pads home with them. Payroll fraud (including ghost payroll and timesheet fraud) is a more costly sort of fraud that occurs in businesses of all sizes across the country.

Ghost Payroll

Do you compensate people who don’t truly work for you? You could be surprised. The second most common sort of fraud is ghost payroll, which is frequently perpetrated by your payroll staff or manager. In a nutshell, a ghost employee is either a fictitious person who has never worked for your firm but was “created” by payroll to drain funds or a former employee who left but was never legally terminated in the payroll system.

Timesheet Fraud

Paying employees inappropriately for the hours they work is known as timesheet fraud. Employees may have a coworker clock in and out for them when they aren’t even scheduled to work; in other situations, corporations overpay employees based on fraudulent timesheet entries.

One typical timesheet scam is for an employee to “forget” to clock in or out, necessitating a manual input, to which they then add excess hours. In other circumstances, a payroll clerk may be complicit in the plan, manually altering employee timesheets to boost the number of hours worked or even the pay rate.

Payroll fraud is expensive for your company. It’s critical to keep track of who’s getting paid what and to ensure that employees are getting paid what they’re worth. Furthermore, if your payroll is exact, you can concentrate on keeping those paper clips from escaping the supply closet.