What follows is an example cycle, drawn from our experience. The building blocks are largely the same in every company; what changes is how they are configured to your requirements.
It starts with two lists the insurance team holds centrally: your insured locations under the policy (the 'sites', each with address, country, legal entity and the person responsible) and the details for that year's cycle (the declaration year, the deadline and the reminder stages).
Once triggered, each site owner gets one email covering all of their sites, with the direct link and the deadline. Anyone who still hasn't filled it in as the deadline approaches is reminded automatically, with manual escalation to management available.
The form itself guides the site owner through step by step. It opens with ownership and the obligation to insure: owned outright, contractually obliged to insure, partially, or not at all. That determines what needs declaring in the first place — e.g. tenant's improvements are captured separately, because they sit with the tenant's own risk. From there the form works through the categories: buildings, with value, floor area, headcount, everything that's changed since last year (such as a new build, demolition, refurbishment, a new solar array) and the site plan; office contents and fittings; plant and machinery (flagging individual machines above an agreed threshold and attaching the machinery list); stock at average and at peak. Every value field states the definition of reinstatement value that applies to it, along with guidance to flag items that are commonly forgotten (repurposed or empty buildings, sublet floor space, fit-outs, rented equipment) that the company is nonetheless required to insure. Where a site carries no obligation to insure, the follow-up questions simply don't appear.
The chances of manual errors are reduced with the solution automatically taking care of site specific attributes. The declaration currency follows from the country the site sits in, and therefore from the local policy — therefore it doesn't have to be inputted by the site owner and nothing has to be converted. Additionally, the index factors you've agreed with your insurer for buildings and contents sit next to the value field, per country, so site owners can see which index is going to be applied and can decide whether their figure already includes it, rather than applying it twice by accident or not at all.
Hardly any site owner has all the numbers themselves. So they can invite colleagues in as contributors for a single category (e.g. finance for stock, engineering for the machines, facilities for the buildings) via a direct link to complete only that category.
Before submitting, the site owner confirms which functions they involved — plant management, real estate, facilities, procurement, production, fixed asset accounting — and whether the site's finance lead has seen the figures (providing an explanation if they haven't). The submission then locks the entry and sends a confirmation listing the values declared. Every event is then in that site's log with a timestamp and a name: creation, a change of responsible person, contributors, submission, and any reopening where the insurance team allows a correction. Any errors in the master data get reported by the site with one click and corrected centrally — so the site list gets better with every cycle instead of quietly going stale.
