One of a self storage facility’s main goals is to keep tenants’ contents safe for them until they can return to retrieve them. Although all facilities have their own standards for security, storage insurance gives your tenants an additional level of protection to their belongings. Unforeseen events such as fire, inclement weather, and even theft or vandalism do happen and can be unavoidable. Providing assistance to your tenants to help them protect their belongings from these events is a great way to provide them with superior customer service. That’s why storage insurance is so important - it helps protect your tenants and helps put them at ease.

This overview will give you an understanding of how the functionality built in storEDGE can help you manage tenant insurance.

Contents:

• Insurance providers
• Software permissions associated with insurance
• Adding insurance policy and plan details to your software
• Excluding unit types from store insurance
• Adding and canceling a tenant's insurance
• Requiring insurance for move-ins
• Adding insurance details to documents
• Automate conditional documents related to insurance
• Interpret tenant insurance details in storEDGE reports
• Managing expired private insurance

Insurance providers

storEDGE integrates with several insurance providers:

• StorSmart Insurance
• Bader Insurance
• MiniCo Insurance
• SafeStor
• SBOA Insurance

These insurance providers are integrated via API (Application Programming Interface). The integration allows the insurance providers to access a summary of insurance information and a detailed list of insurance activity for your facility. That means you will not need to manually send reports like the Insurance Activity report or the Insured Tenants Roll to the providers - they’ll already have access to this information through the API.

You can give your tenants the option to use a separate insurance provider that is not integrated with storEDGE if you wish. If you are using an insurance provider that does not integrate with storEDGE, you will need to manually send the provider insurance reports because they will not have access to the storEDGE API.

📖 You can read more about APIs integrated with storEDGE on our help site.

Software permissions associated with insurance

storEDGE has several different user permissions that control which of your user can perform functions associated with insurance. To edit your permissions, access your Corporate Settings and click Roles in the User Management section.

Find the user role that you’d like to have permissions to edit insurance and click Edit. When the permissions open, you’ll find two permissions associated with insurance that you can add to a role:

• Edit Insurance: This permission is in the Corporate permissions section and allows a user to add, delete, and edit insurance plans in storEDGE in the Corporate software settings.
  
• View insurance at the facility level: This permission is in the Per-facility permissions section and allows a user to view insurance details from the facility-level insurance settings.

Adding insurance policy and plan details to your software

Adding insurance plan details to storEDGE is easy through your Corporate Insurance Settings. You can set up plan information for one facility at a time or for multiple facilities at once.

📖 You can read all about setting up insurance and adding, removing, and editing insurance details on the storEDGE help site.

Once you have insurance set up in your Corporate Insurance Settings, you can view insurance details from your facility-level Insurance Settings.

Excluding unit types from store insurance

Some storage operators choose not to offer store insurance for particular types of units. Parking spaces and rentals that aren't fully enclosed, for example, are types of units that many facilities choose not to insure. Excluding a unit type from store insurance prevents you from adding an insurance policy to a unit that isn't covered by the policy. Additionally, it improves the accuracy of your insurance reporting.

If there are units at your facility that are uninsurable or that you don't want to insure, you can set your software to exclude those particular unit types from store insurance. When you've excluded a unit type from store insurance, it will not be offered for purchase at move-in for those unit types. If you allow your tenants to use private insurance to cover their unit's contents and have your software configured to gather that information from them, your software will still allow you to select private insurance for those units. Your employees simply will not have the option to sell store insurance for those unit types once the setting is in place.

📖 Read more about excluding unit types from store insurance on our help site.

Adding and canceling a tenant's insurance 

You can easily add or remove insurance policy information from a tenant’s account. The move-in process in storEDGE provides an easy way to enroll a tenant in insurance at move-in. Alternatively, if a tenant has their own private insurance, you can add a tenant’s private insurance details to their tenant account easily.

Removing insurance from a tenant’s account is equally simple. You can even automatically cancel a tenant’s insurance by adding that step to a delinquency stage so that insurance is canceled after nonpayment.

You can control what information pertaining to insurance is gathered at move-in by editing your Required Fields settings. Setting up your move-in process to gather insurance information helps you keep track of insurance data for all of your tenants and ensures that the appropriate information is populated into documents (see required fields below for more information).

Requiring insurance at move-in

Many facilities require that their tenants insure the contents of their storage units. When your tenants have their items insured, everyone involved is safer from liabilities. Your software gives you easy ways to require insurance information to be gathered for each tenant during the move-in process.

Onsite move-ins (required fields)

You can set up your Required Fields settings to gather information about insurance at move-in. Once insurance fields are required, you will have to enter insurance details to finish the move-in process.

Online move-ins (Rental Center settings)

If your facility is unmanned, it’s hard to keep track of who has insurance and who doesn’t. Your Rental Center settings in storEDGE offer you the ability to require insurance at move-in via the Rental Center.

📖 Learn more about Rental Center settings and required fields on our help site.

Adding insurance details to documents

The Documents and Emails settings in storEDGE allow you to customize your leases and other documents with personalized information for your tenants regarding their account. We’ve equipped the document editor with several bracket replacements that enable you to include specific insurance information in your documents for communication with your tenants.

Some of the most commonly used bracket replacements that populate details into documents include:

• Ledger events: Brackets that begin with ledger.insurance and that begin with ledger and contain insurance ensure that ledger details are populated. These will populate a broad range of insurance information including private insurance, goods stored, etc if that information is gathered at move-in. See the enrolling tenants in insurance section of this document to ensure this information is gathered at move-in.
  
  
• Insurance effective date: Brackets that begin with new_ledger.insurance will populate details about the date insurance becomes effective for new rentals. Brackets that begin with previous_ledger.insurance populate insurance details for transfers.
  
  
• Projected insurance cancellation date: Brackets that contain cancellation_date populate details about when insurance will be canceled due to nonpayment.

✅ Pro tip: Search the bracket replacements for insurance and all insurance brackets will be filtered for you.

📖 Read more about editing documents on our help site to learn more about using bracket replacements.

Automate conditional documents related to insurance

You can set up documents to generate automatically when they have insurance. Conditional documents allow you to set Insurance Type as a condition or add it to a group of conditions that will ensure necessary documents are generated. If you’d like insurance documents to be generated and included at move-in, for example, you can set a condition for move-in to ensure this happens automatically.

📖 Read more about conditional documents on our help site.

Interpret insurance details in storEDGE reports

There are two reports in storEDGE that can give you a detailed rundown of insurance at your facilities. If you’re using an insurance provider that is integrated with storEDGE, details contained in these reports will be automatically sent to the provider, which will save you the time of generating them yourself. However, generating them at any time will help keep you informed. 

Facility-level reports

• Insurance Activity: This report gives a breakdown of insurance payments, reversals, credits, and fees during a chosen date range and displays the corresponding activity by tenant, showing their coverage, premium, paid through date, and whether the policy was new or canceled.
  

• Insurance Statement: This is a statement that provides a summary of total premiums received, credits applied, refunds, and retained fees. It’s intended to be printed and mailed to your insurance provider with your payment. If you are using an integrated provider like StorSmart or Bader, you will not have to run this report.
  

• Insured Tenants Roll: a list of all units enrolled in store insurance or units occupied by tenants who have provided proof of private insurance. It lists details for each tenant individually.

Corporate reports

• Insurance Activity: This report gives you a breakdown of the number of new policies, canceled policies, new payments, reversals, credits, payments, fees, and refunds facility by facility. It is definable by date range and allows you to view this information for all of your facilities or for a group of facilities.

• Insured Tenants Roll: This report gives you a facility by facility breakdown of occupied units and the number of them are insured, including the percentage of units that are insured and paid, their total coverage, and their total premiums. It also gives you a percentage of your occupied units that are covered by private insurance.

Managing expired private insurance

If you permit your tenants to use private insurance, storEDGE provides an easy way to keep track of policies and plans that have expired or will be expiring soon. As long as an expiration date is gathered and entered from the tenant at move-in, you’ll receive a notification on your Task List reminding you that a tenant’s insurance has expired. To help you stay ahead of expiration, tenants whose plans expire in the next month will also appear on your Task List 31 days before expiration.

To save you time, you can set up email and SMS templates to send notifications to the tenant as well when their insurance has expired or will soon expire.

📖 Read about managing your tenants' expired insurance on our help site.