What counts as business personal property?
Business personal property, usually shortened to BPP, is the contents a business owns and uses to operate: furniture, office equipment, computers and electronics, machinery and tools, and stock or inventory held for sale. It is the commercial equivalent of the personal property coverage on a home policy, and on a commercial property policy or a business owners policy it is typically its own coverage line, separate from the building itself.
The exact scope is set by the policy, and some items sit on the edge of the definition. Tenant improvements and betterments, leased equipment, property of others in the business's care, and property temporarily off premises can be treated differently, so the policy language is what governs which items belong in the BPP claim and which fall elsewhere. The documentation job is the same either way: identify each item specifically and value it with evidence, so the right coverage can be applied to the right property.
What makes a commercial contents claim different
A business contents claim is not just a bigger version of a household one. Three differences change how it is documented.
The first is volume and repetition. A restaurant, a clinic, a warehouse, or an office holds hundreds or thousands of items, many of them identical, such as forty of the same chair or a rack of the same server. That repetition helps in one way and hurts in another: identical items are faster to value once, but a single valuation error multiplies across the whole quantity.
The second is that businesses usually have records a household does not. Fixed-asset registers, purchase orders, depreciation schedules from the accounting system, and stock records can all support the inventory, which means a commercial claim can often be documented with more evidence than a residential one, if that evidence is gathered and matched to the physical items.
The third is stock and inventory. Goods held for sale are valued differently from equipment, often tied to cost or to accounting records rather than to a retail replacement price, and the policy terms decide the basis. Keeping stock separate from fixed contents is part of building a clean claim.
How to build a review-ready BPP inventory
The goal is an item-level record where every line has a clear description, a quantity, the age and condition, and a value with a source behind it. Building it on a large commercial loss is a process, not a single pass.
| Item category | What to capture per line | Evidence source |
|---|---|---|
| Furniture and fixtures | Description, quantity, material, age, condition | Photos, fixed-asset register |
| Computers and electronics | Make, model, specification, quantity, age | Purchase orders, IT asset list |
| Machinery and equipment | Make, model, serial, capacity, condition | Invoices, maintenance records |
| Tools and small equipment | Type, quantity, grade, condition | Photos, receipts |
| Stock and inventory | Item, quantity, unit basis per policy | Stock records, accounting system |
Work from any records the business already has, then reconcile them against the physical loss so the inventory reflects what was actually damaged, not just what was on a list. Group identical items and value the group once. Capture age and condition per line, because those drive the depreciation step and are hard to reconstruct later. When items are destroyed and there is nothing left to photograph, the approach is the same one used to document contents after a fire: rebuild the record from receipts, records, and prior photos rather than the item itself. On the largest losses, the discipline that keeps a huge inventory from stalling is the same one that lets a team process a 2,000-item inventory after a catastrophe without a backlog.
Valuing BPP: actual cash value, replacement cost, and the records behind each
The value on each line has to match the policy's valuation basis. A replacement cost policy pays what it costs to replace the item with a comparable new one at today's prices, while an actual cash value policy pays that replacement cost minus depreciation for age and condition. Which one applies is set by the policy, and it changes what evidence each line needs.
For equipment and furniture, a defensible line ties the item to a current market price for the same or a comparable model, the same way any replacement cost value is established, with the source recorded so it can be checked. For stock, the basis is often different and may follow cost or accounting records rather than a retail price, so those lines should point to the business's own records. The through-line is that every value carries evidence behind it, which is what lets a carrier reviewer confirm the number instead of questioning it, and what keeps a large commercial claim moving.
Where AI helps on a high-volume commercial loss
A commercial contents loss is exactly the messy, high-volume situation where drafting every line by hand is the bottleneck. This is the work Contensure is built for. It reads photos, spreadsheets, PDFs, and claim files, drafts item descriptions, groups identical items, researches replacement cost values from real retailer data, and attaches the supporting evidence, then routes everything through a professional review queue. On a claim with thousands of repeated items, that turns days of research into a review-ready draft a professional checks and signs off.
The line Contensure holds is the same across every claim type: AI drafts the identification, valuation, and evidence; professionals review and decide. It complements the estimating and claim tools a commercial file already uses and the restoration teams working the site, and it fits alongside a restoration packout workflow rather than replacing any of it. It does not interpret coverage, it is not a public adjuster, and it does not negotiate a claim. How the underlying records are protected is described in how Contensure handles security. For more on documenting contents claims, see the Contensure blog, or talk to Contensure about a large commercial loss.