Replacing equipment and stock is where the last part of your settlement actually becomes money. On a replacement cost policy the insurer commonly pays the depreciated value first and releases the rest when you have genuinely replaced the item and sent the receipt. Replace nothing and you keep the depreciated figure. Replace carefully and keep the paperwork matched up, and you collect the difference.

It is also the one moment you get to reconsider the shop rather than recreate it. Everything you owned is now a decision rather than a given, and some of what burned was there because it had always been there.

Open your claim inventory next to you. Every purchase you make should map to a line on it, because that mapping is what converts the holdback into a payment. A receipt the insurer cannot tie to a claimed item is a receipt that gets queried.

Check the deadline for the replacement cost holdback before you plan the order of purchases. Policies normally set a period within which replacement must happen for the holdback to be claimable, and it is often shorter than a rebuild takes. The period is in your policy. Not yet confirmed by LAEDC. If the window is tight, buy the highest-value items first.