How to Price Insurance Contents Claims Faster

The savings come from automating identification, replacement-cost research, source documentation, classification and depreciation — while keeping human review before anything is finalised.

Kevin Godfrey, KevinLast updated 3 October 2026

What is the fastest defensible way to price a large contents claim?

Automate the repetitive parts — identification, replacement-cost research, source links, classification and depreciation — and keep a person on grouping, exceptions and the claim-specific judgment.

Every minute saved by skipping evidence is borrowed, and the carrier collects. The durable savings come from removing the clerical work entirely rather than doing it faster: if the listing behind a price is captured automatically, it is there whether or not the file was built under deadline.

Why large contents claims take so long

A pack-out of a three-bedroom house runs to hundreds of photographs and several hundred line items. The work is not hard, it is uniform: the same seven steps per line, several hundred times, with no cumulative learning — the four hundredth lamp takes as long as the first. That is the profile of work a machine should carry.

The five bottlenecks

Where the hours go, and what removes them
Bottleneck	By hand	Automated
Identification	Read the photo, type a description, hope it matches the product	Read from the photographs, with several signals weighed together; blank where unreadable
Finding the comparable	Search, open several retailers, compare variants	Researched per item, and priced from one listing rather than a blend
Source links	Copy a URL per line, or skip it when short of time	Stored on the row automatically and printed in the export
Categories	Chosen per line from memory	Carried on the line and used for the schedule
Depreciation	Looked up per category and per age	Server-computed from class and age, to 100%

A workflow that holds up

The order is what makes it defensible. Group before identifying, so one item photographed twice is one line. Identify before pricing, because a price is only as good as the identification under it. Review before promoting, so nothing enters the claim unseen.

01Photos inDrop a folder, a phone dump or a whole .zip. Nothing is a claim line yet, and nothing is charged.
02ReviewedShots of one item are proposed as one item. You confirm, merge or split before anything is priced — and a line counts against your allowance once it becomes a line, not when the photo lands.
03PricedEach line gets a price from a listing with the source kept on the row, a content class, and depreciation for its age.
04ExportedXactimate (Excel) · .xlsx in the XactContents template, or a room-by-room PDF.

Where automation should stop

Variants that price differently. Same model name, different capacity, finish or generation. If the photograph cannot settle which one it is, the line should wait for you.
Collectibles. Condition and provenance drive the price more than the product identity does, and neither is visible in a pack-out photograph.
Ambiguous evidence. A blurred label or a frame that only establishes an object existed. Kevin returns a blank, editable cell here rather than a guess.
High-value property. Not because software cannot price it, but because a single line can move the claim enough to deserve a second pair of eyes.

What the run looks like

Several hundred photographs go up in one click. They are grouped into candidate sets — fewer sets than photographs, because the wide shot and the model plate are one item. You merge, split and exclude, then process. The lines come back identified, priced from a listing, classified and depreciated, with the ones Kevin would not guess at left blank for you. Machine time is unattended: you are not watching a progress bar, you are reviewing the result.

We are not publishing an hours-saved figure on this page yet. The figures currently on the site do not agree with each other, and an authority page should not be the place that contradiction gets repeated.

Common questions

What actually takes the time on a large contents claim?

Not judgment — transcription. Describing each item, searching for what it costs to replace, comparing listings that are not quite the same product, copying a URL, choosing a category, looking up depreciation, then typing a row. The thinking per line is seconds; the clerical work is minutes, and it repeats for every line.

Where should automation stop?

At anything where being wrong is expensive and being fast is not valuable: variants that look identical but price differently, collectibles, ambiguous evidence, and high-value property. Jewelry, fine arts, firearms and furs are never auto-priced at all — they reach you with the price cell blank.

Does faster mean less defensible?

It should mean more. The reason manual pricing is fragile is that evidence gets dropped when time is short — the URL does not make it into the column. Automating the research means the listing behind every price is stored on the line and prints into the export, whether or not anyone was in a hurry.

What is left for me to do?

Confirm the grouping, fix the identifications that are wrong, price the lines Kevin left blank, and make the claim-specific calls: what is actually a total loss, what the insured can document, what a carrier will question. The worksheet is fully editable and every money column recomputes server-side when you change an input.

Can I work in batches instead of all at once?

Yes. A claim takes many ingest sessions: a second drop appends rather than overwriting, line numbering continues rather than renumbering — an export already sent to a carrier cites those numbers — and duplicate detection spans the whole claim rather than the batch.

Build contents claims faster with Kevin.

Your first 250 line items are free, with no clock running. $249/mo after that, unlimited claims.

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