How to Build a 500+ Item Contents Claim

Where the hours actually go

Photographs are not line items

A 500-item claim can easily carry 1,500 to 3,000 photographs, because a careful pack-out shoots each item more than once — the item, the model plate, the damage. The first job on a large claim is therefore not pricing. It is working out which photographs belong together.

This is why review sits before pricing rather than after it. Related frames are proposed as one item, you confirm or correct the grouping, and only then does anything become a claim line. Duplicates and context shots become no line at all.

How it runs

1. 01Photos inDrop a folder, a phone dump or a whole .zip. Nothing is a claim line yet, and nothing is charged.
2. 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.
3. 03PricedEach line gets a price from a listing with the source kept on the row, a content class, and depreciation for its age.
4. 04ExportedXactimate (Excel) · .xlsx in the XactContents template, or a room-by-room PDF.

An item counts against your allowance when it becomes a line, not when a photograph is uploaded — so the size of the shoot is not the size of the bill, and a photograph you exclude costs nothing.

Scale amplifies small error rates

Five per cent of a 20-line inventory is one line, and you will probably catch it. Five per cent of a 1,000-line inventory is fifty lines, and you will not. The comparables worth catching are the usual ones — a bundle priced as a single item, the wrong capacity, the wrong generation, an accessory standing in for the product — and every one of them is cheaper to prevent than to find later.

The same logic applies to consistency. Software applies the same rule to line 900 that it applied to line 9; a person working across three weeks does not, however careful they are. On a large schedule that consistency is worth more than speed.

Review what needs reviewing

The goal is not to review nothing. It is to review the right lines: ambiguous identifications, unusual products, high-value property, thin pricing results, discontinued items, collectibles, and anything whose price sits far from its neighbours. Appraisal classes never price automatically at all, so they arrive on that list by default.

Everything ordinary should move through with very little hand work. That is the whole trade.

What this looked like in practice

Kevin was built out of real public-adjuster work rather than from a product spec. In a single month, more than four thousand carrier-facing contents line items were produced through it — with a person confirming the grouping on every one of them before it became a claim item.

The useful benefit is capacity rather than a stopwatch figure. Hours returned to a firm become more claims prepared, less research outsourced, and fewer weekends spent in a spreadsheet — which is a change in what the practice can take on, not just a faster file.

Large claims still need judgment

No large inventory runs cleanly end to end. There will be poor photographs, missing model numbers, discontinued property, collectibles and genuinely hard valuation questions. Those are the lines an experienced adjuster should be spending time on — and the reason to clear the repetitive work out of the way is to make that time available.

Common questions