Public Adjuster Contents Inventory Field Guide

A contents schedule is read by someone who was not there. This is what each line has to establish on its own — and the part that gets expensive at four hundred items.

Kevin Godfrey, KevinLast updated 4 October 2026

What makes a contents inventory defensible?

Each line should answer four questions without anyone having to reconstruct it: what the item was, what replaces it, where the replacement price came from, and how the ACV was reached.

The technical requirements are rarely the hard part. The hard part is performing the same process accurately on the four-hundredth item as on the first — the same specificity in the description, the same standard for a comparable, the same schedule applied to the same class. Consistency is what a large inventory is actually judged on, and consistency is what hand-working a thousand lines over three weeks quietly destroys.

What belongs on a line

Not every line carries every field, and it should not pretend to. A bath towel has no model number. A refrigerator, a camera, a power tool or a television usually does.

The fields that carry the weight, and what each one is for
Field	Why a reviewer wants it
Quantity	Multiplies the whole line; a quantity error is a total error
Description	The thing being valued, specific enough to judge the replacement
Brand and model	Where evidence supports them — the strongest identification available
Room	Locates the property and groups the schedule the way the loss happened
Age	How long the insured owned it, which is what drives depreciation
Replacement cost	What it costs to buy the replacement now
Source	The listing behind that figure, so the price can be checked
Depreciation and ACV	The arithmetic, reproducible by hand from the row

Underneath those sits the classification. Each line is assigned an XactContents category and sub-category, and that class together with the age is what selects the depreciation rate — 31 categories and 87 sub-lines, because footwear, furniture and collectible media do not age at the same speed.

A description is specific enough when it can be priced

The same television, two ways
	Thin	Supportable
Description	Television — $1,299	Samsung 65-inch OLED 4K smart television, S90D — $1,299
What a reviewer can judge	Whether $1,299 sounds high	Whether that model is the right replacement
What happens on review	A question comes back	The line is checked against its source and stands

The rule of thumb is to look at what moves the price. Brand, size, capacity, generation, material and quality tier all move the price of a television, so omitting them makes the line weaker. On a generic utensil they do not, and inventing them is worse than leaving them out.

Several photographs, one item

One frame rarely carries everything. A strong set for an appliance is often the item itself, a close-up of the manufacturer, the model label, a feature that affects value, and a wider shot showing where it sat. Those are five photographs of one piece of property.

Keep evidence and inference apart

Four different kinds of certainty on one line
Source of the fact	Example	How firm it is
Visible in the photograph	A Samsung television	Observed
Read off a label	Model QN65S90D	Observed, and checkable
Stated by the insured	Owned about two years	Reported — and what depreciation runs on
Replacement research	A current comparable at a major retailer	Researched, with the listing kept

The goal is not to make every field look certain. It is to reflect what can actually be established — which is also why a line Kevin cannot identify confidently comes back with an empty, editable field rather than a plausible guess. A wrong description that reads well is the one that survives review and causes trouble later.

Establishing the replacement

Once the property is identified, the question becomes what it reasonably costs to replace. Where the exact item is still sold, that is the answer. Where it is not, claims practice works down a familiar ladder: the manufacturer's successor, then a current equivalent from the same maker, then a like-kind-and-quality replacement, and for property that ordinary retail no longer represents, the resale market.

A current product is not a valid comparable merely because it appeared in a search result. The replacement has to match the characteristics that set the original's value — which is the whole subject of pricing a discontinued item.

Age is a claim fact, not a manufacturing date

These come apart more often than people expect. An insured who bought a three-year-old collectible one year before the loss has owned it for one year. The age on the schedule should reflect the claim, because that is the number the depreciation schedule consumes — and on a long-lived class the difference between one year and four is most of the ACV.

What still deserves your attention

Automation earns its place by removing repetition, not judgment. The lines worth slowing down on are the ones where a small error is expensive: unclear model numbers, luxury goods, collectibles, discontinued products, unusual quantities, products with several close variants, and anything whose price sits far from its neighbours.

Jewelry, fine arts, firearms and furs are never auto-priced in Kevin at all — they carry coverage limits that turn on judgment, so they reach you unpriced by design.

The goal is not more rows

A longer spreadsheet is not a better one. A strong line answers four questions — what was the item, what replaces it, where did the price come from, how was the ACV reached — and a strong inventory answers them the same way a thousand times. That repetition is the part worth handing to software.

Common questions

What information should a public adjuster include in a contents inventory?

Quantity, a description specific enough to price, brand and model where the evidence supports them, room, age, the replacement cost, the source behind that cost, depreciation, and the resulting RCV and ACV. Not every line carries every field — a bath towel has no model number — and the goal is the highest level of detail the evidence actually supports.

Should every item have a make and model?

No. Some property cannot reasonably be identified that far, and a model number invented to make a spreadsheet look complete is worse than a blank: it is the kind of detail a reviewer checks first. Make and model belong on a line when a plate, a badge, a barcode or a receipt establishes them.

Can multiple photos support one contents line item?

Yes, and on a careful pack-out they usually do — a wide shot establishes what the item is, a close-up of the plate establishes the model, another frame shows the damage. All three describe one piece of property, and an inventory that turned them into three televisions would be wrong in a way that is very easy for a reviewer to spot.

Should depreciation be the same for every item?

No. Useful life differs sharply by class — footwear and furniture do not age at the same rate — so a single blanket percentage across an inventory is the first thing to come apart under review. Depreciation should follow the class and the age of each item.

Can Kevin export to XactContents?

Yes. The export is an Xactimate (Excel) .xlsx written in the XactContents template, alongside a room-by-room PDF. Every derived cell is a computed number rather than a formula, because the importer rejects formulas. Kevin is not affiliated with or endorsed by Verisk; it writes a file their importer reads.

How specific does a description need to be?

Specific enough that a reviewer can tell whether the replacement is reasonable. The test is whether price moves with the detail: brand, size, capacity, generation and quality tier all move price on a television, so leaving them out makes the line harder to defend. On a generic kitchen utensil they do not, and the detail is not worth inventing.

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