I’m not a software developer. I’m a contractor who built the system he needed.

Two of us and a van

I started in the insurance repair trade with two members of staff, doing storm damage and escape of water for insurers and loss adjusters. On the tools first, then running the office, then running the firm. We handled property damage claims for households and businesses: storm, escape of water, fire, impact, the full book of domestic and commercial repair work that insurers instruct out to contractors every day of the week.

By the time I was done, seventy people worked for me, and the business was worth enough that when I sold it I retired on the proceeds. That did not happen because we were good on the tools. Plenty of firms are good on the tools. It happened because we answered, every single day, the two questions an insurance repair firm lives or dies on: does the insurer trust us with the next instruction, and did we make money on the last one?

What insurance work is really like

If you have never done it, insurance repair looks like building work with a different customer. It is not. The policyholder did not choose you and did not want the damage. The insurer is paying but is not on site. The loss adjuster wants it priced right and done quickly. And everyone involved has a complaints procedure with your name at the top of it.

A claim is a chain of promises with clocks on them. Ring the policyholder before they ring the insurer. Survey before the damage spreads. Price it right first time. Start when you said you would. Invoice what was agreed. Chase what you are owed. Miss one link and the claim goes quiet, and a quiet claim is a complaint, a lost panel place, or a loss on the books that nobody notices until year end.

I know, because I missed every one of those links at some point. The insurer rang at nine about a policyholder nobody had contacted. A surveyor drove forty miles to a house where nobody was in because the appointment had been booked before anyone spoke to her. My lads found rotten joists, cracked on and did the right thing, and the insurer refused to pay for it because nobody had written instruction. The excess was never collected on jobs I could name. A rate changed in an estimate and nobody could tell me who changed it.

The lessons that became rules

Each of those cost money. Each time, I put a rule in so it could not happen again, and I made the rule something the office could not work around.

When a policyholder went uncontacted and the claim collapsed into a complaint, the rule went in: no appointment can be booked until contact is logged. Not a warning box. The button is not there. No exceptions, not even for emergencies, because the emergencies are exactly when people cut corners. When a job left the yard underpriced, the margin floor went in: checked when the surveyor prices it, again before acceptance, and watched while the works run. When a number changed with no trail, the audit went in: every quantity, rate and price change written down with who and when, and accepted estimates locked so the people running a job cannot quietly adjust the figures they are judged on.

The timescales in the system, first contact within fifteen minutes, survey within forty-eight hours, estimate within twenty-four hours of the visit, works started within seven working days, are not aspirations I typed into a settings screen. They are the service standard my firm actually worked to. It was the standard that won us insurer work and kept it coming when other firms were being dropped from panels.

Why I built my own

I looked at what was on the market. Job-management software for tradesmen understood a diary and an invoice. It did not understand a policyholder, an excess, a loss adjuster, a variation that needs written instruction, or a margin floor that differs by insurer. Nothing I could buy knew what a claim was.

So I built my own system, and then did the thing that matters more than building it: I ran my business on it, every working day, for years. My administrators, surveyors, works managers and bookkeeper each had their own worklist telling them what needed doing today, with badges that had to be cleared. Control that slows the office down is worse than no control at all, so the discipline had to live in the software, not in anybody’s head.

Seventy staff, then the sale

The firm grew on those rules to seventy people handling thousands of claims a year, from a burst pipe in a flat to a fire in a factory, and I sold it as a multi-million-pound business. The rules did not retire with me. They are in the software: the contact discipline, the clocks, the margin control, the audit trail, the worklists. Claim Job Control is that system rebuilt as a modern web application. It is not a technology company’s guess at how your business works. It is how a business like yours actually worked, when it worked well.

Who I built it for

If you are already running insurance work and you know jobs are quietly leaking money, or you are fighting a system that was never built for how claims move, this was built for exactly that problem, inside a firm exactly like yours.

If you are looking to get into insurance work, it puts you ahead from your first instruction: the timescales adjusters and insurers expect, enforced from day one, and a margin gate that makes sure you make money on every job while you learn the market. I had to learn those lessons the expensive way. You do not.

I am on every demo. Bring one of your own jobs and we will run it through.