Estimates and invoicing

Claim invoicing built on the insurance estimate

An insurance claim is not one bill. It is ACV, then depreciation, then a supplement, minus a deductible the homeowner owes you directly. CRM For Claims gives every one of those its own invoice type, applies carrier payments across them, and keeps the balance honest.

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The short version

The estimate is the source, and the invoices are its parts

The estimate does not start here. It is written in Xactimate or by your estimator, and it arrives as a document. What the system does is take that document apart into the numbers the claim will be paid in, and hold them on the claim where the invoices are raised.

Uploading an insurance estimate asks for the figures below, not just the file. The upload is blocked until the claim information is filled in, which sounds like friction until you have chased an estimate that belonged to no claim number.

Where the money actually goes wrong

Depreciation that is never invoiced. The work finished, the holdback was releasable, and no one raised the invoice.
A deductible nobody billed because the carrier paid and the file looked closed.
A supplement folded into the original invoice, so the supplement can never be proved separately.
A check applied to the wrong invoice, leaving one balance too high and another paid that was not.

The estimate upload

What gets recorded when an estimate arrives

These are fields on the upload, not notes in a memo box, which is what makes them readable later by the screens that raise invoices.

Captured on the estimate	Why it is a field and not a note
Total Estimate Amount and RCV	The headline number the carrier wrote, and the replacement cost value the rest of the claim is measured against.
Actual Cash Value (ACV)	What the carrier releases first. It becomes the first invoice on most claims, before a shingle is touched.
Recoverable and non-recoverable depreciation	Held back at the start. Recoverable depreciation is money you will invoice for later; non-recoverable never arrives and belongs in the forecast as such.
Deductible, all losses	Required on the upload, because the deductible decides what the homeowner owes and what the carrier never pays.
Hail / wind deductible and deductible credit	Kept apart from the all-losses figure, since a wind-and-hail percentage deductible is a different number on the same policy.
Pay When Incurred (PWI)	Money conditional on the work happening. It is invoiced when it is incurred, not when the estimate is written.
Sales tax added separately, and whether tax sits inside RCV	A yes/no question on the upload, because getting it wrong double-counts or loses the tax on every invoice after it.

Revisions are their own uploads rather than a replaced file — an initial estimate, a first revision, a second, and the carrier’s own version each keep their date and their total. They file into the claim’s document folders like everything else, so the estimate that produced an invoice is still there when the carrier disputes it.

Invoices

An invoice has a type, and the type is a claim payment

This is the part a general CRM cannot copy without rebuilding itself. An invoice here is not a generic bill with a number on it: it is declared as a specific component of the claim, and the insurance types only appear once the claim carries a claim number.

Invoice type	When it is raised
Actual Cash Value (ACV)	The first release on a claim. Supplemental and appraisal versions are separate types, so a supplement never hides inside the original number.
Recoverable Depreciation (RC)	Invoiced once the work is complete and the carrier releases the holdback. Also has its own supplemental and appraisal types.
Non-recoverable Depreciation	Tracked on its own so nobody chases a payment that was never coming.
Deductible	The homeowner's portion, invoiced to the homeowner rather than the carrier.
Pay When Incurred (PWI)	Raised when the conditional item is actually done, with supplemental and appraisal variants.
PA Contract Pre-Approved Expense	Expenses the public adjuster's contract already allows, kept out of the trade money.
Roof Payment Schedule (RPS) — customer's portion	For carriers who pay a roof on a schedule and leave the balance with the homeowner.
Retail down payment, progress and final payment	For work that is not an insurance claim at all. Retail financed through a bank is its own type; in-house financing is created from the Customer Finance Dashboard instead, so an instalment plan is never typed in by hand.

Each invoice carries a status of pending, approved or denied, a due date, a total, a memo that prints on the invoice itself, and attachments. It is billed to whoever is actually paying — a homeowner, a business entity, or an attached company such as the mortgage company or the carrier — and goes out as a PDF by email or as a link by SMS from inside the claim.

Payments

One check, several invoices, a balance that stays true

Carriers do not pay one invoice at a time. A single check lands covering ACV on one trade and a supplement on another, and the office has to split it correctly or the claim reads wrong for the rest of its life.

On every payment	What it is for
Method	Check, ACH, wire, cash, card, Zelle/Quickpay or QuickBooks — because the office reconciles by how the money arrived.
Status: issued by payee, or received and cleared	The important distinction on this page. A check in the mail is not money in the bank, and only a cleared payment reduces an invoice balance.
Which invoices it pays	One payment can be applied across several invoices. The picker offers only approved invoices that still carry a balance, each showing its type, amount, remaining balance and due date.
Reference number and who the check is payable to	A carrier check made out to the mortgage company is a different problem from one made out to you, and the record says which.
Payment account	The company bank account the money landed in, chosen from the accounts you set up rather than typed as free text.
Deposited date and settlement date	Two dates, because the gap between them is the one finance keeps asking about.

Only cleared money counts

An invoice’s applied total and remaining balance are built from payments marked received and cleared. A payment sitting as issued by the payee does not mark anything paid, and an invoice cannot be edited down below the money already applied to it. A payment that is returned is kept and reversed with a matching negative entry rather than quietly deleted, because a bounced check is a fact about the claim.

Paying by card, from a link

A homeowner can pay an invoice by card from a link without an account in the system. The payment is refused unless it matches the invoice balance exactly — a part-payment by card is not accepted, precisely so that the balance the office is reading cannot drift. Invoicing and online payments are part of the Professional plan; both plans are set out on the pricing page.

The other side of the ledger

What the job cost, against what it was contracted for

Income alone tells you nothing about whether a claim was worth doing. Expenses are recorded on the same claim, each one carrying a payee, a type from roughly twenty categories — labor, building materials, permit fees, dumpster, commission, measurement reports, weather verification, temporary tarp repairs, appraisal and legal fees among them — a status from pending through issued to paid and cleared, and the trade it belongs to.

A counter purchase does not need the office

A field inspector buying materials at a supply house records the expense from the tasks screen in five fields: amount, payee, project, trade and the receipt. It writes exactly the same expense record the full form does, so nothing has to be re-entered later.

Contracted amounts, per trade

What each trade was contracted for is captured when the contract is uploaded, and more can be added later without touching the original. Totals are always added up from those entries rather than stored as a running figure, so the page and the report cannot quietly disagree.

Profitability

Two profitability reports that answer different questions

The general report is the one an owner asks for: income from approved, cleared invoices, minus every expense on the project. The by-trade report answers something narrower and more useful — whether roofing made money on this job even though siding did not.

For each trade it takes the contracted amount as income, the expenses assigned to that trade, plus that trade’s share of general overhead, allocated in proportion to what it was contracted for. On a $100,000 job contracted as $60,000 roofing and $40,000 siding, a $1,500 commission booked to overhead lands as $900 on roofing and $600 on siding. Only paid expenses and refunds count, so money still sitting as pending never flatters a margin.

A trade with expenses but no contracted amount still gets a row, flagged as not contracted — spend never disappears from the total.
If nothing on the project is contracted there is no basis to split overhead by, so it is reported as not allocated rather than spread evenly and pretended to be accurate.
Both reports generate as PDFs, and both wait until the project reaches retrospective or completed — the stages are set up on the pipeline, and a job still in progress has costs that have not landed yet.

Honest limits

What the invoicing deliberately does not do

It does not write estimates. There is no line-item estimator and no price list. Estimates come from Xactimate or from your estimator; the system records their figures and files the document.
It is not accounting software. There is no general ledger, no tax filing and no two-way accounting sync — QuickBooks appears only as a payment method on a payment record.
Card payments are all-or-nothing. A homeowner paying online pays the invoice balance in full. A part-payment is recorded by your office, not by the customer.
Profitability waits for the project to finish. Both reports are unavailable until the job reaches retrospective or completed, which is deliberate rather than a missing feature.

If you want the wider picture first, the features overview covers invoicing alongside documents, messaging and scheduling, and the comparison page says plainly where a broad roofing platform fits better than a claims-first one.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Straight answers about who we serve, what we automate, and how to get started.

Can CRM For Claims create an estimate?

What invoice types does a claim support?

Can one carrier check pay several invoices?

Does a pending check mark an invoice as paid?

Can a homeowner pay an invoice online?

How is profit calculated per trade?

Is invoicing included in the entry plan?