The Estimate Review Checklist: What to Check Before You Hit Send

Somewhere in the file there's a basement bedroom with a seven-foot ceiling. Somewhere in the estimate, the same bedroom has nine. Nobody did it on purpose. The template defaulted, the estimator was on their fourth job of the day, and the sketch and the line items quietly drifted apart. A reviewer will spot it quickly, and once they've found one wrong number, they read every other number in the file a little more closely.

Every estimate gets read twice: once by the person who wrote it, who sees what they meant, and once by the person reviewing it, who sees what it says. A short checklist run before you hit send closes the gap between the two. This one sticks to the file itself. Pricing, overhead and profit, and carrier-specific guidelines follow your own policies and the programs you work under, so they aren't covered here.

Measurements match the sketch

Start with the numbers everything else is built on.

• Every room in the scope is in the sketch, and no room is in there twice. Closets, hallways, and stairs are the ones that tend to go missing.
• Ceiling heights are right for each room. One default height applied across a house with a finished basement, a vaulted living room, and a two-story foyer will be wrong somewhere.
• Quantities come from the sketch. Wall and floor quantities should follow the measurements, not a number typed in by hand and never checked again.
• Removal quantities match the moisture map. If drywall was cut at a set height along certain walls, the linear footage on the estimate should match those walls. Our post on flood cuts covers how that height gets chosen and documented.
• Room names match everywhere. "Bedroom 2" in the sketch, "guest room" in the photos, and "BR-B" in the estimate are three names for one room and one headache for whoever reads the file.

Every line item has a reason and a photo

For each line, you should be able to answer three questions without opening another file: what was done, why it was needed, and where the photo is.

• Match line items to photos. If you can't point to a photo for a line, find the photo or ask whether the line belongs.
• Match photos to line items. It works in reverse too. A photo of a vanity pulled from the wall, with no detach and reset line on the estimate, is work you did and didn't write up.
• Explain anything unusual in the line note. A reviewer who sees a line they didn't expect will look for a reason. Give them one before they have to ask.

Equipment matches the drying logs

Equipment lines are a common place for estimates and drying records to disagree, and one of the easiest to check.

• Counts match. The number of air movers, dehumidifiers, and air scrubbers on the estimate matches what the logs show was placed.
• Days match, room by room. Equipment pulled from a room on day three shouldn't run through day five on the estimate. Check each room, not only the totals.
• Monitoring matches. If the estimate includes monitoring visits, the logs should show a visit and readings for each one.
• Dates line up. The date of loss, the first visit, and the dates equipment was set and pulled should agree across the estimate, the logs, and the notes.

When the logs and the estimate disagree, the logs are the record of what happened. Correct the estimate to match the job, and never edit a log to fit an estimate.

The often-missed items

Some work gets done on nearly every water job and still slips off the estimate, usually because it happened in the first hour, before anyone was thinking about line items. If it happened and the file shows it, check that it's there:

• Content manipulation. Moving furniture and belongings out of the way so the work could happen, and putting them back.
• Detach and reset. Baseboard and trim, toilets, appliances pulled out so the floor could dry, toe kicks, door casings.
• Protection. Floor protection along the path in, covering cabinets and countertops, protecting contents left in the room.
• Cleaning. Cleaning before drying on contaminated jobs, cleanup after demolition, and the final clean.
• PPE and containment on jobs that needed them, such as Category 3 water or suspected mold.
• Debris removal and disposal for everything that came out.

The goal is a complete estimate, not a padded one. Everything on this list belongs on the estimate only if it actually happened and the photos or notes show it.

Notes a stranger could follow

The notes are where a reviewer learns what the photos can't show. Write them for someone who has never seen the house.

• Lead with the basics: cause of loss, date, affected areas, and the water category, with a sentence on how you determined it.
• Use plain words. Skip the shorthand only your office understands. If a note needs you standing in the room to explain it, rewrite it.
• Explain the judgment calls. Why the pad came out, why the walls were cut instead of dried in place, why one room took longer than the others.
• Stay factual. Describe what was found and what was done. Leave out guesses, opinions about the policy, and anything you can't support with a photo or a reading.

Nothing contradicts the scope

The last pass is a consistency check. Read the estimate, the notes, and the photo captions side by side, and look for anything that disagrees with anything else.

• The category matches the actions. A loss written up as Category 3 with the carpet and pad dried in place will raise questions, and so will a Category 1 loss with full containment and no explanation.
• Materials match. The notes say laminate and the estimate says carpet. One of them is wrong.
• The work matches the authorization. The estimate should reflect the work the customer authorized, plus any documented changes.
• Affected rooms match. Nothing billed in a room that stayed dry, and nothing in an affected room left out without a reason.
• The toilet test. Every toilet detach and reset happens in a room that actually has a toilet. It sounds obvious until the template says otherwise.

Where scanning fits

A lot of the measurement mistakes above start with a tape measure, a notepad, and a long day.

With riivet, a tech can scan a room using a supported iPhone Pro or iPad Pro (the compatibility page lists which ones) and get a sketch plus Xactimate-ready line items for an estimator to review. The review still happens, and every item on this checklist still applies, but the estimator starts from a sketch built in the room instead of from notes typed up at the end of the day. Our posts on LiDAR scanning and AI estimating go deeper, and the integrations page covers how riivet works with Xactimate.

Before you hit send

Check that the measurements match the sketch, that every line has a reason and a photo, and that equipment matches the logs room by room. Look for the often-missed items, but only the ones that happened. Make sure the notes make sense to a stranger and that nothing in the file argues with anything else. Better yet, have someone who didn't write the estimate run the list. Ten minutes of review on your side costs far less than a week of back-and-forth after someone else finds the nine-foot ceiling.