About Xactimate Time & Materials
Updated
by
Heather Jones
Xactimate Time & Materials (T&M) allows service providers to capture and track job expenses for any size project. On projects with T&M, the client (often an insurance carrier) agrees to pay the service provider for the costs incurred in completing the job according to an agreed upon rate. Because the final cost is not calculated until the end of the job, service providers have historically only used the T&M workflow on complex work that is difficult to estimate (such as for commercial or large residential projects) but Xactimate T&M was built to be synergistic with both large and small projects, reducing overhead expenses and improving workflows across organizations.
Users require the following to have full access to T&M:
- A T&M license for the active account (purchased through the Online Store or by contacting the Sales team at 1-800-424-9228.)
- A profile that has T&M enabled. (The account manager or profile owner can enable it). See Time & Materials in Profiles in Xactimate Admin for more details.
Obtaining data
Traditional T&M project workflow (general)
Traditionally, T&M flows in the following order:
- Team leads on a job fills out physical forms for labor, material, and equipment (which is typically captured daily).
- The project manager collects the forms from all the leads (often over a hundred pages).
- The project manager sends the paperwork back to the office.
- An administrator in the office scans all the forms (typically the next day).
- An administrator manually enters all the scanned forms into their third-party application and generates reports for the project manager.
- The project manager reviews the reports (often 36-48 hours after they were recorded by the team leads).
Not only is there a huge time commitment for recording and reviewing these forms, but there is a high risk of error or data loss.
Xactimate T&M project workflow (general)
Instead of reentering form data multiple times and in multiple mediums, users of Xactimate T&M can streamline their workflow to the following:
- Team leads fill out the digital worksheets on-site via a desktop or mobile browser for labor, material, and equipment (with the option of using previous worksheets as templates).
- Xactimate automatically imports the worksheets.
- The project manager can immediately review the entered data.
- The project manager completes the project in Xactimate and can easily create and share the reports with customers during or after the project completion.
