Background

National Water is the leading provider of water mitigation estimating and review analytics. The National Water applications are based on industry standards of the Institute of Inspection, Cleaning and Restoration Certification (IICRC), FEMA Guidance 13025a, and market-based material and labor charges. National Water offers its clients several ways to determine the impact of water damage to a building structure and helps them quickly begin the process of recovery.

Challenge

National Water assists insurance companies and homeowners in auditing Water Mitigation invoices. The team applies in-depth knowledge of the rules and conditions to evaluate the estimates. In the earlier days, a legacy system was employed to perform audit tasks. Due to the huge volume of rules and conditions, the legacy system could not handle a vast number of claims. Besides, it proved highly time-consuming for the estimating experts. National Water wanted to develop a software application with the rules and conditions necessary to audit a huge volume of water mitigation estimates with minimal human intervention and increased efficiency.

Solution

Prime Audit is a web-based application meeting these goals by helping the end user process an existing contractor estimate, resulting in a fully audited estimate.

The audited estimate has the following information:

• Service provider’s original invoiced quantity, price, and total.
• Recommended invoiced quantity, price, and total.
• Differential (Guideline Variance) between the original invoiced amount and recommended amount.
• Notes that explain the rule applied and rationale for the difference.

The system is integrated with Xactware pricing providing services, to get the recommended cost of each line item during real time.

Here are a few of the reporting features in Prime Audit.

Transaction Report –This report shows all relevant fields related to individual claims, with options to choose report fields as necessary.

Summary Audit Report – A report providing an overview of the audit findings. In many cases, if there is no variance or very low variance, the user may opt to approve the estimate just by glancing at the Summary Report.

Prime Index – A score that indicates how accurate the estimate is and how well the service provider meets the service standards of the program.

Analyze and Review Edit Collaboration Feature – This feature allows the users to edit each line item as they find applicable. They can save the changes and distribute the report to the service provider to notify them of exactly what should be changed.

Benefits

By incorporating National Water Audit, the adjusters have a clear understanding of equipment needs, appropriate drying time, and reasonable pricing. The system was designed for ease of use, flexibility, and increased productivity. Prime Audit comes packed with all of the rules and algorithms built in. These rules are based on industry guidelines (IICRC), best practices, and the experience and expertise gained by National Water over several years of reviewing water mitigation invoices. However, while the pre-packaged rules/guidelines are useful, each client determines the rules they want to use in the application.

All clients are different, and to accommodate differing allowances in some areas, rules and algorithms can easily be modified and saved on a client-by-client basis according to their specific guidelines or best practices. It’s being used by leading insurance companies and water mitigation companies.