A claims executive at a large national insurer told me about a rural catastrophe event a few years back. The measurement reports his team could get on those properties came back two-dimensional. No sketch. Just flat data.
So one adjuster sat down and rebuilt the sketches by hand. Three hundred of them. About twenty minutes each. That is close to a hundred hours of work that existed for one reason: the geometry arrived in a form the estimate could not use.
He was not describing an accuracy problem. The numbers may well have been fine. The problem was format. And format is the part of this almost nobody asks about during a vendor evaluation, because everyone assumes it is handled.
There are seven things I would look at before standardizing on any measurement vendor. The first four are about how the file reaches your team. The last three are about what happens when it does not, and what it costs you when the geometry has to be rebuilt anyway.
Xactimate-Ready Is Doing a Lot of Work in That Sentence
ESX is the native file format for Xactimate. That is the whole thing. If the roof geometry reaches your team as an ESX, it can populate the project. If it reaches your team as anything else, somebody is going to rebuild it.
Which is why a phrase like Xactimate-ready deserves a follow-up question. It gets used to describe a report that a person still has to read and key in by hand. It also gets used to describe a file that lands inside the project with the measurements already populated. Same phrase, very different day for the adjuster.
When I am talking with a carrier or an independent adjusting firm, this is usually where the conversation gets more specific. Not "is it accurate," but "what arrives, and who has to touch it." There are three answers to that question, and most claims organizations are operating on the first one without knowing the other two exist.
Order It, Download It, Import It
You request the report on the vendor's website. When it is ready, you download the ESX, then import it into the Xactimate project yourself.
It works. It is also the version where every claim carries a small handling step, and that step lives with a person who has other claims waiting. One file is nothing. A surge is a different math problem.
Order Inside Xactimate, Receive It Inside Xactimate
With the RoofScope integration, the request happens in the platform your team already works in. The finished ESX is delivered straight into the project with the measurements populated.
Nobody downloads anything. Nobody imports anything. The geometry is simply there when the adjuster opens the file. Anyone on the team can initiate the request, which matters more than it sounds like it should, because it means the claim is not sitting in a queue waiting on one specific person to be at their desk.
The Measurement Is Ordered Before the Adjuster Opens the File
This is the newest tier and the one I am asked about most.
Through XactAnalysis, creating the claim can trigger the measurement request on its own. By the time the file reaches an adjuster, the scope is already in it. Nobody decided to order anything. Nobody remembered to.
Adoption here is early. We have carriers running it now, and the direction of the category is clear enough that it belongs in any evaluation happening this year. The gap between tier one and tier three is not measured in minutes per claim. It is measured in how many claims a team can carry during a surge without adding people.
The Property Still Has to Be Measurable
There is a step underneath all three tiers, and it stalls more files than any of them. Somebody has to be able to measure the roof in the first place.
Heavy tree canopy obscures the roof surface. Rural properties do not always have current imagery at the resolution the work requires. Complex and multi-structure properties do not always resolve cleanly from a single capture. When a measurement request comes back as a rejection, the claim does not slow down. It stops, and the adjuster now owns a problem that was not on their list that morning.
This is where how the report gets produced starts to matter more than the specification sheet suggests. RoofScope reports are drawn by certified CAD technicians. When current imagery will not support an accurate measurement, a technician can work the problem instead of returning a decline: review historical and alternate imagery, including captures from a season when the canopy was down, and produce a measurement from source material a single automated pass would have rejected. Our property decline rate runs under one percent, and we back the output with a 99% accuracy guarantee.
The same principle applies when a number looks wrong on a finished report. There is a person who drew it, and there is a person who will pick up the phone. In my experience that surprises adjusters more than anything else about how we work, which says something about what the rest of this category has trained them to expect.
Rework Is Slower Than Work
Every one of these gains compounds in the same place, and it is not the first estimate. It is the trips back.
A quantity that was rebuilt by hand is a quantity somebody may have to defend later. A supplement reopens a file that had already cleared someone's queue. A re-inspection puts a person back in a vehicle. A quantity dispute pulls in a reviewer who was working on something else. None of that shows up in the cycle time of the first estimate. All of it shows up in the cycle time of the claim.
Starting from a documented measurement does not eliminate that work. Coverage, causation, pricing, depreciation, and code interpretation still require judgment, and they should. What it does is take the geometry off the list of things that can come apart later.
The cost side is simple. The RoofScope report is $39, with no subscription and no minimum volume commitment, so a claims organization can standardize the workflow without restructuring a vendor relationship first. For anyone modeling what quantity variance is worth across a book of roof claims, we walked through that math separately in Reducing Claims Leakage with Verified Roof Measurements.
Fast Is Not the Same as Ready
If you take one thing from this, make it a question for your next vendor conversation. Not how accurate is it, and not how fast is it. Ask what format the measurement arrives in, and where it lands.
Ready means the geometry shows up where the estimate gets built. It also means there is a person behind it when something looks off. Those two things together are what actually move a claim.
Talk to our team about running the Xactimate integration against your own claim volume.
Contact Uswritten by RoofScope published on 09. 09. 2026