Somewhere between "we never supplement" and "we have a full-time supplement department" sits an outsourced supplement company, and for a lot of storm crews that is the right answer for a couple of seasons.
It is also a decision worth re-running once a year, because the math changes as volume grows. Here is what these firms actually do, what they cost, and the honest case for and against.
What a roof supplement company does
A supplement company is a specialist back office for one narrow, high-value piece of claim paperwork. On a typical engagement, they:
- Receive the claim file from you — the carrier's scope of loss, your measurements, and your inspection photos.
- Review the scope line by line against the real roof, looking for items that are missing, mis-quantified, or priced as the wrong thing.
- Write the supplemental estimate in the carrier's own Xactimate line codes, with the justification for each item.
- Submit it to the adjuster and handle the correspondence.
- Chase the follow-up through the approval rounds, re-submitting with additional documentation when the carrier asks.
- Track the approved amount to payment, including the recoverable depreciation release in most cases.
What they do not do is inspect the roof, meet the adjuster on site, or talk to your homeowner. You still own the customer relationship and the field work. They own the paperwork between the scope and the check.
They are also not public adjusters. A public adjuster is state-licensed and represents the policyholder. A supplement company works for you, the contractor, preparing documentation. The line matters legally in most states, and a firm that blurs it in its marketing is a firm to look at harder.
What they cost
The dominant model is contingency: a percentage of what gets approved, nothing if nothing does. Around 10% of the recovered supplement is the common figure, though it moves with volume and with how much of the follow-up they handle.
Two contract details are worth reading slowly, because they change the number materially on the same job:
- Percentage of what, exactly. Ten percent of the supplement is a very different bill from ten percent of the revised claim total. The second version charges you for money the carrier had already agreed to pay before the firm ever saw the file.
- What counts as "recovered." Some agreements count the depreciation release as recovery, even though that money was always yours to collect once the work was finished.
You will also see flat-fee-per-claim pricing and monthly retainers for a committed volume. Publicly advertised flat fees sit around $150 per supplement, and the commission end of the market is generally quoted in the 8% to 15% range depending on volume and scope of service. Flat fees favor you on big claims and hurt on small ones, which is precisely why they are less common — the firms know the math too.
Run the comparison on your own numbers before you sign anything. Ten percent sounds small next to a recovered supplement and stops sounding small when you multiply it by a year of claims.
The case for outsourcing
A share of something beats all of nothing. This is the whole argument, and it is a good one. If supplements are currently not getting written — because nobody has time, or nobody is confident enough — then 90% of a recovered supplement is infinitely better than 100% of a supplement that never got submitted.
It is genuinely specialist work. These firms see thousands of scopes a year across every major carrier. They know which adjusters at which carriers push back on what, and they have already lost the argument you are about to have.
No fixed cost. A contingency fee scales down in a slow season. A salaried supplement coordinator does not.
It removes a task nobody wants. Supplement writing competes with selling, and selling always wins. Outsourcing takes it off the pile entirely.
The case against
The fee is permanent and it compounds. Ten percent of every supplement, on every job, forever. On a company doing meaningful claim volume that becomes one of the larger line items in overhead, and unlike a salary it never stops scaling.
You do not build the muscle. Every supplement they write is one your team did not learn from. Three years in, the knowledge lives at the vendor, and switching or bringing it in-house means starting from zero.
Turnaround is not yours to control. Your file sits in their queue with everyone else's. When a storm hits your market it has usually hit theirs too, and the queue is longest exactly when speed matters most.
Documentation quality is still on you. A supplement company cannot supplement what was not photographed. If your field process produces a wide shot of the roof and nothing else, they will write a thin supplement and you will blame them for it.
The third option most people skip
The choice is usually framed as outsource-or-hire-a-coordinator. There is a middle path that has gotten a lot more practical: keep it in-house but stop relying on memory.
The reason in-house supplements fail is almost never that nobody knows ridge cap gets left off. Everyone knows. It fails because the scope review is a manual, tedious step at the end of a long day, and it competes with going home. Remove that and most of the argument for outsourcing evaporates.
That is what roofing supplement software is for. It reads the carrier's scope PDF, compares it against the real roof, and flags what is missing or under-quantified — so the review happens on every job whether or not anyone remembered to do it. Your rep still writes the justification and hits send, but the finding step is no longer the bottleneck.
For most companies the honest sequence is: outsource while you are learning, watch what they catch, and bring it in-house once your own process is reliable enough that the fee is buying you convenience rather than competence.
What the engagement actually looks like
Worth knowing before you sign, because the day-to-day is where most of the friction lives.
You send files, not roofs. Typically the carrier's estimate, your measurement report, and your photo set, uploaded to their portal or emailed. The quality of what you send caps the quality of what comes back — this is the single biggest variable in whether the relationship works.
Turnaround is measured in days, not hours. Your file joins a queue. In a normal month that is fine. In the four weeks after a major storm in your market, it is usually also four weeks after a major storm in a hundred other markets, and the queue reflects it.
Follow-up rounds are where the value is. The first submission is the easy part. Carriers routinely come back asking for more documentation, and a firm that handles those rounds is worth considerably more than one that submits once and reports back that it was denied.
Someone on your side still has to own it. Files do not upload themselves and denied items do not re-submit themselves. Whoever that is at your company should be named, not assumed.
What to look for in a supplement partner
The market ranges from genuinely expert firms to a laptop and an Xactimate license. Six things separate them.
1. Carrier depth, not just Xactimate skill. Anyone can write a line item. Knowing that a particular carrier reliably pushes back on steep charges but approves code items without argument is the knowledge you are actually buying.
2. Licensing clarity. Ask directly whether anyone on the file is a licensed adjuster and in which states. Preparing estimate documentation for a contractor and negotiating a claim on a homeowner's behalf are legally different activities, and only one of them requires a public adjuster license in most states. A firm that gets vague here is a firm to pass on.
3. A defined follow-up commitment. How many rounds, over what period, before they stop working the file? Get it in writing. "We handle follow-up" is not a commitment.
4. Visibility into status. You should be able to answer "where is this supplement" without sending an email. If their answer is a monthly spreadsheet, you will be the one explaining delays to your homeowner.
5. Clear documentation requirements up front. A good firm tells you exactly what photos and measurements they need before the first job, because they know that is what determines the outcome. A firm that accepts whatever you send and complains later is optimizing for signing you, not for recovering money.
6. An exit that does not cost you the file. What happens to open supplements if you leave? Who owns the correspondence history? Ask before you need the answer.
Questions to ask before you sign
Short list, and any legitimate firm answers all six without hesitating.
- Is the percentage calculated on the supplement amount or the revised claim total?
- Does the depreciation release count as recovery for fee purposes?
- How many follow-up rounds are included, and what triggers you stopping?
- What is your typical turnaround, and what does it become after a major storm?
- Who is licensed, and in which states?
- What happens to open files if we end the agreement?
If any answer is "it depends" without a follow-up sentence, get it in writing before you proceed.
How to decide
Run these four questions honestly.
1. What percentage of your jobs currently get a supplement written at all? If the answer is under half, outsource now and fix the process later. Recovery you are not attempting is the most expensive problem on this page.
2. What is 10% of your annual supplement recovery? Compare it to the fully loaded cost of the alternative — a coordinator's salary, or a software subscription plus a few hours a week of somebody's time. Do this with last year's actual numbers, not a good month.
3. Is your field documentation good enough to supplement from? Dated photos of every slope, every wall intersection, every penetration, attached to the job. If not, fix that first regardless of which path you choose. It is the input to both.
4. Where do you want the knowledge to live in three years? There is no wrong answer, but there is a wrong way to arrive at it — which is by default, having never asked.
If you keep it in-house
Three things have to be true, and they are all process rather than talent:
- The scope comparison happens on every job, automatically. Not when someone remembers. Our complete guide to roofing supplements and the line items roofers miss most are what to compare against.
- Photos are captured at inspection, not reconstructed later. The supplement is written from the photo set, so the photo set decides the ceiling.
- Somebody owns follow-up until the check clears. A submitted supplement is not a collected supplement, and the gap between the two is where most of the loss actually happens.