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The storm season supplement playbook.

By Chaz Jaco, Co-Founder & Software Architect, ESXPress - Last updated:

What is a storm season supplement playbook?

A storm season supplement playbook is a year round system for recovering the line items carriers leave off storm claims. ESXPress publishes this hub as a map of the claim year, hail through hurricane through freeze, with the prep work and the checklist to have ready before each window opens, so a storm season supplement becomes a routine step instead of a scramble.

The claim year, season by season

Storm claim volume follows the weather, and the weather runs a script. This calendar is qualitative on purpose: it names the pattern and the prep work, and it does not invent a statistic to make the pattern look sharper than it is. Read it against the storms your own market gets, because the windows are national and your region is not.

February to March

Pre-season prep

February to March is the pre-season prep window, the quietest stretch of the wind and hail year, and that is the point. Fewer files land on the desk, so this is the one window where the setup work actually gets finished instead of deferred to a busier month. What you build here is what carries you through April.

Have ready before the pre-season prep window

  • Decide how a scope reaches you. A carrier scope PDF or a scope XML export can take different paths, so settle the intake route while the desk is calm.
  • Run your next few claims through the same workflow so it becomes muscle memory, not a first attempt, when the volume arrives.
  • Bookmark the storm-type playbooks for the weather you actually get, not the weather someone else gets.
  • Write the supplement template once, so a supplement is something you fill in rather than something you start from a blank page.

April to June

Hail peak

April to June is hail peak, the window the rest of the year is built around. Claim volume climbs through the spring and stays high, and the same handful of line items go missing on scope after scope, for the same structural reason: the first estimate is written before anyone opens the roof.

Have ready before hail peak

  • A repeatable route from the adjuster's scope to an import-ready estimate, so a new file never starts a new process.
  • The list of what hail scopes omit most, in front of you, not in someone's memory.
  • A code-requirement reference for the counties you actually work, because the same roof can carry a different obligation one county over.

June to November

Hurricane season

June to November is hurricane season, which runs long and arrives in events rather than a steady stream. A single landfall can put a whole market's worth of claims on your desk in days, so this is the window where volume is least predictable and turnaround is measured hardest. It is also the window that finds the ceiling of any process built on retyping.

Have ready before hurricane season

  • Batch capacity that does not depend on a person retyping line by line, because a surge never brings more hands, only more files.
  • A plan for onboarding temporary help quickly, without a week of training before the first file moves.
  • A per-claim record you can hand to a desk adjuster without re-reading the whole estimate.

December to February

Freeze and ice dam

December to February is freeze and ice dam season. Fewer in number, but these claims land hard on specific cold-weather line items, and the ones the first estimate tends to leave off are the ones freeze history actually drives: underlayment and ice barrier where the climate calls for it, and drip edge at the eaves and rakes.

Have ready before freeze and ice dam season

  • The cold-weather code requirements for your region, so the items the first estimate left off are ready to cite the moment the claim opens.
  • A short, written supplement narrative for freeze claims, because the argument for these items is a code argument, not a preference.

Why processes break during a CAT surge

Every process has a ceiling, and a catastrophe event finds it. Three things fail first, and none of them is the estimate itself.

  • Retyping. A process built on typing line items by hand scales with the number of hands, and hands are exactly what a surge does not bring. The bottleneck is not the thinking, it is the reentry.
  • The same omissions, repeated at volume. The items a first estimate misses are the ones it always misses. Under surge pressure nobody has time to catch them from memory, so a miss on one file becomes a miss on hundreds.
  • Turnaround and trust. Desk capacity is measured against a rising queue. A file waiting for someone to rebuild it is a file the insured, the carrier, and your cash flow are all waiting on.

The fix is the same in every window: move the mechanical work off the desk before the volume arrives, so the surge is a workload and not a rewrite. What a catastrophe does to a single claim, and how a supplement desk runs when a whole market's losses land at once, is the event side of that work, set out on the CAT claim supplement page.

Pre-season readiness checklist

The list below is the same every year, because the failure modes are the same every year.

  • Know your intake. Decide now whether a scope arrives as a PDF or as a scope XML export, and sort the path to an import-ready file while the desk is calm.
  • Turn the conversion into a habit. Run the next few claims through the same workflow in the quiet months so the seasonal spike is a workload, not a first try.
  • Keep the omission list where you work. The items carriers leave off are the same season after season. Have them in front of you, not in memory.
  • Line up your code references. Underlayment, drip edge, and ventilation calls turn on local code and climate zone, so a single generic checklist is not enough.
  • Write the supplement template once. A supplement you can fill in beats a letter you start from blank at the end of a long day.
  • Plan for surge help. Decide how a temporary hand gets onboarded in an afternoon, not over a week of shadowing.
  • Give every file a home. A per-claim record is what lets you answer a carrier question without opening the estimate again.
  • Re-read this page each February. The calendar does not change, but the year you are in does, and the prep window is short.

Storm-type playbooks

Each storm type drives a different set of omissions, and the cluster splits two ways: hail damage and wind damage are single-mechanism losses, while a hurricane and a freeze and ice dam claim each arrive as two losses in one event. Ice dam claims share the freeze page, because the two arrive from the same cold snap.

  • Hail damage claim How hail damage presents on a roof, what the carrier's first scope under-represents, and what to document.
  • Wind damage claim The uplift mechanism, why corners and edges fail first, the shingle wind-rating code, and what to document.
  • Hurricane damage claim The two-peril wind and water split, named-storm percentage deductibles, code upgrades, and what to document.
  • Freeze and ice dam claim The roof ice dam versus interior frozen pipe split, the ice barrier code, and what to document.

How this page stays current

This hub is reviewed and refreshed once a year, before the storm season, and the last reviewed date on this page is the signal that it happened. On each refresh the calendar is re-checked against the year you are in, the storm-type links above are re-verified so none of them points at a page that has moved, and anything the season taught us is folded back in. The date is not decoration: it is the promise that the page you are reading was checked for the year in it.

Related reading

Sources and standards cited on this page

Cited for the code requirements referenced on this page and for the platform behavior described here.

Common questions

What is a storm season supplement playbook?

A storm season supplement playbook organizes supplement work around the claim year instead of a single storm. It carries three things: the seasonal calendar, the pre-season readiness checklist, and the links to the storm-type pages, so the work is planned before the volume arrives rather than assembled under it. The point is routine, not heroics: the same omissions recur season after season, so the prep is repeatable.

When does storm claim volume peak?

Volume follows the weather, not a single date. Hail drives the spring, hurricane season runs from June through November and arrives in events rather than a steady stream, and freeze and ice dam claims concentrate in the winter. The two windows that matter most for planning are February to March, when the desk is quiet and the setup work gets done, and the weeks right before your region's own peak.

What should a contractor have ready before hail season?

A fixed intake path for the carrier's scope, a conversion workflow you have already run enough times to trust, the list of items hail scopes omit most, and a code-requirement reference for the counties you work. None of it is exotic. The point is to have it settled in February rather than inventing it in April.

Why do supplement processes break during a CAT event?

Volume exposes the parts of a process that scale with hands rather than workflow. Retyping line items is the usual bottleneck, the same omissions recur across every file at once, and turnaround becomes the number everyone watches. Moving the mechanical work off the desk before the surge is what keeps a CAT event a workload instead of a rewrite.

How is ESXPress used across the season?

ESXPress turns a carrier scope, whether a PDF or a scope XML export, into an import-ready Xactimate file in about two minutes, so the seasonal volume is a throughput problem rather than a retyping problem. On dashboard conversions, the 93 rule completeness audit reports the code required items a scope did not carry, each paired with the citation behind it. The estimate is still written and priced in Xactimate.

How often is the storm season supplement playbook updated?

Once a year, before the storm season. The last reviewed date on this hub moves with each refresh, the calendar is re-checked against the year you are in, and the storm-type pages it links to are re-verified so no link points at a page that has moved. A date that looks stale is not a forgotten page, it is a page with a refresh contract.

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