How Do I Write an Estimate in Xactimate?

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The short answer: Xactimate’s own training teaches estimate writing as four steps, in this order: Claim Info, Sketch, Estimate Items, Complete. Everything else — the menus, the shortcuts, the tricks — hangs off those four. If you understand what each step is for, the software stops feeling like a maze.

This page walks through all four in plain language, pulled straight from Xactware’s official documentation and training materials. No shortcuts presented as gospel, no “trust me” — just what the maker of the software says the process is, translated out of manual-speak.

Step 1: Claim Info — set up the job before you touch a line item

Before you draw anything or price anything, Xactimate wants the facts of the claim nailed down. In the desktop version you start from the Control Center / Local Projects page and create a new project; in Xactimate Online it’s the + New Project button on the Projects page.

Either way, you’re asked for the same foundation:

  • Who: client name and contact info
  • Where: property address
  • Which claim: the claim number
  • What happened: loss type and date of loss
  • The money details: policy information, the tax jurisdiction for the job

You also pick two things that quietly control everything downstream:

  1. Your profile — this is whose settings, templates, and defaults the estimate runs under. Pick the wrong profile and you’re fighting defaults the whole job.
  2. The price list — Xactware publishes regional price lists updated every month, built from what contractors in the field report they’re actually charging. Pick the price list that matches the project’s location. An estimate priced on the wrong region’s list is wrong before you’ve written a single line item.

Xactimate Online also asks you to choose a project type at this point: a standard Estimate, a FEMA Flood project (settings pre-adjusted for NFIP flood claims), or 360Value (a replacement-cost valuation insurers use for underwriting, not a repair estimate). Most restoration work is the standard Estimate type.

Why this step matters: everything downstream — the sketch quantities, the line-item pricing, the tax math — keys off what you enter here. Garbage in at Claim Info means rework everywhere else.

Step 2: Sketch — draw the rooms, because the drawing does the math

The Sketch is Xactimate’s floor-plan drawing tool, and it’s the step beginners most want to skip. Don’t.

You draw each affected room or area — walls, doors, openings, ceiling heights. The sketch isn’t decoration. It’s what generates your quantities: square footage of drywall, linear feet of baseboard, square footage of flooring. When you place line items in the next step, they pull quantities from the sketch.

The sketch window has four parts: the tools (what you draw with), search, the sketch workspace itself, and the items panel. You can view the sketch in 3D to check your work, and there are tools like Missing Wall for openings and staircases.

The plain-English version: measure twice, draw once. An accurate sketch means your quantities are defensible. A sloppy sketch means every line item downstream is built on sand — and that’s exactly the kind of thing an adjuster questions first.

Step 3: Estimate Items — the actual line items

This is the step people mean when they say “writing the estimate.” With Claim Info set and the sketch drawn, you add line items — the individual units of work, each with a code, a description, a quantity, and a unit price from the price list.

A few things worth knowing about how the pricing works, straight from Xactware’s training:

  • Unit prices come from the field. Xactware surveys contractors on what they charge. The published unit price for a line item includes the costs and fees of performing that task — but it does not include general overhead and profit. O&P gets applied separately, which is why it shows up as its own line and its own argument.
  • Price lists update monthly. If your list is stale, your numbers are stale. This is one of the most common silent errors in estimates that get questioned.
  • Line items carry more than price. Each item has a coverage assignment (Dwelling, Other Structures, Contents — the three coverage types in the Coverage/Loss section), and you can apply the deductible across all coverages or to specific ones.

You add items by searching the price list database, setting quantities (which can pull from your sketch), and adjusting as needed. Notes and photos attach at the line-item level — and this is where estimates live or die in review. An item with a photo and a note explaining why it’s there survives. An identical item with no documentation gets stripped.

Step 4: Complete — review it like the adjuster will

The last step is review and output: check the estimate summary, verify totals, and generate the reports. Xactimate’s Estimate Reports window lets you choose which report to print and set options for each — the standard estimate report, summaries by category or coverage, and so on. You can export to PDF.

Read your own estimate before anyone else does. Check that the price list is current, the tax jurisdiction is right, quantities trace back to the sketch, and every unusual item has a note or photo. That’s the entire quality-control pass, and it takes ten minutes.

The three things that trip up new estimators

These aren’t in any manual’s troubleshooting section, but they account for most of the pain:

  1. Wrong price list. Monthly updates, regional lists. If you opened an old project as a template and never updated the list, your pricing is fiction.
  2. Sketch first, items second. Items placed without a sketch have hand-typed quantities nobody can verify. Adjusters know this.
  3. Undocumented items get cut. The line item isn’t the argument — the photo and the note are. This matches what we wrote about undocumented mitigation getting stripped from estimates.

Where this comes from

This is a translator’s guide, not the manual. When in doubt, Xactware’s own documentation is the authority — this page just tells you which parts of it matter and why.

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