Restoration Intel has a new desk. Not a new section, not a new site — a labeled place inside the documentation coverage this site already publishes, where every piece says, up front, which chair it was written for.
There are two chairs at every contents claim. In one sits the public adjuster, hired by the policyholder, paid a percentage of what the claim recovers. In the other sits the carrier-side adjuster — staff or independent — retained by the insurer, paid to close files that defend themselves. They sit on opposite sides of the same file, and on some questions they are actively opposed. This desk writes for both of them, and it argues for neither.
That needs explaining, because a publication that claims to serve two opposing chairs sounds like it’s serving nobody. So here is the ground the desk stands on, and it is narrower than you might expect.
The one thing both chairs say in public
We went and read what both sides actually say, in their own channels, before building this. Public adjusters argue in associations, in courts, and in trade coverage — about licensing, about fee caps, about whether carriers can write them out of a policy entirely. Carrier-side adjusters are quieter in public by a wide margin; most of what gets said about their work is said by their employers, their firms, and their trainers. Those are different conversations, and this desk is not going to pretend otherwise.
But underneath the disagreement, both chairs state the same standard, from opposite directions, in plain words: a well-documented file moves, and a sloppy one dies. The carrier-side training world says a desk adjuster can only move what the field file gives them — photos, measurements, documented detail — and that gaps mean reinspection and delay. The public adjuster’s world says completeness is the whole job: an undocumented line is money that cannot be recovered, no matter how real the loss was. Different chairs, different pay, same sentence about the file.
Documentation is the shared language of the claim. It is the one subject neither side has to concede anything to discuss. So that is the subject of this desk: the standard itself — what a complete file is, line by line — taught straight, with no side taken in the coverage fight happening around it.
Why a desk, and why now
This is less of a departure than it looks. We counted our own site: of the 54 posts Restoration Intel has published, 29 sit in Field Documentation — more than half the site, and the largest desk we run. Eighteen of those 54 are already written facing an adjuster reader. Thirteen more are shared ground — standards either chair can pick up and use. By weight, this site has been a documentation-standard publication for a while. The desk doesn’t change what we publish. It labels it, so a reader in either chair knows which pieces were written for them and can hold us to the rules below.
What each chair gets
If you sit in the carrier-side chair: what a complete contents file looks like when it lands on your desk, so review becomes verification instead of archaeology. Every item identified — not “television,” but the television: type, size, brand or model where the evidence supports it. Quantities somebody counted, not somebody assumed. A stated basis behind every price. And a custody chain behind every item — which room, which box, which warehouse, what disposition — so a priced line can be traced to a physical thing you can ask about. When a file arrives built that way, the questions are short. When it doesn’t, the file comes back, and everyone waits.
If you sit in the public adjuster’s chair: the same standard, run the other direction. What to demand in the record before anyone argues about price — because the argument is only ever as good as the record underneath it. A pack-out record proves custody; it is not a priced inventory, and it will not become one at review time by wishing. The inventory your client’s recovery stands on has to carry identity, quantity, and a defensible replacement basis per line, built while the evidence still exists. Depreciation gets argued later, on top of that record. It cannot be argued instead of it.
If you’re the restorer reading over both shoulders: how to build one file that both chairs can use. That is not two files, and it is not a file padded for effect. It is the file where observed, reported, and assumed are kept in separate piles; where total-loss and salvageable never blend into one undifferentiated list; where unresolved items are written down as unresolved instead of being priced over. Build that file and you have served your client, satisfied the standard, and given both chairs the same document to work from — because it was the same document all along.
The rules of this desk
Stated here, on the page, so any reader can check us against them:
1. Every piece is chair-labeled. It says which chair it addresses — public adjuster, carrier-side, or the shared ground — in its framing, before the argument starts.
2. No coverage verdicts. Whether a loss is covered, what a policy owes, what an endorsement means — those are somebody else’s call, and this desk doesn’t make it.
3. No side is argued. We will not tell you a fee cap is unjust or that an endorsement is a conspiracy. The moment a piece argues a chair’s case, it has stopped teaching the standard and started wearing a coat that isn’t ours.
4. The standard is the subject. Identity, quantity, basis, custody. If a piece on this desk isn’t about the record, it doesn’t belong on the desk.
One more rule, about honesty rather than position: carrier-side adjusters, in our reading, do not discuss contents inventories in public in their own words — every public word on that subject is written by restorers, vendors, or homeowners. So this desk will not invent a desk adjuster’s voice to agree with us. Where we state what a complete file does for the review chair, we are stating what the standard requires and what the carrier-side training world itself publishes — not quoting a conversation that never happened.
The practice
Take any contents file — yours, a vendor’s, one that just landed on your desk — and run the one-page test before anything else happens to it:
1. Pick five priced lines at random. For each one: could a stranger identify the exact item from the line alone — type, size, defining features, brand or model where evidence supports it? If a line could describe forty different items, it prices none of them.
2. Check the basis. Does each of the five carry where its price came from — a comparable item, a source, a date? A price with no basis is a number, not evidence.
3. Add it up. Do the priced lines rebuild the stated total, and does the line count match the items the file claims to cover? A total nobody can rebuild is a total nobody checked.
4. Separate the piles. Are total-loss, clean-and-return, and in-between items in distinct lists with distinct math — or blended into one?
5. Trace one item end to end. Pick one priced line and follow it to the custody record: the room, the container, the location, the disposition. If the two documents can’t be tied together item by item, write that down as a finding — don’t discover it at review.
A file that passes those five checks can be argued about productively, from either chair. A file that fails them isn’t ready to be argued about at all — it’s ready to be rebuilt, and rebuilding it now is cheaper than rebuilding it from photographs and memory in four months. That’s the standard. This desk exists to teach it, to whichever chair is reading.