Use Cases

Funding the Wait on an Insurance Claim

The job is done and the claim is approved, but the carrier pays on its own calendar. How restoration and roofing contractors bridge that gap safely.

Restoration and roofing businesses live on a payment schedule nobody else in the trades would accept. The work is emergency work — the tarp goes on the night of the storm, the water comes out before the adjuster has seen the house — and the money arrives whenever the carrier's process finishes, in pieces, weeks or months later. The crew that did the mitigation gets paid this Friday either way.

Most lenders look at that deposit pattern and see chaos. We see a business that fronts its revenue and then waits for an insurance company to catch up. The gap between those two readings is the whole subject of this article.

A claim number and an adjuster's timeline are a receivable

Here is the reframe that matters. Once a carrier has approved a claim — assigned it a number, agreed on a scope of loss, put an adjuster's name and a timeline on it — you are no longer waiting on maybe-money. You are waiting on scheduled money. That is a receivable in everything but the invoice format, and it deserves to be underwritten like one.

This matters for a second, quieter reason. Deposit consistency is one of the things underwriting weighs most heavily, and claim-driven revenue is lumpy by nature — three big checks a quarter instead of steady weekly deposits. A lumpy history you can tie to specific claims and payout dates reads completely differently from volatility with no story behind it. Lumpiness with a paper trail is a pattern; lumpiness without one is a question mark, and question marks are what slow a file down.

The carrier's calendar is back-loaded — your costs are not

The structural problem is not that insurance pays slowly. It is that insurance pays in reverse order of how you spend. Your costs land in the first days of the job; the payout arrives in stages, with the largest piece held until the paperwork proves the job is finished.

The mortgage line deserves its own sentence, because it surprises contractors who are new to residential claim work. On many residential losses the check is made out jointly to the homeowner and their mortgage company, and the mortgage servicer releases the funds on its own inspection-and-draw schedule. The carrier has paid. You still have not.

A sound bridge is sized to the gap, not the claim

The discipline here is identical to bridging any slow-paying customer, with the claim file standing in for the invoice. The facility needs a defined end — a specific payment it is waiting on and a date to build the term around. Everything else follows from that.

1. 1

   Start from the outstanding number, not the headline number

   Say the approved scope is $60,000, the first check brought in $21,000, and your deductible-and-depreciation math leaves roughly $34,000 still to arrive. The gap you are bridging is that $34,000 — less whatever cash the business can carry itself. Sizing to the full claim, or to the largest approval you could get, is how a timing problem becomes a debt problem.

2. 2

   Build the term around the adjuster's date — then add buffer

   If the completion paperwork goes in this week and the adjuster's office says thirty days, plan for longer. Depreciation releases, supplement negotiations, and mortgage endorsements all have a habit of adding weeks. A bridge that assumes the best case is a bridge you will be renegotiating.

3. 3

   Retire it when the check clears

   The proceeds land, the facility ends. That defined end is what separates a bridge from a standing debt load — and it is why prepayment flexibility is worth asking any funder about, since claim money often arrives in lumps rather than on schedule.

This is a use case we know well, because it is the job working capital does for claim-driven trades: keeping cash flow healthy enough to take on the next job, including work on slow payment terms, while the money from the last one is still in someone else's process.

When the claim is not a receivable

Now the part a funding company is not supposed to say. Not every claim qualifies for this treatment, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.

The same honesty applies to frequency. If every single job needs a bridge, the claims process is not your problem — your pricing, your deposit structure, or the mix of work you accept is. Repeated short-term facilities cannot fix an operating model, and a funder who keeps writing them for you anyway is not doing you a favor.

Line up the conversation before storm season does it for you

One thing years of these conversations have taught us: how urgently someone needs money says nothing about whether they will fund. The owners who handle claim-gap cash flow best are the ones who had the conversation early — product fit settled, documents ready, an advisor who already knows the business — so that when the storm lands and three claims open at once, the capital question is already answered.

The mechanics are deliberately simple. Underwriting starts from three to six months of business bank statements; the published floor is $250,000+ in yearly revenue, 1+ year in business, and a 580+ credit score, with funding from $10K – $350K. Decisions are made in-house by a person who can hear context — which, for a claim-driven business, is precisely the point — and funding can move in as little as 24–48 hours once documents are in. Bring the claim file. It does the explaining for you.

Keep reading

Use case

Bridging Slow-Paying Customers

Guide

What You Need to Get Funded (and How to Prepare It)

Calculator

Payment Fit Calculator