Dave is fifty-one. He's been in restoration for nineteen years — six of those running Larsen Restoration & Drying, the last three with serious TPA volume. His shop sits in that uncomfortable middle: too big to run on paper and a whiteboard, too small to justify enterprise restoration platforms like DASH or Encircle at $400+/seat/month. The dominant carrier-side software stack — Xactimate, Symbility, MICA — runs alongside whatever the shop runs internally. Most shops run a Frankenstein of three to five tools and call it operations.
His clients aren't really the homeowners. The actual customer on most jobs is the insurance carrier or the TPA. They set the scope. They approve the supplement. They rate his shop on the SLA dashboard. Miss too many 30-min customer-contact windows and the assignments dry up. Miss the document-the-job-within-24-hours SLA and same story. $100K-$500K of TPA-routed revenue per year sits on top of those compliance windows.
The day before OpsLight
Dave's typical day started at 4-something AM with a phone call. Cat 2 water loss, a single-family residence — dishwasher supply line failed, water in the kitchen and dining room ceiling below. He dispatched the on-call crew with the loss number the homeowner had been given by their carrier during the intake call. Two hours later, the crew was on-site doing moisture mapping. By 10am he was on the phone with his IICRC-certified lead going through psychrometric readings — RH, GPP, dew point, temp — to size the dehumidifier count (LGR vs desiccant) and the air-mover count.
Midday was a carousel of phone calls. Adjuster #1 negotiating scope on the dishwasher loss. Adjuster #2 asking for supplement documentation on a job three days old. Homeowner #3 on a job five days old asking why his kitchen wasn't dry yet (because the carrier hadn't approved the additional dry days yet). Afternoon: structural drying monitoring visits, two new-loss intakes, one TPA dispatch from Alacrity assigned at 2:14pm with a 30-minute contact-customer SLA — meaning Dave had to call the homeowner before 2:44pm or take a hit on his SLA rating.
Evening was Xactimate. Each estimate is forty-five to ninety minutes. The reading sits on his desk: psychrometric readings, moisture-map photos, lead-tech notes. He converts all of it into Xactimate line items matched to the carrier's terminology and unit costs. By 11pm he's usually still at it. His wife calls it "the second shift." Storm season makes it triple.
"Xactimate is supposed to make estimates faster. It is — compared to writing them by hand. But the cycle every night for me was the same: come in from the field at 7, eat dinner, get back to the office computer at 8, write estimates until midnight, sleep, get a 4am call. I was making good money and burning out at the same time."
Dave Larsen · Larsen Restoration & DryingThe other quiet pain was equipment. Dave has roughly $180K in air movers, LGR dehus, desiccant units, HEPA scrubbers, and negative-air machines distributed across active jobs at any moment. About every six weeks, somebody forgot a piece. Sometimes it walked. Sometimes the homeowner found it in a corner of the basement two months later and emailed him. The lost-trust hit was worse than the $1,800 piece of equipment.
How Dave found OpsLight
One of his TPA contacts at Contractor Connection mentioned a restoration shop in the East Bay that had just started using something called OpsLight — and that their supplement-pushback response time had gone from "eventually" to "within 24 hours." Their TPA rating bumped up two notches in a quarter.
Dave's first call with us was an hour. We asked him: what does a Cat 2 dispatch look like end-to-end at your shop? He walked us through it. We asked: which TPAs route to you, and what's the SLA on each one? He named four. We asked: how do you currently track equipment on-site? A whiteboard with magnets in the office and a group text. We asked: walk me through one Xactimate estimate from raw field notes to submitted line items. He walked us through it. That walk-through became the install brief.
Two weeks later, OpsLight was live. The TPA-SLA alarm caught a 2:47am Alacrity assignment on day three; Dave got a buzz and was on the phone with the homeowner at 3:01am, safe inside the SLA window. The dehu tracker caught two pieces of equipment outside the 7-day window on week one. The Xactimate pre-draft cut his Tuesday-evening writing session from three hours to thirty minutes.
Three moments from a regular Tuesday
The Alacrity assignment that didn't blow the SLA
An assignment-routing email landed at 2:47am from Alacrity — a Cat 3 sewage backup at a multi-family unit, customer phone attached. OpsLight parsed the email, fired an SMS to Dave with the address, customer name, customer phone, and a 28-minute countdown to the 30-min contact-customer SLA. Dave called the homeowner at 3:01am, gave her an arrival ETA, hung up, went back to bed. The crew was dispatched at 6am. The SLA stayed green.
The supplement-denial that got drafted before dinner
An adjustment notice came in from a carrier at 4:30 — $2,400 of the supplement Dave had filed last week was denied without explanation. OpsLight read the adjustment, pulled the original supplement's psychrometric justifications, matched the denied line items against comparable past jobs, and drafted a push-back memo citing IICRC S500 §12.2 and the specific GPP readings from days 3, 5, and 7 of the dry-out. Dave reviewed it in 18 minutes, edited two sentences, submitted. Recovered $2,100 of the $2,400 the following week.
The Xactimate evening that ended at 9
Three jobs needed estimates submitted by Wednesday morning. OpsLight had pre-drafted line items for each one from the crew's field psychrometric data, moisture-map photos, and lead-tech notes. Dave pasted into Xactimate, reviewed in chunks of ten-fifteen minutes, submitted all three by 9pm. His wife noticed.
Six months later
Dave's TPA shop-rating across all four programs is at the top tier in his region. Supplement recovery rate has moved from somewhere around 67% to consistently above 85% — visible in his Friday job-profitability report. Per-job gross margin tracking (see job costing) caught two losing jobs early and let him bid the next batch differently. Equipment-on-site shrinkage has stopped completely. The Xactimate evening shift has compressed from 15-25 hours a week down to four or five.
The number Dave keeps coming back to: his average Tuesday-evening bedtime moved from 12:30am to 10pm. That's not a revenue number. He doesn't care.
What's configured specifically for restoration
- Restoration-vocabulary intake classifier. Knows Cat 1 / Cat 2 / Cat 3 water, Class 1-4 saturation, LGR vs desiccant dehumidification, structural drying, moisture mapping, containment, HEPA scrubbing, negative-air machines, hydroxyl, ozone, wet vs dry smoke. Distinguishes water from fire from mold from biohazard at intake.
- TPA-SLA compliance alarms. Per-TPA timing thresholds: Contractor Connection (30-min customer contact, 24-hour documentation), Alacrity (same), Sedgwick, Crawford. Owner SMS countdown clock on every assignment.
- Carrier-account list. Each TPA + each direct-carrier relationship has a contact, preferred terminology, supplement-pushback success patterns, and per-program SLA configuration.
- Xactimate pre-draft module. Reads field psychrometric data + moisture-map photos + scope notes; outputs line-item drafts in the carrier's preferred terminology and unit costs. Owner pastes + reviews.
- Supplement-pushback drafter. Reads carrier adjustment notes; cross-references IICRC S500 / S520 standards; pulls historical comparable jobs; drafts the push-back memo for owner review.
- Equipment-on-site tracker. Every air mover, LGR dehu, desiccant dehu, HEPA scrubber, negative-air machine has an asset tag. Crew SMS-tags placement and recovery. 7-day threshold alarm for forgotten equipment. More on inventory + equipment tracking →
- Mold-discovery decision support. Crew uploads a photo of suspect material; OpsLight cross-references the historical-loss library, surfaces Stachybotrys-vs-Aspergillus visual cues, drafts the customer-disclosure script + scope-expansion supplement, pings owner with a one-screen "here's what to do next."
What other restoration owners ask us
What is the best software for a small restoration contractor?
For 1-5 truck water and fire damage restoration shops, the right software depends on your role mix with carriers and TPAs. OpsLight fits owner-operator shops that want to cut Xactimate-evening estimate backlog, TPA-SLA stress, and equipment-on-site tracking without forcing the crew onto an app. It pre-drafts Xactimate line items from field psychrometric data, alarms on Alacrity/Sedgwick/Contractor Connection 30-minute customer-contact SLAs, and tags every air mover + LGR dehu against the job.
Does OpsLight integrate with Xactimate?
Not via direct API (Xactimate's API is gated to enterprise customers). OpsLight reads your crew's field documentation (moisture mapping, psychrometric readings, photos, scope notes) and pre-drafts the Xactimate line items in the carrier's preferred terminology and unit costs. You paste into Xactimate, review, submit. Typical reduction: 60-90 min/job of estimate writing down to 10-15 min of review.
How does OpsLight handle TPA SLA compliance?
A TPA assigns a loss at 2am via email or portal. OpsLight reads the assignment, wakes the on-call owner with an SMS that includes the customer phone, address, and a 28-minute countdown to the 30-min customer-contact SLA. Document-the-job-within-24h SLA also tracked. Compliance becomes default, not something the owner has to remember at 2am.
Can OpsLight help with supplement push-back to carriers?
Yes. When a supplement comes back denied or adjusted, OpsLight reads the adjustment notes and drafts a push-back memo citing IICRC S500 standards, your prior comparable jobs, and the specific psychrometric readings that justify the additional scope. Owner reviews and submits in 20 minutes instead of 4-6 hours.
Will my IICRC-certified techs need to install an app?
No. Crew interacts with OpsLight via SMS only. Tech texts the company number with IN [job-id] on arrival and a photo of the moisture map, OUT [job-id] when leaving. Equipment tags (which air mover / dehu / HEPA scrubber is at which job) tracked via the same SMS.
Does OpsLight track dehumidifiers and air movers left on-site?
Yes. Every air mover, LGR or desiccant dehumidifier, HEPA scrubber, and negative-air machine has an asset tag. OpsLight tracks placement-and-recovery against each job. Flags any piece on-site more than 7 days without an active job.
How is OpsLight different from a storm chaser shop's tools?
Storm chasers don't really use software — they sign AOBs on the porch, do the cheapest work possible, and disappear before the warranty matters. OpsLight is built for the opposite: IICRC-certified, TPA-routed, supplement-documented work. The wedge is professionalizing the small reputable shop with the back-office a $5M restoration franchise has — without the franchise fee, without forcing the crew onto an app, without the multi-year contract.
How long does setup take?
Two weeks from kickoff call to live system. That includes: porting or provisioning the Twilio number, building the TPA and carrier-account list, configuring the SLA thresholds per program, branding the Xactimate-pre-draft and supplement-pushback templates, tagging your equipment inventory, and wiring up the crew SMS roster. We schedule a 30-minute training call at the end so you know exactly where every signal lands.