Claim Toolkit’s newest product is Auto Total Loss Tax & Fees. If you’ve never heard of it, an adjuster puts in the amount of a total loss vehicle with all the vehicle and owner information and our product tells them what the taxes and fees are associated with that information. If might not sound that difficult, but it’s a beast! Did you know that taxes and fees can be different from your neighbor across the street?
So, how did Auto Total Loss Tax & Fees get started? A customer came to us asking if we could create it! So, we did. But, it looked very different than how it does now. We created the platform with the calculator but told the customer that they needed to update the taxes and fees themselves – that would not be something we would maintain. In fact, our President wasn’t about it at all! He said there would be no way for anyone to create this system and keep it up to date. The man power that it would take would be off the charts.
Our Vice President thought it could be done so pushed ahead! Along with our very talented developers, they created a platform that an adjuster could enter in the vehicle information and the final calculation with taxes and fees would populate. Again, at the beginning though, the customer had to keep up with the taxes and fees.
If you’re like me, you might not really think about taxes and fees, but now take a second and really think about it. You need to keep track of taxes and fees for EVERY country across the U.S. And what do you need to calculate taxes and fees? The garaging address. If you’ve never lived in the mountains before, let me tell you, USPS hates our addresses. It might be hard to believe, but we actually don’t get mail to our houses because our addresses aren’t validated. Now, let’s put that all together…to figure out taxes and fees, we need to know the garaging address to figure out the county and not all addresses will validate. What does that mean though? Someone needs to manually check those addresses that won’t validate. I know, a beast!
When it became apparent that the customer wasn’t keeping up with the taxes and fees, plus more customers inquiring about the product, the Claim Toolkit team took over. We decided that our small (but mighty) team would take this on full time and keep track of the taxes and fees. It has been quite the undertaking but every day we have more insurers interested in the product. Why? Because it’s that difficult to keep track of taxes and fees and no one else is doing it!
What I hope you take away from this story is, if a customer asks for something, we will do our very best to make it a reality – no matter the obstacles! Here at Claim Toolkit, we take on big challenges to make claims adjuster’s lives easier. That’s why we do what we do.