Hail this big can cause some SERIOUS damage. Contact the experts at IntelliDent if you are in need of Auto Hail Repair in the San Antonio, TX and surrounding areas. (855)830-4245. Ask for me, Celine!
Supplements–What are they? In short, body shops require supplements when they are performing repairs for an insurance claim and the insurance adjuster has missed some damage or left some necessary items off his or her original estimate.
Here’s how it works: say your car gets hailed on. The first thing you’re going to is contact your insurance claims office. Typically they’ll require you to run through their catastrophe tent where they’ll take a look at the damage and write an estimate. For a more detailed description on what to do after you’ve received hail damage, check out this post entitled “So I Got Hailed on…What Do I Do?”
So you’ve run through the tent and have a check in hand for say, $2,000. You bring the car to us, and we say “Well, it’s actually going to cost $3,000 to fix all the damage on your car.” You feel the need to panic and take it to 5 other body shops in town to see if they can fix it for the $2,000 you got from you insurance… only to find out that EVERY shop in town will charge you $3,000 to fix all the damage! Oh NO, right??? Wrong. There is no need to do that, in fact, that is a HUGE waste of your time. That’s not how it works. Insurance companies recognize that they are not going to catch all the damage on the first look, and they make it really easy for us to request a “supplement” in order to cover that last $1,000 in damage that they didn’t originally catch.
We’ll get into a little more depth here. First of all, your insurance company is going to require that we work off of THEIR estimate. They are not going to pay some arbitrary amount that we or any other body shop has written and sent to them. They want THEIR adjusters to assess the damage and write the estimate according to their system’s estimation on what repair of this magnitude should cost. That means that regardless of what we write on our estimate, they are only going to pay an approved and pre-determined amount for the repairs to your car. The good news is, we use the exact same pricing matrix that every single insurance company uses. So here’s what happens: you bring your estimate from your insurance company into us. Our estimate comes up higher than your insurance company’s (this happens 99.9% of the time as hail is very difficult to see and adjusters do not have on-hand the special paintless dent repair lights and other tools we use when fixing the damage, which we use when writing our estimate in order to make sure we are paid for every dent we fix). So if our estimate is higher than theirs, that simply means they missed some damage (since remember we use the same pricing matrix as they do). Not a big deal, but we will send this discrepancy up to the insurance company’s supplement approval department in order to be paid to fix ALL the damage on the car, not just what they saw the first time (typically our customers want ALL the hail damage fixed). If we don’t request the supplement, yet still tell our customer we’ll repair all the damage, it would be like fixing some of the dents for free. Who wants to do that? It’s not good for business either, to do work for free. I’m sure most of you reading this understand that.
What happens once we send a supplement request varies from insurance company to insurance company. If the discrepancy is over a certain dollar amount, they will usually send one of their adjusters back out to re-assess the damage. Sometimes they’ll require us to circle the dents in order to prove dent count, they’ll put sizers on the dents in order to determine the size, have us send pictures of the missed damage, have us send receipts of parts purchased that were NOT on the original estimate, and the list goes on. We do this all day every day, so we’re pretty good at getting the money owed on all hail damage repairs from your insurance. No matter what, you’re not going to have to pay any of the differences out of your own pocket that may arise. Guaranteed. Even if we send up a supplement that isn’t ultimately 100% approved (which usually doesn’t happen, but has happened a few times), you STILL will NEVER be responsible for any overages. That’s our guarantee.
As I mentioned before, 99.9% of the claims we deal with DO require some type of supplement. Sometimes it’s just missed damage, sometimes it’s a difference in part prices, and sometimes the insurance just doesn’t want to pay for ALL the damage on the vehicle in hopes you’ll just take the money and run. Writing the estimate BELOW what it’s actually going to cost to fix it is, in a round-about way, a method of ensuring you actually fix the car with that money instead of pocketing it. Any way you look at it, just know that supplements are very common in insurance claims and are especially prevalent among hail damage claims. But rest assured that when you bring your car to IntelliDent to fix, we’ll make the process as seamless as possible for you and will NEVER charge you anything out of pocket to fix the hail damage. That’s your insurance company’s responsibility, and we ensure they cover all the damage so you don’t have to.
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