Symptoms: Claims that contain multiple estimates contain a "Totals (All)" page which consolidates the values from each estimate's Totals page. While the "Totals (All)" page was accessible within mobile claims, it was not accessible when the claim was viewed in Symbility.NET.
Explanation: Now the "Totals (All)" page is accessible within Symbility.NET.

 

 

 

Before, when an insurance company assigned a new claim to a contracting company, all Symbility users within the contracting company would automatically become participants in the claim. Feedback we received from several contractors prompted us to change the way this works. We were told that a) some estimators did not want to be involved in every claim (nor did they want to start receiving notifications of every event that occurred in the claim), and b) some contracting company owners/administrators did not want all estimators to be able to automatically access all claims but would prefer to manually involve an estimator when needed. The details of exactly what has changed:

1. The insurance company who creates the claim can now choose to assign it to the contracting company in general, or to one or more specific users within the company. In the latter case, the claim is still technically assigned to the company, but the individual user(s) selected are added as participants in the claim. Only these participants will see the claims in their Symbility.NET Hot List and in their mobile claims Claim List, and only they will receive notifications of events that occur in the claim.

2. Other users within the contracting company can be added as participants in the claim by existing participants. The participant must open the claim file in Symbility.NET and use the command "Add Participant". When the new user becomes a participant, they can:

   • track the claim on their Symbility.NET home page (New Activity box and Hot List)

   • they can see the claim in their mobile claims claim list and download the claim to work on in the field

   • they can receive notifications about events that happen in a claim.

   A journal entry is created automatically when a user is added as a participant in a claim.

3. All current participants can stop participating in any claim if desired—open the claim in Symbility.NET and use the command "Stop Participating in the Claim".

4. If the insurance company assigns the claim to the contracting company in general (i.e. without selecting any individual users within the company), which users within that contracting company that are automatically added as participants in the claim are controlled by the company administrator. If you are an administrator, you can set up  the rules for which users become participants in new claims (unless the claim creator specifically selects a user) on the Claim Defaults page (accessed from the Administration menu in Symbility.NET). If no users are selected to be default claim participants, then all users are added as claim participants (this duplicates the behaviour as it used to be).

 

As part of our overall documentation plan (which will also include a user's manual and on-line help) we have implemented "tooltips"—context-sensitive descriptions for each command button that appears on each toolbar within the software. To find out what a button does and see a brief description of the function, just hover the mouse pointer over the button (Tablet version) or tap-and-hold a button (Pocket PC version).

 

The purpose of the item list view in the item pane is to show you the items currently attached to the selected room(s) in the floorplan diagram. In effect, it shows you the same list of items that appears under the room block on the estimate. So some of our more inquisitive users (and you know who you are ) asked us why the item list view couldn't show all the columns that can be shown on an estimate. Since we didn't have a good answer, we decided to correct this "oversight" and allow users to configure the item list view to show the columns they desire. By default, only the Total Cost column is shown (as was the case before, and when only this column is shown it continues to toggle between total Quantity and total item cost when tapped). But you can now configure the item list view to show any of 9 different columns, and you can show as many as you want at once. Note that you are constrained in how many are useful at a time by the width of the item pane. Tablet version users will want to increase the width of the item pane if used in landscape mode, or increase the width of the item list sub-pane if used in portrait mode. Pocket PC version users will likely not want to show more than a couple columns at once, although using the item pane full screen in landscape mode will help.

 

For each selected room on a floorplan, the height and ceiling type now appear in the bottom right corner of the room, so you no longer need to open the ceiling editor for rooms in order to inspect these properties. In addition, clicking the ceiling height is a shortcut to changing the height.

 

If the ceiling is sloped or peaked, then the height labeled in the bottom right corner of the room is that of the highest part of the ceiling.

 

Here is another great time-saving feature, one of several more to come that will will insure Symbility is the standard for powerful, easy-to-use floorplan drawing. Basically, it allows you to draw a new room with the Freeform drawing tool () by only drawing walls that don't already exist—the new room will automatically complete itself using existing common walls it shares with an existing room. It's probably best described using an illustration:

If you use the freeform tool to draw these three walls in this fashion:

What you end up with is a new room like this:

 

Additional field have been added to the Reports section of the admin page, as illustrated. The field Initial Loss Report is editable only by the claim creator, but all other fields can be changed by any user at any time.