If your restoration company works with a TPA — Contractor Connection, Alacrity, Sedgwick, Core Group, Hancock, any of them — you already know the deal you signed. The program feeds you claims. In exchange, you agree to a Service Level Agreement that spells out, in uncomfortable detail, how fast you'll make contact, how fast you'll be on site, when every estimate gets uploaded, and how happy the homeowner needs to be when it's all over. What most contractors underestimate is how that agreement gets enforced. It isn't a person calling to check in. It's a scorecard: an always-on grade built from timestamps, portal uploads, and survey scores, and it quietly decides how many assignments you get next month — or whether you get any at all. Industry veterans are blunt about it: performance is graded constantly on metrics you don't fully control, and a few bad scores can get you suspended or removed from a program. The frustrating part? Most of the points contractors lose aren't lost on the job site. They're lost in the gaps — the 2am call that rang four times too long, the assignment email nobody opened until morning, the photo a tech forgot to upload. This is a deep dive into how the scorecard actually works, and where those gaps live.
The client behind the client
A TPA (third-party administrator) sits between insurance carriers and contractors. Carriers outsource claim management to the TPA; the TPA maintains a vetted network of contractors and hands out assignments. Getting on a panel is its own gauntlet — Contractor Connection, for example, requires demonstrated financial stability, at least $1 million in general liability coverage, workers' comp, current licensing, employee background checks, estimating technology, and a stack of quality references before you take a single assignment.
But getting on the panel is the easy part. Staying on it is where the scorecard comes in. Here's the mental shift that separates contractors who thrive in programs from contractors who churn out of them: the homeowner is your customer, but the TPA is your client — and the TPA experiences your company entirely through data. It never sees your crew's craftsmanship. It sees timestamps, upload logs, and survey scores. That's the whole relationship. Which means the operational question isn't "did we do good work?" It's "did the data say we did good work, on time, every time?"
The metrics that actually move your score
Every program weights things a little differently, but the same handful of metrics show up on virtually every TPA scorecard:
First contact time
The clock starts when the assignment hits your inbox or your phone, not when someone on your team notices it. Programs commonly require homeowner contact within a tight window — often two hours or less, with emergency water loss response SLAs commonly running 2 to 4 hours. Miss the window and the metric records it forever, no matter how well the job goes afterward.
On-site arrival time
Contact isn't enough — the scorecard tracks how fast a tech is physically standing in the loss. For emergency mitigation, this is usually the second timestamp the program watches, and it's the one homeowners remember when the satisfaction survey shows up.
Documentation and upload deadlines
This is where programs get famously demanding. Typical requirements include uploading the preliminary estimate within 24 hours of the assignment, the initial estimate within 24 hours of inspection, and the final estimate within 24 hours of the completion certificate — in Xactimate format, in the TPA's own portal, with the photos and forms the program specifies. Missing a single photo or blowing a deadline can mean financial penalties or significantly delayed payment.
Cycle time
Total elapsed time from assignment to closed file. Carriers care about this metric more than almost anything, because faster cycle times mean lower claim costs and happier policyholders. Everything upstream — slow contact, late uploads, stalled supplements — flows downhill into cycle time.
Customer satisfaction
Post-job surveys go to the homeowner, and the results go on your scorecard. The maddening part is how much of this score is set in the first hour of the claim — a homeowner who stood in rising water listening to your phone ring is already drafting the survey response in their head.
Supplement approval rate
How often your estimates hold up without disputes and rework. A clean, well-documented file sails through; a thin one triggers back-and-forth that drags cycle time and flags you as friction in the program's data.
The clock starts before you know the job exists
Here's the structural problem with response-time metrics: the deadline begins at first notice of loss, but your ability to respond begins whenever a human at your company actually processes the assignment. Those are not the same moment — and the gap between them is pure, unrecoverable scorecard damage.
Assignments arrive two ways, and both have a failure mode. Program calls come in by phone, sometimes at 2am, and need to be answered by someone who recognizes it's a program call, captures the claim number, policy number, and carrier correctly, and routes it to the right coordinator — not by a groggy on-call tech scribbling on a napkin. Assignment emails land in an inbox, and an email that arrives at 11pm and gets read at 7am has already burned eight hours of a response window nobody was watching.
None of this is a competence problem. Your project managers can be excellent and your techs can be fast, and you can still bleed points every single week because the intake layer — the unglamorous machinery between "assignment exists" and "my team is moving" — runs on whoever happens to be awake.
Where good contractors quietly bleed points
Talk to contractors who've been suspended from a program and you rarely hear about bad workmanship. You hear about administrative leaks like these:
- The after-hours program call that rang through to voicemail — the TPA's data shows a missed contact window before your team even knew the claim existed.
- The assignment email that sat unread overnight, then got manually retyped into the CRM the next morning, introducing both delay and transcription errors into the claim file.
- The job photos that lived on a tech's phone for five days instead of in the portal, turning a routine file review into a payment delay.
- The initial call and inspection that happened on time but were never logged in the portal on time — in scorecard terms, if it isn't in the portal, it didn't happen.
- The dedicated TPA admin who went on vacation. Many successful program contractors staff at least one full-time person whose entire job is portal management — which also means their compliance has a single point of failure.
What falling off a panel actually costs
Program work gets a bad rap in some corners of the industry — the discounts, the paperwork, the feeling of being graded by a spreadsheet. The Restoration Industry Association even runs an annual TPA Scorecard survey where contractors grade the TPAs right back, on payment timeliness, documentation burden, and fairness. The frustrations are real and worth taking seriously.
But for companies that rely on program volume, the math of losing a panel seat is brutal. It isn't one lost job — it's the entire stream of assignments, gone, usually with little warning and a slow path back. Non-compliance with response SLAs can trigger removal, and reinstatement means re-proving yourself from the back of the line. Whatever you think of TPA economics, the scorecard is the gate to the volume. Protecting it is protecting the revenue.
Where Hank fits into the scorecard math
Hank was built for insurance-backed service industries, and TPA workflow is baked into its architecture rather than bolted on. The pattern: every metric above depends on what happens in the first minutes after an assignment appears — which is exactly the layer Hank automates.
- Program calls get answered instantly, every time, at any hour. Hank recognizes inbound TPA program calls, captures the claim number, policy number, and carrier, and routes the call to your designated program coordinator per your configured protocol — so the first-contact clock starts with the intake already done.
- Assignment emails become CRM jobs automatically. When a TPA like Contractor Connection emails a new assignment, Hank turns it into a job record in your CRM in real time — no one retypes a loss report at 11pm, and no response window burns while an inbox sits unread.
- The job file exists before your crew wakes up. Hank writes qualified jobs directly into restoration CRMs like Albi, DASH, Proven, and Xcelerate, so dispatch and documentation start from a structured record instead of a voicemail.
- The photo chase runs itself. Hank texts techs reminders to upload job photos and texts customers to upload damage photos before the tech even arrives — attacking the single most common documentation bottleneck in getting a claim paid.
- Everything is timestamped. Every call is recorded, transcribed, and summarized in a searchable log, which means when a program asks what happened and when, you have an answer that matches their data.
FAQ: TPA scorecards and restoration contractors
What is a TPA scorecard in restoration?
It's the performance grade a third-party administrator keeps on every contractor in its network, built from metrics like first contact time, on-site arrival time, estimate upload timeliness, cycle time, customer satisfaction scores, and supplement approval rates. TPAs use it to decide how many assignments you receive and whether you stay on the panel.
How fast do TPAs require contractors to respond to a new assignment?
It varies by program and claim type, but homeowner contact windows are commonly two hours or less, and emergency water loss response SLAs commonly run 2 to 4 hours. Documentation deadlines are similarly tight — preliminary and initial estimates are typically due in the portal within 24 hours of assignment and inspection respectively.
Can you really get removed from a TPA program over response times?
Yes. Repeated non-compliance with response SLAs can trigger suspension or removal from a panel, and industry contractors report that a few bad scores are enough to put a program relationship at risk. Missed documentation deadlines can also mean financial penalties or delayed payments even when you stay on the panel.
How does Hank handle TPA program calls differently from regular calls?
Hank recognizes inbound calls from TPA networks and applies your configured program protocol: it captures claim-specific information like the claim number, policy number, and carrier, routes the call immediately to your designated program coordinator, and creates the job record with the program call data included. Each TPA network can have its own call flow.
Does Hank replace the person who manages our TPA portals?
No — portal management, estimate uploads, and program communication still need a human who knows your workflow. What Hank removes is the intake bottleneck upstream of that person: answering program calls at any hour, turning assignment emails into CRM jobs instantly, and chasing photos automatically, so your coordinator starts every claim with a complete, timestamped file instead of a scramble.
The Bottom Line
The uncomfortable truth about TPA scorecards is that they mostly don't measure restoration. They measure responsiveness and record-keeping — the parts of the business that happen at 2am, in inboxes, and inside portals, where great field crews can't help you. That's also the good news: the metrics that put panel seats at risk are the most automatable part of the entire operation. Answer every program call instantly, turn every assignment email into a structured job the moment it arrives, chase the photos without anyone remembering to, and keep a timestamped record of all of it — and the scorecard starts working for you instead of against you. If program work is a meaningful slice of your revenue, it's worth seeing what that intake layer looks like when it never sleeps. Book a demo at dialhank.com and we'll walk through your TPA call flows and show a program assignment become a CRM job in real time.
