Supervisory Hours From the Photo Record
By Farough Darakhshan
I write the final invoices for water-damage jobs and defend them when adjusters cut them. Supervisory hours are one of the lines that get denied as a matter of routine. The usual question is simple: how do you know a supervisor was there, and for how long?
This note is about the rule I use to answer it, and why the answer is in the photos.
Why history could not answer it
The first approach we tested was predicting supervisory hours from past invoices. If a job of a given size and type usually carried a certain number of supervisor hours, a model should be able to estimate the next one.
It could not. Tested against 18 held-out invoice lines, the predictions missed by a combined $49,152. Supervisory time does not follow job size closely enough to be estimated. It follows what actually happened on site that day.
So the source had to be a record of what actually happened on site. A timesheet would do, if anyone kept one. What every job already had was a photo record.
The rule
On 10/01/2026 I set the rule that every invoice now follows.
On site: a supervisor takes a CompanyCam photo within 15 minutes of arriving on the job each day, and a final photo within 30 minutes before leaving.
On the invoice:
- Hours for a job on a day = the timestamp of the last photo minus the timestamp of the first photo.
- Add 30 minutes of drive time.
- Bill only in half-hour steps. Never minutes.
- Always round up to the next half hour. Three hours and five minutes bills as 3.5.
- Photos from anyone on the job count, not only the supervisor's.
- Times are read in Eastern time, per job, per day.
A worked example with round numbers: the first photo of the day is at 8:10 AM and the last is at 11:25 AM. That span is 3 hours 15 minutes. Add 30 minutes of drive time for 3 hours 45 minutes. Round up to the next half hour: 4.0 hours on the invoice.
Why each piece is there
The 15- and 30-minute photo windows tie the photo record to arrival and departure. Without them, the first photo might be an hour after arrival and the span would understate the day. With them, the span is a fair bracket of time on site.
Anyone's photos count because a supervisor on site is often directing a crew that is doing the photographing. If the technician's photo shows the work in progress at 2:40 PM, the job was staffed at 2:40 PM. Restricting the span to the supervisor's own camera would throw away real evidence.
Half-hour steps, rounded up, keep the number simple to read and simple to check. An adjuster can take the photo times, apply the rule, and reach the same figure. A line billed in minutes invites an argument about each minute.
Drive time is a flat 30 minutes. It is a fixed allowance, not estimated per trip.
The day with one photo
This is the part I changed my mind on.
An earlier version of this method, used before the 10/01 rule, padded every workday with a 30-minute buffer before the first photo and another after the last. A day with only a single photo still got a full one-hour buffer.
That gave a number for every day. It also gave a number for days the record cannot support. One photo is a moment, not a span.
Under the current rule, a day with one photo has no span. It is flagged for the project manager to answer from what they know. It is never guessed.
The result is an invoice where every supervisory hour computed from photos traces to two timestamps an adjuster can open and look at.
The timeline document
For each job, the timeline goes into the client's folder as a short document: a link to the job's photos, and one line per day with the first and last photo time. Something like:
2/3/26 (first photo at 5:46pm – Last photo at 11:39pm)
That document is the working record of crew presence I write the invoice from: the dates, the two times, and the photos behind them.
Traps worth knowing
The API pages short. If you pull this data from the CompanyCam API, a request for 100 projects per page silently returns 50. A short page is not the end of the data. Stop only on an empty page. One early run read 50 of 1,590 projects and nearly reported that a job had no photo project at all.
Equipment hour meters are not a clock. It is tempting to use a dehumidifier's run-hour panel as proof of time on a job. Crews do not reset those meters between jobs, so a panel can carry a previous job's hours. Photo capture times, install and removal sheets with a matching address, and the first and last capture dates on the photo project are what actually date a job.
Most jobs are photographed as bookends. Install day and removal day carry most of the photos, with little between. That is fine for dating equipment, but it means a monitoring visit with no photo has no supervisory span. The arrival-and-departure photo rule for supervisors closes that gap going forward.
What I would pass on
If you bill supervision on insurance work, find the record that already exists before you invent a new one. For us it was the photo timeline. The rule turns it into a number anyone can recompute, and the one-photo rule keeps the number honest.
Farough (Frank) Darakhshan writes the final invoices for water-damage jobs in Northern Virginia and builds the tools that turn field records into invoice lines. More of his systems are on the projects page.