Claim Filing Deadline Monitor: Never Lose Recovery to a Lapsed Window

The problem this kills

A freight claim is money your company is owed — for goods that arrived damaged, short, or never at all. But that money only exists inside a window. File the claim too late and the carrier denies it outright. Miss the deadline to sue and the recovery is gone for good, no matter how clearly the carrier was at fault.

The trouble is the clock starts quietly. Delivery happens, the claim sits in a spreadsheet, and the filing deadline — often nine months from delivery — drifts closer while everyone is busy. The deadline to actually file suit, usually two years and a day after the carrier denies or partially pays, is even easier to forget. Carriers each have their own rules, and a single claim can have two or three live deadlines at once. One lapsed window and a perfectly valid claim becomes a write-off. You do not need to be a developer to stop that from happening.

What you'll build

A simple internal web tool for your claims team. You import your open claims — claim number, carrier, delivery date, and where each one stands. The tool computes the filing deadline and the suit deadline for every claim from your carrier rules (with sensible defaults: 9 months to file, 2 years and a day to sue), counts down to each one, and sorts your claims by how close they are to the edge. The claims that are about to lapse rise to the top of an at-deadline list. Your claims manager reviews that prioritized list and approves the actions — file now, escalate, request an extension — before anything is escalated or filed. A daily deadline digest lands in the team's inbox so nothing drifts. Nothing is acted on automatically; the tool draws the map, a person makes the call.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — your claims process, the systems and spreadsheets you use, the exact fields and naming in your claims data, your typical and peak claim volumes, and your real carrier-by-carrier deadline rules. It reads a short spec back to you for a thumbs-up, then builds the tool around your answers instead of a generic template. From there it walks the agent through the data model, the CSV import, the deadline-computation engine (filing and suit windows, with carrier-specific overrides on top of the defaults), the countdown and alert thresholds, the prioritized at-deadline review screen, the manager approval gate, the deadline dashboard, and the daily email digest. Every step ends with a ready-to-copy prompt.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a toy. The plan builds in the controls a real claims function needs: login so only your team can use it, row-level security so people only see their own organization's claims, a complete audit trail of every deadline computation, approval, and override (who, what, when, and why), a hard human-approval gate so nothing is escalated or filed until a manager signs off on the prioritized list, and duplicate guards keyed on the claim number so the same claim can't be imported and tracked twice. The whole tool exists to make a careful human decision easy and timely — the AI computes the windows, a person decides the action.

Who it's for

Claims managers, OS&D coordinators, and logistics leads who own freight recovery and have felt the sting of a write-off caused by a missed deadline. If you can describe how your carriers' filing and suit windows work, you can build this.

You've got this — open the plan, paste the first prompt, and you'll be counting down your first real claims this afternoon.