Claim windows are short, they are measured from a date nobody thinks about, and they are different for every carrier. That combination is why so many valid claims are filed too late.
Key takeaways
The window runs from delivery in almost every carrier’s terms.
Concealed damage has a shorter window and a much weaker position.
Carrier terms are configuration, entered once, with a note of where they came from.
Working days and public holidays matter when the window is three days.
Reminders go out at half the window and at two days remaining, to a named person.
From delivery, not discovery
Fig 1. How the deadline is computed. The last box is the small design decision that makes the reminders possible.
App integration
Management
Analytics
Front-end & mobile
Concealed damage
Damage found after the delivery note was signed clean is a materially different situation. The window is usually shorter — often three days rather than seven — and the carrier’s starting position is that the goods were fine when they handed them over, which the signature supports.
What helps: photographing the packaging still sealed or as it was found, opening it in a way that preserves how the item sat inside, and reporting the same day. What does not help is anything about how obviously the damage must have happened in transit, which is an argument rather than evidence.
The honest framing is that concealed damage claims succeed less often, and the system says so at the point somebody is deciding whether to spend twenty minutes on one. That is more useful than treating every claim as equally likely.
Three days is not three days
Fig 2. Why the deadline is computed rather than counted on fingers. A Thursday delivery before a bank holiday leaves the same window spanning nearly a week of calendar time.
The practical consequence is that a person estimating “we have until about Monday” is sometimes right and sometimes two days out, and the two-days-out case is the one where the claim is lost. Computing the date once, at the point the claim opens, removes the estimation entirely.
Carrier terms as configuration
Each carrier gets a small record: the visible damage window, the concealed damage window, whether they are working or calendar days, the liability cap, and a note saying which version of their terms it came from and when it was checked.
That last field is the one that stops the configuration quietly going stale. Terms change, and a window that was seven days in 2024 and is now five will produce late claims that look like process failures.
Reminders that work
Fig 3. The reminder schedule. Escalating to a second person on the last day is the step that converts most nearly-missed claims into filed ones.
App integration
Management
Analytics
People
Recording the missed ones with their value is the part that changes behaviour. “We missed the deadline on four claims worth eleven hundred pounds last quarter” is a sentence that produces a process change; the same four claims individually forgotten produce nothing.