Insurance

Identify insured properties by legal land description, batch-process claims after storms, and dispatch adjusters with optimized field routes.

Free account for individual property lookups. Contact sales for Business tier pricing with batch processing and team management.

The Problems

Policies identify rural properties by LSD or quarter section

Property and crop insurance policies in western Canada list coverage locations using DLS notation. A policy might read SW-22-041-14W4 - that's the southwest quarter of Section 22, Township 41, Range 14, West of the 4th Meridian. After a hail storm or flood, the claims team needs to quickly identify which insured properties fall within the affected area. That requires GPS coordinates. The policy document doesn't have them.

Post-storm triage is time-sensitive

When a storm hits, the claims team has days - not weeks - to identify affected policyholders, prioritize claims, and deploy adjusters. A July hailstorm can generate hundreds of incoming claims overnight. Manually converting LSDs to GPS coordinates one at a time creates a bottleneck at exactly the moment speed matters most. Every hour spent on conversion is an hour not spent on inspections or settlements.

Adjuster field routes are inefficient

An adjuster with 10 inspections scheduled across three townships doesn't need just a list of coordinates - they need an efficient driving order. Rural properties are spread across range roads and township roads with no obvious sequence. Without planned routing, adjusters make real-time decisions in the field, backtrack between quarter sections, and lose inspection time to unnecessary driving.

Portfolio risk analysis requires spatial data

Underwriting teams need to see where insured properties cluster geographically. A concentration of crop policies along a recognized hail corridor or in a flood plain creates portfolio risk that isn't visible in a spreadsheet of legal descriptions. But the policy database is in DLS format. To run any spatial analysis, those descriptions need to become coordinates first.

What Township Canada Does

Property identification by LSD

Enter any legal land description from a policy and get back GPS coordinates with the parcel boundary displayed on a map. Before processing a claim, confirm the insured property is where the policy says it is.

Enter 09-18-036-04W4 and you get the parcel location southeast of Hanna, Alberta - its center point, boundary lines, and position relative to adjacent quarter sections. Visual verification takes seconds. If a policy has a transposed township or range number, it surfaces here before an adjuster drives to the wrong location.

LSD to lat/long guide · LSD finder

Batch processing for storm response

Upload the affected policy portfolio as a CSV. Map columns to legal description fields - whether your export has the full description in one column or splits LSD, section, township, range, and meridian across five. The batch converter returns GPS coordinates for every row in seconds and flags any descriptions that didn't resolve.

After a July hailstorm near Kindersley, Saskatchewan, an insurer uploads 300 policy locations. The batch converter returns coordinates for all 300 in under a minute. Overlaid against the storm path, 47 properties fall within the damage zone. Those 47 go to the top of the claims queue before the next morning's adjuster briefing.

Batch conversion guide

Route planning for adjuster dispatch

Add claim locations as stops - either by entering legal descriptions directly or uploading a list. The route planner converts each one to GPS coordinates, calculates the most efficient driving order, and generates turn-by-turn directions on rural roads. Hand off to Google Maps on mobile for navigation in the field.

An adjuster with 10 inspections across three townships enters the claim locations, runs the optimizer, and cuts 40 minutes of driving compared to the order the claims came in. That's one or two additional inspections completed before end of day - during the stretch of a storm response when every inspection counts.

Route planner guide · Directions guide

Portfolio risk mapping via export

Batch-convert the full policy portfolio - thousands of insured locations - to GPS coordinates. Export as Shapefile for GIS analysis, CSV for actuarial modeling, or KML for overlay in Google Earth. Identify geographic concentrations, mark exposure along known hail corridors, and give underwriting teams the spatial view they need to make informed decisions.

The export runs once. The Shapefile loads into any GIS platform your risk team uses. Concentration risk that was invisible in a DLS spreadsheet becomes a visible polygon cluster on a map.

Export guide

Recommended Plan

Business plan is the right fit for insurance companies and adjusting firms:

Batch CSV upload for processing hundreds or thousands of policy locations at once
All export formats: CSV for actuarial spreadsheets, Shapefile for GIS, KML for Google Earth
Team management with role-based access for claims, underwriting, and field teams
Route planner for adjuster dispatch across multiple stops
Survey grid map layers for visual property verification

For programmatic integration with claims management systems or policy databases, add API access to the Business plan.

Single users doing occasional individual property lookups can start on the free plan. Teams running storm response or portfolio analysis need Business.

See pricing

Start Processing Claims Locations Today

Free account for individual property lookups. Business plan for batch processing, all export formats, and team management.

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Feature guides

Township Canada for Insurance - Claims Processing, Adjuster Dispatch, and Portfolio Risk Mapping