Warranty & Guarantee Register

What this tool does

CM8-190 is a register of the warranties and guarantees you have given to customers and the ones you have received from suppliers and manufacturers. It works out when each one ends, how many days are left, what is expiring soon, what you are still carrying on the cover you gave, and what has happened to every claim made under any of it.

The point of keeping it is narrow and practical: a warranty is only worth anything while it is live. Most cover that is never claimed is not lost because the claim would have failed — it is lost because nobody could say what was covered, on which serial number, until when, and by then the date had passed.

Everything runs inside this single file. There is no account, no upload and no network request of any kind, so customer addresses, job references and claim histories stay on the computer you are using.

Given and received — the one thing not to get wrong

Every record has a direction, and the two are opposites:

• Given — you warrant something to a customer. It is a liability. If it fails, you go back and put it right at your cost.
• Received — a supplier or manufacturer warrants something to you. It is an asset. If it fails, somebody else pays.

They must never be added together. A total of "warranties held" that mixes both is meaningless: it adds money you might have to spend to money you might get back, and the result describes nothing. Every figure in this tool that involves an amount either states its direction or shows the two separately, and the exposure figure counts warranties given only.

One job usually produces two or more records: the maker's cover on what you fitted, and your own cover on the fitting. That is deliberate. Give them the same job reference and the same serial number so they can be found together, and enter the value covered on each for what that cover alone is worth — not the value of the whole job on both, which would double-count your exposure.

Start dates, periods and end dates

There are three date fields and they do different jobs. The installation or purchase date is when the item was fitted or bought. The warranty start date is when cover actually begins, which is often handover, commissioning or registration rather than purchase. The warranty end date is only for when the document states a specific date.

If a record has no period of its own, the default period on the Settings tab is used, and the register records that it did so in the "End date basis" column, which appears in the CSV export. Anything entered in the end date field always wins over the calculation. If you enter both and they disagree by more than a month, the tool refuses the record and tells you what the period works out to — that disagreement is almost always a typing error in one of them.

Calendar months are not all the same length, so a period counted in months and one counted in days will not agree. This tool counts in months, because that is how warranties are written. If your cover runs from delivery, from first use, or from the date on a commissioning certificate, use that as the start date rather than the invoice date; the difference is often several weeks, and it is several weeks at the wrong end.

Warranty types

The type records what the cover actually pays for, which is the question that decides most disputes:

• Parts only — a replacement part arrives; the labour to fit it is yours.
• Labour only — the time is covered, the part is not.
• Parts and labour — both.
• Manufacturer backed — honoured by the maker, not by you or your supplier, and usually conditional on registration and servicing.
• Insurance backed — a policy stands behind it, so it survives the failure of whoever gave it.
• Workmanship — the quality of the work itself, as distinct from the goods installed.

The gap between a parts-only warranty you received and a parts-and-labour warranty you gave is a real cost, and it is yours. Recording the types honestly is what lets you see that gap before it turns up as an unbudgeted return visit.

Value covered

Enter what it would cost to put the failure right, not what the customer paid. On a warranty you gave, that is your cost to return, strip out, replace and reinstate. On a warranty you received, it is what you could recover. Where cover has a stated cap, use the cap. Where it genuinely has none, leave the field blank rather than inventing a number — a blank is excluded from the totals and is honest about it.

Exposure

Exposure is the money you would be exposed to if every warranty you have given were claimed in full tomorrow. It is a worst case and nothing else. Most warranties are never claimed, and most claims cost a fraction of the value covered — the sample register settles two claims for well under a tenth of the cover on those jobs.

What it is good for is scale and concentration. If your exposure sits mainly on three customers, the "Exposure by customer" chart says so, and that is worth knowing before you take on a fourth job of the same kind. What it is not good for is a provision in your accounts: that needs an expected cost based on your own failure rates, not a maximum.

Warranties you have received are never counted in it. A record with no end date is counted while it is not void, because you cannot show that cover has ended — fix the dates rather than leaving that to inflate the figure.

The warning window

The warning window on the Settings tab is how many days ahead a warranty is flagged before it runs out. Set it to the time you actually need: to get somebody on site to look at the work, to gather the service evidence a maker will ask for, and to submit a claim before the date passes. Sixty days is a reasonable default for site work; a fortnight is not enough if the claim needs an inspection.

The register turns amber inside the window and red once cover has ended. The "Expiring soon" table lists both, nearest first, along with anything whose end date cannot be worked out at all — those belong at the top of the list, because an undated warranty is one you cannot defend or claim on.

Claims and the success rate

Tick the claim box, record the date it was made, and set the outcome. Claim value is the amount actually settled — what the remedy cost you on cover you gave, or what you recovered on cover you received. Leave it blank while a claim is open, and on one that was rejected or withdrawn, because nothing was settled; put the amount asked for in the claim notes instead. The tool enforces this, so the settled column never mixes asks with outcomes.

Pending claims are excluded from both halves. This matters: a claim that has not been decided is not a failure, and counting open claims in the denominator drags the rate down every time you submit one, which would make the figure worst exactly when you are chasing hardest. Where no claim has yet concluded, the tile shows "—" rather than a confident zero.

Withdrawn claims are counted as concluded and unsuccessful. A claim you dropped recovered nothing, and treating it as neutral would flatter the rate. If a claim was withdrawn because the fault turned out not to be a defect at all, say so in the notes — that is useful history, and the next person to read the record will need it.

Read the rate on warranties received and warranties given separately, using the direction filter. They measure opposite things: on cover you received, a high success rate is good news; on cover you gave, a high acceptance rate means you are accepting a lot of failures, which is a signal about the work, not about your claims handling.

Conditions, exclusions and evidence

The conditions field is the most valuable free text on the register, and the most neglected. Write down what would make the cover fall away: annual servicing, registration inside a deadline, installation by an approved fitter, clearing gutters, not running a pump dry. Whoever handles the claim in two years' time will not have been on the job, and the register is all they will have.

Record the serial or batch reference on every record. It is the single field that turns a register into something that can answer a question. Where cover is conditional on servicing, note where the service records live; a maker's warranty refused for want of a service certificate is the most common way cover is lost.

Status, and how it differs from cover

Status is what you say about the record: active, expired, claimed where a claim has been settled against it, and void where cover has been invalidated. Cover state is what the dates say. They are shown side by side on purpose, and where they disagree the dates are usually right and the status is stale.

A warranty with a settled claim against it is not automatically finished — cover usually continues for the rest of its term, and it can be claimed on again. Mark it void only when cover has genuinely been invalidated; a void record is excluded from exposure and from the expiry lists, so using it loosely will quietly hide a live liability.

Printing and sharing

Print Report produces a report from whatever the current filter shows: the headline figures, the four charts, the expiry and claim tables, the full register and your closing notes. Print to PDF to send it on.

The scope line under the title states the filter in force. If you are issuing a report about your own liabilities, filter to warranties given and say so — a mixed report will be read as one total by somebody who did not build it.

Saving your work

Records, settings and the report header are written to this browser's local storage as you type, and the toolbar shows the time of the last save. That storage belongs to one browser on one computer: another browser, a private window, a second machine or a clean-up tool that clears site data will not have it.

Treat Export .json as the real save — one file containing everything, which Import .json restores anywhere. Export CSV gives you the register for spreadsheet work and includes every filtered record, not only those drawn on screen. Reset asks twice, then erases everything this tool has stored. There is no undo.

Warranty records outlive the work by years. Export a backup whenever you add a batch, and keep it with the job files rather than only in a browser.

Accuracy & disclaimer

This tool calculates from what you type. It cannot read a warranty document, cannot tell whether cover has been invalidated by something nobody recorded, cannot tell whether a claim would succeed, and does not notify anybody or submit anything.

What must be covered, for how long, on what terms, and what rights a customer has regardless of what any document says, differ by country, by trade and by contract. Statutory rights frequently run alongside a warranty and are not modelled here at all. This is an internal record-keeping and date-calculation aid, not legal or accounting advice, and not a substitute for reading the wording you agreed to.