Warranty Expiry Tracker: Know Which Units Leave Cover This Month

How it is handled today

The typical arrangement is a warranty card given to the customer and a copy of the invoice in a file. The dealer holds no queryable record of cover at all. When a customer calls about a fault, the first ten minutes are spent locating an invoice, and when the cover lapses nobody notices, because noticing would require somebody to be looking.

A warranty expiry tracker fixes one narrow thing: it turns cover into a date on a record, keyed to a serial number, so that a list of units leaving cover next month can be produced in one action. Everything else, including extended warranty sales and service planning, follows from having that list.

One row per unit sold, not per invoice, because one invoice can carry three units.

• Invoice number and date — the date is the start of cover in almost all cases.
• Customer name and mobile — the mobile is the key that links units, service and messages.
• Category, brand and model — kept as separate fields so the register can be filtered by any of them.
• Serial or IMEI — the unique identity of the unit, and the field most often skipped.
• Brand cover months — a number, not a phrase.
• Brand cover end date — invoice date plus cover months.
• Extended cover sold — yes or no, with provider, months and its own end date.
• Installation date — for air conditioners and similar categories where cover starts at installation.
• Service visits and last service date — a count and a date, both useful before a renewal call.
• Reminder stage — not started, first contact, second contact, lapsed follow-up.
• Owner — the person responsible for the renewal conversation.
• Outcome — renewed, declined with reason, unreachable, unit sold on.

An illustrative example. Serials and dates are invented to show the structure of the register rather than to represent any real customer.

A dealer selling a few hundred units a year can keep this in a sheet and read it on the first of every month. At a few thousand units across branches, the monthly list is too long to work by hand, and the register needs to hand out work rather than display it.

In a CRM each expiring unit generates a dated task for a named person, the reminder message goes out on a template from a business number, replies arrive in a shared inbox, and the outcome is recorded against the serial. The following month the same filter runs again with no preparation, because the register maintains itself from the billing feed.

Storing cover as text. One year in a cell cannot be sorted, filtered or scheduled. Store months and a computed date.

Recording per invoice rather than per unit. Multi-unit invoices lose two of the three serials, and those units become invisible.

Ignoring the installation date. For categories where cover starts at installation, invoice-based dates are wrong by weeks.

Contacting only once. One message before expiry catches the easy renewals and misses everyone who was busy that week.

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