Warranty Management: How to Stop Paying for Covered Repairs

The repair looked routine — until the invoice hit. Five grand for a pump that should’ve been covered under warranty. Weeks later, someone finds the paperwork buried in a filing cabinet: parts and labor, fully covered. That mistake isn’t rare—it’s routine. We’ve worked with huge enterprises that lost millions of dollars a year to maintenance costs on equipment that was already under warranty. Even worse, they were paying for warranties on equipment they didn’t realize had already been decommissioned. The issue isn’t bad luck; it’s bad process. Warranty management fixes that. When you integrate warranty data directly into a warranty management software, you stop the silent leaks, recover real dollars and turn maintenance from cost center to profit shield. In this guide, you’ll see how top teams build the workflow that keeps their assets — and their budgets — protected.

The Costly Realities of Poor Warranty Management

In the real world of maintenance and reliability, managing warranties with spreadsheets and paper files is a recipe for catastrophic financial bleed. This is where most organizations — even seasoned ones — fail. They mistake filing a document for managing a process, leading to severe inefficiencies. Here are the harsh, costly realities we see daily when warranty management breaks down:

Forgotten Expiration Dates

This is the most common and expensive error. You buy an expensive asset with a three-year manufacturer’s warranty. Three years and one day later, it fails. Because no one set a proactive reminder or scheduled an inspection, you’re footing the entire bill for a repair that should have been covered just 24 hours earlier. Without warranty tracking, you incur massive, avoidable warranty costs.

Data Silos & Missing Documentation

An asset’s warranty information often lives in a procurement folder, while the work order system has no visibility into it. Your technician in the field has no idea if the asset is covered, so they default to the fastest fix — the one you pay for. The process is broken when the person who needs the information most (the technician) can’t access it in real time. This inefficiency increases your overall processing time.

Voided Warranties From DIY or Third-Party Repairs

Many product warranty documents have strict clauses. Only authorized dealers can perform certain repairs, or using parts made by another manufacturer will automatically void the warranty coverage. When your team fixes an issue themselves to save time or hires an outside contractor without checking the fine print, they often kill the product warranty and expose the company to future full-repair costs.

Inefficient & Delayed Claims Process

When a piece of equipment fails and you think it’s covered, the clock is ticking on equipment downtime. If your manual claims process is a disorganized scramble for PDFs, old invoices and phone numbers, the delay costs you in lost production. This time-consuming struggle to manage warranty claims and their subsequent claims processing is the difference between a 48-hour equipment maintenance outage and a two-week bureaucratic mess.

3 Types of Warranties Every Team Must Track

For effective warranty management and successful asset inventory management, not all warranties are created equal. As a maintenance leader, you need to group them by what they cover and who you need to contact. This small classification detail dramatically streamlines your repair process.

1. Manufacturer/Equipment Warranty

This is the standard product warranty that comes with the piece of equipment — your pump, your forklift, your chiller unit. It covers defects in parts, materials and workmanship for a defined period (i.e., one year or 10,000 operating hours). This warranty coverage is tied directly to the asset’s serial number and is usually non-negotiable.

2. Contractor/Labor Warranty

This warranty service is often overlooked, but it is crucial for new builds, retrofits and major repair and maintenance projects. The contractor who installed the new roofing system or electrical panel provides this. It covers the quality of their work — not the actual materials — for a set period. If the new pump fails because the contractor wired it incorrectly, their labor warranty covers the fix, saving you from unnecessary warranty claims.

3. Extended/Service Warranty

This is an optional service contract you purchase to extend a warranty’s coverage beyond the initial manufacturer warranty. Extended warranties are strategic; they are often tied to guaranteed service levels (i.e., 24-hour response time) and may cover labor that the original manufacturer warranty didn’t. This type requires careful cost-benefit analysis of prices and warranty terms before purchase.

Essential Best Practices for Proactive Warranty Management

In order to stop the financial bleeding, you need to shift your mindset from a reactive to proactive maintenance strategy. You have to build a system that guarantees your team knows what’s covered before they pick up a wrench. This is the path to maximizing product quality and customer satisfaction in the eyes of your internal stakeholders. Here are the five essential practices that the best reliability teams use:

Centralize All Asset & Warranty Data

Every key document — the contract PDF, the expiration date, the authorized vendor contact and the asset’s serial number — must be stored in one centralized, digital location. This digital file should be directly linked to the physical asset itself. Forget the filing cabinets; if your tech can’t find it on their phone, it doesn’t exist. This is the core of effective warranty management.

Link Warranty Status to the Work Order Process

This is the single most important step. When a maintenance technician or warranty manager creates a work order for a repair, the warranty system must immediately flag that asset’s warranty status. If the asset is covered, the work order should automatically route to the approved vendor and skip internal approval, preventing an accidental void. This is how you stop reactive maintenance mistakes.

Automate Expiration Reminders & Inspections

Your preventive maintenance schedule should include a task 90 days before any major warranty term expires. This is your final chance to schedule an inspection. If a covered part is showing early signs of failure, you can catch it and file a warranty claim while it’s still free. This automation helps you optimize your spending.

Standardize Documentation for Claims

A warranty claim will be denied if you can’t prove the failure and the service history. You must standardize the documentation process to create a clear audit trail. For every claim submission, you need: the date and time of failure, the exact repair performed and the time the asset was down. This consistency ensures faster claims processing and makes it easier to defend against a denial, helping you streamline the entire claims process.

Pro tip: We’ve encouraged customers to use QR codes and external work requests to start tracking equipment downtime the second they notice an issue before they even start the claims process.

Establish a Feedback Loop for Analytics

Your warranty data is a goldmine for capital planning. By tracking which original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) generate the most warranty claims, which assets consistently fail under warranty and which vendors provide the best warranty services, you gain business intelligence. This data helps you identify assets with persistent issues, like a defective product, and stop buying equipment from unreliable suppliers.

Key Features of a CMMS for Automated Warranty Management

Trying to follow warranty management best practices without software is like trying to drive a semi-truck with a spreadsheet — it’s inefficient and dangerous. The reality is that the only true solution is a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS). A modern warranty management solution automates the hard parts of warranty management. Here are the key features of a CMMS software that deliver massive ROI:

• Centralized digital asset register: The software serves as the single source of truth for all asset inventory management. Every asset has a digital profile where you can upload the warranty document, capture the serial number, date of purchase and maintenance history. This central register makes the warranty information instantly searchable by anyone, anywhere.
• Integrated work order check: When a technician generates a new work order, the warranty management system automatically runs a check against the asset’s profile. A simple banner pops up: “Asset under warranty until 03/15/2026.” This immediate, onsite visibility is what prevents technicians from making the $5,000 mistake. The system can even perform claim validations instantly.
• Automated notifications and alerts: The software automatically tracks expiration dates and sends proactive reminders to the warranty manager. This feature ensures you never miss a final inspection window and can flag assets that require an extended service contract review. This level of automation significantly cuts down on time-consuming manual checks.
• End-to-end warranty claims management: A CMMS allows you to track the entire warranty claims process, from initial claim submission to eventual reimbursements. It manages the digital workflow, tracks all repair metrics and ensures you are working with approved vendors to keep the warranty’s coverage intact. This is the epitome of end-to-end warranty claims processing.

How Coast Can Help Streamline Your Warranty Management

You’re an operations leader. You don’t need another bloated, complicated enterprise system that takes six months to implement. You need a simple, powerful tool that your technicians will actually use.

Coast is built to solve this exact warranty challenge by putting the right information in the hands of the person who needs it most — the technician. Our warranty management processes are designed to be intuitive and mobile-first. Here’s how we turn those painful best practices into automated workflows:

• Asset profiles with one-click access: Coast’s asset management software is digital. You can upload the warranty PDF and input key dates directly into the asset’s profile. When your team scans the asset’s QR code on their phone, the warranty coverage status pops up instantly, making warranty claims a no-brainer.
• Preventive inspection workflows: Instead of trusting a sticky note, you can create a task or even an entire workflow in Coast specifically for “Warranty Expiration Checks.” You schedule these checks for 90 days before contracts end, ensuring your team conducts final inspections to flag pre-existing issues.
• Communication built into the work order: When a repair is required, the work order automatically shows the warranty status. Your team can then use Coast’s internal messaging to quickly coordinate next steps, all while maintaining a complete, time-stamped audit trail for the eventual warranty claim and reimbursement.

Now’s the Time to Stop Paying for Covered Repairs

The difference between a high-performing operations team and one that constantly struggles isn’t the equipment they buy; it’s how rigorously they manage the paperwork that comes with it. Effective warranty management is a cost-control and reliability strategy disguised as an administrative task. By centralizing your data, linking product warranties to the work order process and using a simple, powerful CMMS like Coast, you stop paying for covered repairs, improve equipment uptime and secure your budget.

Don’t wait until the next major failure to find that dusty warranty paper. Sign up for a free account of Coast today to start managing your assets and warranties proactively.