When Your Accounting System Isn’t Enough for Repairs and Warranty Claims

Your accounting system sits at the heart of your business. It knows what you’ve sold, who you’ve sold it to and what they owe you. So when a product comes back faulty, it’s natural to start there. You print a returns note, pop it in the box and send an email.

For a while, that works perfectly well. But as the repairs and claims add up, you start to notice the parts of the job it was never designed to do.

What your accounting system does well

Your accounting system is the right place for:

• Invoices and credit notes, the record of every sale and every credit.
• What you’re owed and what you owe, from your customers and to your suppliers.
• Your stock, what’s come in, what’s gone out and what’s on hand.
• Your returns notes, the document that travels with the product.

The part it was never built for

Most of a repair happens before any money changes hands, and very little of it ever reaches your accounts.

The claims nobody raised

This is where it starts to cost you money.

Your books show the credit notes you’ve received, but they can’t show the ones you never asked for. If a faulty product was replaced for a customer and nobody claimed it back from the supplier, there’s nothing for your accounting system to flag.

No entry is missing, because none was ever made.

The same goes for a claim your supplier has already approved. Until the credit note arrives, it’s only a promise in an email, and nothing reminds you to follow it up.

Signs you’ve outgrown it

If you only handle the odd return, your accounting system may be all you need. It’s when the numbers grow that you start to notice:

• Answering “where’s my repair?” means asking around the office.
• Only one person really knows what’s going on.
• Your accounts team keeps finding costs that nobody reported.
• You can’t say how many claims are open with a supplier, or what they’re worth.
• You don’t know which brands or faults keep coming back.

Keep your accounting system, and add what’s missing

There’s no need to replace your accounting system. It should stay the home of your invoices, credit notes and statements.

RepairStep handles everything your accounting system doesn’t. It keeps your repairs organised, keeps your customers updated and helps you claim back what your suppliers owe you.

Open any repair and you’ll see the whole story: the customer, the product, the fault, the photos, and every email, note and status change. Your customer gets their own page to follow the repair, so they don’t need to call you to ask.

When a repair should be claimed back, you can start the claim straight from the repair, with the photos, notes and serial number already included. It stays open until it’s settled, so you always know what each supplier still owes you.

You can try it on your first 20 repairs for free, with all the features and no credit card.