A warranty claim is what you do when a customer brings in a defective product still under warranty: you replace or repair it, then recover the cost from the vendor.

Process

  1. Open the customer's record from Customer Management. If the product was sold by you, you will see it in their purchase history.
  2. Create a warranty invoice. From the customer detail page click New Invoice and choose Warranty as the invoice type.
  3. Add the defective product as a negative line. Quantity goes negative, which pulls the unit out of regular stock and into the Defective Inventory list. Add the replacement product as a positive line.
  4. Save and post the invoice. The customer pays nothing. Do not add a labor line here. If a technician spends bay time on the vehicle and you pay them for warranty work, their hours belong on a separate repair invoice so the pay reports can find them; see "How to Pay a Technician for Warranty Labor".
  5. Track the defective unit at Point of Sale > Inventory > Defective Inventory until you are ready to send it back to the vendor.
  6. Generate a Vendor Return PO from Defective Inventory > + New Return Order. The PO is pre-filled with the right product, vendor, and cost.
  7. Email or print the return PO and ship the defective unit back per the vendor's RMA process.
  8. When you receive credit or a replacement unit, settle the open balance under Point of Sale > Inventory > Vendor Receivables.

For the customer-facing record of what you did, the warranty invoice serves as their warranty paperwork. Print or email it from the invoice page.

Scheduling the work: the warranty invoice records the inventory side of the exchange and does not hold bay time, so it has no Schedule button. A parts-only swap, where nobody works on the vehicle, needs no appointment at all. When the customer does need to bring the vehicle in, book the visit from a repair invoice and its work order rather than from the warranty invoice. That is what puts the technician's hours somewhere the pay reports can read them, and it is the same order of operations whether or not you pay for warranty labor. The full sequence is in "How to Pay a Technician for Warranty Labor".

See also the article on tracking defective inventory for the queue and return-PO flow in isolation.