Warranty Overview

Extended warranties are similar to other products in your system in that you create product records for them and sell them in Sales Order Entry. However, the system also contains special files and fields that monitor information unique to warranties, such as the following for each warranty:

• warranty type

• warranty period (the starting date and duration)

• third-party warranty providers

  The data retention settings (for example, the Customer Retention Months fields in the Point of Sale Control Settings) determine how long the system retains invoice data before purging. Therefore, if you use Warranty Processing, you should set the data retention settings to a period matching the longest warranty you offer.  Otherwise, the system will purge the invoice data before its associated warranty expires.

Extended Warranties

You can use the Warranty Product Linkage feature to link extended warranties to specific, tangible inventory items, either at point of sale or after invoicing. You can apply multiple warranties to a single product as long as the warranties belong to separate extended categories. The system also provides similar processing and linking for the following special warranty products:

• Fabric Protection (FP),

• Leather Care (LC), and

• Wood Care (WC).

In order entry, when you add a product with one or more associated warranties, the Product Warranty Selection screen appears in which you can select one or more of the linked warranties and add them to the order.  When you add a warranty to an order, the system logs a comment in the Sales Order Audit Comments log.

Factory Warranties

The system processes information for factory warranties as well (that is, warranties that originate with the manufacturer and come with the product). Unlike extended or special-coverage warranties, factory warranties are not separate products or sources of additional revenue for your organization, nor are they itemized on sales orders. However, you still need to know when they entitle the customer to parts and labor to fix defective merchandise, and the system allows easy linkage and entry of this information into Service Order Entry.

You can associate factory warranties with merchandise either by

• product (via the Factory Warranty Code field in the Advanced Product Settings) or

• vendor (via the Factory Default Warranty field in the Advanced Vendor Settings).

When a product appears on an order, the system checks the Product file and then the Advanced Vendor Settings for a factory warranty, attaching the first warranty it finds or none if one is not found.

Warranty Features

STORIS’ Warranty Product Linkage feature allows you to:

1. Set up extended, special-coverage, and factory warranties in your system.

2. Include extended and special-coverage warranties on sales orders.

3. Link extended and special-coverage warranties to inventory products during sales order entry.

4. Link extended and special-coverage warranties to previously invoiced products through a link from the sales order to the View a Customer’s Historical Purchases (Customer Buy History) routine.

5. Process extended and special-coverage warranties on

1. customer returns or

2. exchanges.  If a customer exchanges a warranty product, the sale date of the new warranty product becomes the warranty date. If the customer decides not to exchange the warranty, the system removes the linkage on the old product.

6. Process extended, special-coverage, and factory warranties on service orders.

7. Print the Product Warranty Details Report, listing and sorting all available warranties.

8. Use the Report Salesperson’s Warranty Activity routine to compare the quantity and dollar value of warranties sold with the quantity and dollar value of warranties that could have been sold.

9. Use the Report Products Sold Without Warranties routine to identify customers who did not purchase a warranty at the time they bought the product but may be willing to reconsider.

10. Use the Report Extended Warranties About To Expire routine to display a list of soon-to-expire (or recently expired) extended warranties along with the names and phone numbers of the customers who can then be contacted about renewals.

For information on linking warranties to kits, click here.

Prerequisite Information

STORIS’ Warranty Product Linkage feature interacts with many other STORIS features and processes. A basic understanding of the following routines may help you more easily comprehend the warranty feature.

• Product Categories

• Product Groups

• Products

• Sales Orders

• Returns

• Exchanges

• Service Orders

• View a Customer’s Historical Transactions (Customer Buy History)

Basic Setup

Use the following basic steps to set up warranties in STORIS. To enter complete information on extended or special-coverage warranties, follow steps 1-6. For factory warranties, follow steps 4 and 7 only.

1. Using the Product Category Settings, create a product category for non-inventory products. You use this category to contain your warranty product groups.

2. Using the Product Group Settings, create one or more product groups for non-inventory products. You use these product groups to contain individual warranty products.

3. Using the Warranty Category Settings, create a warranty category. You link this category to your inventory products (see step 6).

4. Using the Warranty Settings, create a product warranty record.  The warranty code you create in this step enables the Service module to recognize the warranty type (that is, factory or extended) and the warranty terms.

5. Using the Advanced Product Settings, create a non-inventory product record for each warranty. In the Warranty Product Linkage section on the Miscellaneous tab, specify a warranty category.  Completing this step for each warranty product you create makes the warranties accessible in Sales Order Entry.

6. Still in the Advanced Product Settings, identify the inventory items to which you want to link warranty products, and specify a warranty category (see step 3) for each using the Extended Warranty Categories field in the Inventory Product Linkage section. In this way, whenever one of these linked inventory items appears on a sales order, the warranty products associated with the selected warranty category display, and you can choose any warranty from the list that appears.

7. If a factory warranty exists, enter the code of the warranty from step 4 into the Product record for the inventory product, thus enabling the system to retrieve the factory warranty information for service orders. Use the Factory Warranty Code field in the Inventory Product Linkage section.

 After completing steps 1-3, you can add additional warranties to the same product category, product group, and warranty category that you created for the first warranty. In this way, actual setup for most new warranty products can begin with step 4.

To control the sale of a warranty with As-Is products, select the Sell Warranty For As-Is setting in the Reason Code Settings.