Plumbing Warranty Template: Streamline Labor and Parts Warranties

In this article, we share a free warranty template for plumbing companies to document their warranties with customers. We’ll share specifics about what the template includes and provide a link to download and use it in your business. 

However, there are a number of challenges involved with tracking and managing plumbing warranties that a template alone won’t solve. For example:

• Tracking which customers have which parts and labor warranties and for how long.

• Accessing warranty information on the fly from the field and office.

• Ensuring that warranties are communicated to customers in estimates and invoices.

• Ensuring that warranties are registered with plumbing equipment manufacturers.

• Submitting warranty claims, initiating equipment returns, and ordering replacement parts.

Many plumbing businesses try to manage these tasks in a variety of disconnected systems: spreadsheets, emails, purchase orders, estimates, invoices, etc. But this often leads to problems such as difficulty tracking down warranty information, missed warranty registrations, delays in receiving replacement parts or getting credits back from manufacturers. 

All of this can lead to poor customer experiences and negative impacts on a plumbing contractor’s bottom line.

So, in addition to sharing our template below, we’ll also walk through how our plumbing contractor software can help solve these key organizational and workflow issues involved in warranty management.

Specifically, we’ll cover how ServiceTitan helps plumbing businesses to:

• Share Warranty Details with Customers by Adding Warranties to Estimates and Invoices

• Easily Track Which Customers Have Which Warranties (And for How Long)

• Initiate and Track Warranty Parts Orders and Returns (Through to Receiving Credits Back From Manufacturers)

• Leverage Task Management to Ensure All Necessary Warranty Actions Are Taken

» Want to see how our plumbing software can help you streamline and grow your business? Schedule a call for a free product tour.

How to Download and Use Our Plumbing Warranty Template

The warranty template includes fields to document the following information:

• Company Information: Your company name, logo, address, phone number, etc.

• Job Details: All relevant information related to the job (e.g. homeowner address, installation date, warranty period, etc.).

• General Warranty: A statement that provides your company guarantee of quality workmanship (a best practice used by top plumbers and subcontractors).

• Labor Warranty: The period of time you agree to honor call-backs (for free or a fee) for install and repairs.

• Parts Warranty: All manufacturer warranty information that is relevant to the customer.

• Items Not Covered: Specifications, disclaimers, or waivers related to work that is not covered.

• Permits and Codes: A statement of who is responsible for obtaining any required work permits, building codes, etc.

Save the PDF template to your desktop as a new file. From there, you can customize the first page with your company name and logo and begin using the template to document warranties. 

However, as we mentioned above, this template won’t be able to solve the biggest challenges of warranty management. 

In the next sections, we’ll walk through a number of features available in ServiceTitan that work together to streamline warranties.

How ServiceTitan Optimizes Plumbing Warranty Management

Share Warranty Details with Customers by Adding Warranties to Estimates and Invoices

One of the most common ways that plumbers share warranty information with customers is by adding warranty details to estimates and invoices. To facilitate this in ServiceTitan, most users add warranty coverage information to their pricebook (from which estimates and invoices are built). In doing so, whenever techs or office staff generate estimates or invoices, any warranties involved with products or services sold are automatically added (without needing to remember to think about it or add in the information manually). 

There are typically two ways they’ll do this. 

First, users will commonly include warranty information in the item descriptions of plumbing systems and equipment that they sell. For example, for each piece of equipment they offer (whether it’s a tub, kitchen sink, water heater, faucet, drain line, or other fixture), they can specify parts and labor warranties based on their company’s policy for installation of that item and the warranty offered by the manufacturer. 

Second, companies will also often add warranties to their pricebook as individual pricebook items. For example, they might create a 10-year warranty on labor that technicians or office staff can add to “Better” or “Best” options in a Good Better Best proposal. This allows them to use extended warranties as a way to entice customers to select upgraded options, which helps to increase average ticket prices.

Once this warranty information is defined, it will be automatically viewable on any estimates or invoices where this item has been added. So, if a technician is presenting a Good Better Best proposal for a new garbage disposer to a customer, the customer can see the labor and parts warranties included with that product.

In addition, once an invoice is generated for the estimate they select, that warranty information can also be reflected on their invoice, as demonstrated at the bottom of this example invoice:

Easily Track Which Customers Have Which Warranties (And for How Long)

With ServiceTitan, instead of digging through emails, spreadsheets, or invoice records when a customer calls about a defective item, CSRs can easily find a customer’s warranty information on the fly. 

Our call-booking system automatically recognizes when existing customers are calling in and pulls up their complete customer history, which allows CSRs to easily locate past invoices and estimates that include warranty details. Or, if enabled, they can identify warranties through our tagging system, which allows businesses to create warranty tags that display on jobs pages and makes it even easier to see which customers have which warranties.

Note: Through this same page, CSRs also have access to other key customer information such as scheduled appointments, address and billing information, property data (whether it’s a new home, old home, square footage, etc.), and more.

In addition, technicians can just as easily view customers’ warranties through our mobile app. If a tech is out on a service call and discovers a faulty part, they can look at the customer’s job history with a few taps on their tablet, view previous estimates and invoices, and quickly see whether the part is still under warranty. 

In cases where it is, they can initiate the ordering of replacement parts right from their tablets (as we’ll describe below).

Initiate and Track Warranty Parts Orders and Returns (Through to Receiving Credits Back From Manufacturers)

When a technician discovers a faulty part that’s under warranty, they can create a new estimate or invoice and mark it as a warranty job. And then they can follow our warranty parts order workflow, which allows them to:

1. Select existing equipment to indicate any failed parts that were found.

2. Submit a request to initiate the requisition of a replacement part.

At this point, office or warehouse staff can see this request in the In Demand tab of the warranty tracking page and begin fulfilling the replacement order.

Via our warranty tracking page, warranty or warehouse managers can easily view warranty parts orders that have been requested by technicians in the field, displayed in the In Demand tab. In addition, they can also see which parts orders are In Progress, Completed, or Canceled.

From this page, the appropriate staff can click into individual order requests, and take actions such as: 

• Updating claim information

• Initiating requisitions (choosing procurement sources and item quantities)

• Creating and sending purchase orders to vendors for replacement parts

As things progress, they can continue to monitor and update the status of warranty orders, seeing which ones are Pending, On Order, or Arrived.

Meanwhile, techs can also monitor these statuses, and once new parts are received, they can carry out the replacement job. From their mobile device, they can continue to update the warranty part status to On Truck and Installed, so that the warehouse can see when the job has been completed.

Finally, they can pass the faulty part off to the warehouse team to return to the vendor and monitor for the credit, marking the return as Credit Received to close out the order.

As you can imagine, by centralizing the warranty parts ordering and tracking process, and providing real-time updates that are visible to both warehouse and field techs, this workflow significantly reduces errors and missed steps in this process—resulting in happier customers and saved revenue.

Leverage Task Management to Ensure All Necessary Warranty Actions Are Taken

As we’ve discussed throughout this post, there are many different steps involved in plumbing warranty management. So far we’ve shown how ServiceTitan helps to facilitate transparency and efficiency when it comes to:

• Adding warranty details to estimates and invoices.

• Communicating with customers about their warranties.

• Tracking and accessing warranty details for individual customers.

• Ordering and tracking warranty parts returns.

However, on any given business day, steps in this process can still be missed and details can fall through the cracks. And when they do, companies pay the price in a number of ways, whether it’s upset customers or consequential losses in revenue. 

So, to provide an additional layer of accountability that ensures all necessary actions are taken in warranty management, users also have access to our task management system. 

ServiceTitan users can leverage our task-management features to ensure crucial steps are always taken by the appropriate staff, at the appropriate times. For example, businesses can create a task workflow that is automatically triggered when a warranty (or particular piece of equipment that comes with a warranty) is sold. 

The trigger can then automatically notify the specific person responsible for registering the warranty, or ordering replacement parts, or scheduling the replacement visit, for example—and ensure that these important steps are taken.

This significantly improves the organization of tasks that need to be completed in warranty management and fosters accountability among your team.

Warranty Management Is Just One Example of How ServiceTitan Streamlines Plumbing Business Operations

The types of challenges we discussed throughout this post—keeping track of customer information, communicating between field and office staff, fostering accountability and ensuring all necessary actions are taken at each step of a job—exist in nearly every facet of a plumbing business.

In addition to streamlining warranty management, ServiceTitan has been designed to improve efficiency and revenue growth holistically throughout a plumbing business operation.

To get a free, one-on-one walk-through of the features we’ve covered in this post, as well as the other core features of our plumbing contractor software (scheduling, dispatching, mobile functionality, accounting integrations, payments, and more), schedule a call for a free product tour.