It's possible to store warranty-related information against items of stock.
This feature allows you to effectively track warranty expiry dates against the product assets in your customer base. Enabling you to provide a proactive customer service while adding an extra revenue stream by upsell additional warranties at the right time.
This is ideal for products of a high value, such as IT equipment, which will be kept by the customer for a long period and maintained as part of the service you provide.
You can create work stacks for these product assets, to help you identify expiring assets at the earliest opportunity.
Setting warranty information when booking in stock
When booking in an item of stock, you can set its Warranty length in months, as well as the Warranty Expiry Type.
You can set default values for both of these against items in inventory - see the next section for details.
Warranty Expiry Types
This setting allows you to select the event that triggers the start of the warranty period:
Shipped Date
Purchased Date
Booked-in Date
The Shipped Date can be seen against the delivery on the sales order.
Purchased Date refers to the creation date of the linked purchase order.
The Booked-In Date option will use the stock movement date for the relevant item of stock.
Setting default warranty information at inventory level
Warranty information is set when stock is booked in. However, defaults can be set at inventory level. This is optional, but recommended.
The following fields are present in Settings for physical products (non-service):
Warranty Months
Warranty Expiry Type
This will auto-set the respective fields when booking in stock, though these can always be overriden.
These values can also be set as part of inventory import.
Calculation of warranty expiry date for customer assets
A product's warranty expiry date will be calculated when a product is converted to asset.
This will happen as long as an item of stock has been allocated to the sales order line before conversion. That item of stock must also have a warranty period (in months) set against it.
This date will be backfilled to sales order Data Capture as a read-only field.
If the field does not appear, you can check that it is enabled from Settings - Manage Categories on the Product Core Fields tab.
Monitoring expiry dates in work stacks
Product asset work stacks can be filtered to show product assets that have a Warranty Expiry Date within a specified range. You can use a sliding range or fixed period.
You also have the ability to see assets with one or more specific Warranty Expiry Type.
Attaching product assets to a new opportunity
When renewing an existing asset, you may find it useful to link the existing asset to a new opportunity.