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Warranty Schedule: Which Installed Sites Are Still Covered
Every installation job starts a warranty clock the moment the customer signs the handover document. After that, the clock runs. Some sites are at six months. Some are at fourteen. A few have already passed the warranty period, and the contractor does not know it yet.
For a contractor running eight projects a month, the portfolio of active sites grows quickly. After eighteen months, there could be forty or fifty sites at various points in their warranty periods. Somebody on your team needs to know, at any moment, which ones are still covered. Most cannot answer that without making several phone calls first.
What a warranty clock actually is
A warranty clock is the countdown from handover date to warranty expiry for a specific site. It starts when the customer signs the acceptance document, not when the physical work finishes. If the work completes in week three but the signature arrives in week five, the clock starts in week five.
The distinction matters because contractors often count from the wrong point. A job the technician considers done might not have a signed handover for another two or three weeks. That gap shrinks the effective warranty period without the customer knowing it changed.
Most contractor workmanship warranties run one to two years from handover. Equipment warranties from the manufacturer run on their own clock, often from the date of purchase or commissioning rather than the handover date. These two clocks do not expire at the same time.
What are the three warranties on a factory install?
A typical factory electrical installation carries at least three overlapping warranty commitments:
Workmanship warranty: this is the contractor’s own guarantee. If the installation fails because of how it was done rather than what was used, this is the coverage that applies. Duration and scope are set by contract.
Equipment warranty: the manufacturer’s warranty on major components (inverters, switchgear, LED fittings, distribution panels). Duration varies by product and supplier. The contractor is usually not the responsible party for equipment failures under this coverage, but they are often the first call the factory makes.
Component warranty: smaller items (cables, conduit fittings, connectors, junction boxes) may carry their own short-form coverage from the supplier. In most cases this overlaps with workmanship, but the distinction can matter when a specific component fails and the supplier is willing to replace it at no cost.
When a factory calls about a problem fourteen months after installation, your team needs to know which of these three applies before deciding how to respond. Getting it wrong in either direction costs money: absorbing a repair that belongs to a manufacturer’s warranty, or charging for work that falls within your own.
Why does this get harder as the portfolio grows?
When a contractor has five or six active sites, the owner or project manager usually knows the status of each one from memory. Ask which sites are still under warranty, and they can tell you.
At twenty sites, that certainty starts to slip. At thirty, it is mostly gone. The information was not lost. It was never written down in a form that anyone other than the original project manager can find quickly.
Consider a contractor who has completed thirty sites over eighteen months, each with a one-year workmanship warranty. On any given day roughly half the portfolio is still under warranty, but the split shifts every week. Without a register, confirming the status of a specific site means locating the original handover document and calculating. If that document is in someone’s email folder, the calculation takes time that a service call does not allow.
What does your warranty position look like right now?
This is the question worth answering before a service call forces the answer on you.
A warranty position is a snapshot: for each site, the handover date, warranty expiry by type, and the responsible party. Having this written down means the person handling the service call does not need to track down the project manager before responding.
Building this retrospectively is possible but slow. Two to five handovers a month takes a morning to reconstruct; five or more a month over several years is a week of file work.
The alternative is capturing it at the point of handover: when a job is closed and signed, the handover date, warranty terms, and expiry date become part of the register your business keeps for every closed site immediately. The register builds from closed jobs rather than requiring someone to reconstruct it later from scattered documents.
The proactive use: reaching out before expiry
A site whose warranty expires next month is worth a proactive call, not just a note in a file. It is an opportunity to offer a maintenance agreement that then needs tracking of its own, while the customer still sees you as the team responsible for that installation.
A site whose warranty expired three months ago is a harder conversation, especially if the factory calls about a problem first. Knowing the expiry calendar in advance turns a passive list into something the maintenance team can act on before the phone rings.
Running a warranty register that is actually useful
A warranty register needs four things to be practical:
- Site name and location
- Handover date (the signed date, not the completion estimate)
- Warranty expiry by type (workmanship, equipment where tracked separately)
- Responsible party for each type (contractor for workmanship, manufacturer or supplier name for equipment)
It also needs to surface upcoming expirations before they happen. An expiry date buried in a spreadsheet nobody checks is functionally the same as no record. The register is only useful if someone looks at it regularly or if it raises an alert automatically when a date approaches.
FAQ
What if we never received a signed handover from a particular site?
Then the warranty clock has no verified start date. You can use the completion date as a conservative proxy, but the customer may count differently. This is one reason the signed handover document matters beyond the invoice: it anchors the warranty start for both parties.
Should we track manufacturer warranties separately from our own?
Yes, but not elaborately. A single column in the site register showing the warranty type and the manufacturer or supplier name is enough. When a piece of equipment fails, you need to know within thirty seconds whether to call the supplier or absorb the cost yourself.
When does a service call become a warranty claim rather than billable work?
The practical question to settle before the visit is: is this site still within the workmanship warranty period, and does the reported fault look like an installation issue rather than a usage issue or equipment failure? If both answers are yes, treat it as warranty work. If either answer is no, document what your technician finds before agreeing to absorb the cost.
If tracking warranty clocks across a growing portfolio currently depends on memory or email folders, the site register inside TRACE 30 builds this from closed jobs automatically. Each signed handover creates a site record with the warranty clock running from the signed date, including expiry by type and responsible party. Details are at /program/.