About Warranty Claims
The way that you use warranty claims depends on the role that you are operating in:
- When operating as the service company that owns a warranty, you will use warranty claims to reimburse external partners for the work done on equipment, based on a pre-defined agreement given to the customer.
- When operating as the distributor, you will use warranty claims to request payment from a third party for work performed.
You can set up Service Management to handle both sides of this process.
- You can process payments to the dealers through the Partner Reimbursement functionality. Submit the warranty claim to the manufacturer using the Bill To Override field on the Warranty Claims Submittal form.
- Or, you can reconcile warranty claims with payments received using the Warranty Claim Reconciliation and Warranty Claim Adjustment Posting forms.
There are also scenarios where warranty work can be intermingled with billable work on the same service order. For example, performing some type of an upgrade or preventative maintenance on an automobile while a warranty repair is being done. Service Management supports this use case by allowing the user to identify which operations should be billed to the customer versus those that need to be sent to the manufacturer.
Claim Tolerance
For small discrepancies, it is not worth the cost or potential strain to your business relationship with a vendor to re-submit claims that were underpaid by an insignificant amount. Allowing a tolerance value to be maintained for each vendor streamlines the usability of the reconciliation and re-submittal process.
Claim tolerance is set on the Vendors form and used to determine if a vendor has paid enough against a warranty claim. You can set the claim tolerance value as a set amount or as a percentage of the total claim amount.
The claim tolerance value is then used to reconcile claims on the Warranty Claim Reconciliation form. If the invoice for a claim meets the tolerance amount, then you can reconcile the claim. If the invoice does not meet the tolerance amount, then you must use the Warranty Claim Adjustment Posting form to reconcile.
Claim Status
The status of a warranty claim is displayed in the Claim Status field on the Service Order Operations form, Warranty Claim Reconciliation form, and Warranty Claim Adjustment Posting form. These are the possible claim statuses:
- Blank: If the service order is not a warranty claim type, the field is blank.
- Authorized: Displayed when the Submittal Authorization Number is populated.
- Submitted: Displayed when invoicing has occurred.
- To Be Reconciled: Displayed when the claim has been accepted and an amount has been returned. This is typically set by an API call or when the claim is set to To Be Reconciled on the Warranty Claim Reconciliation form.
- Reconciled: Displayed when the claim has been reconciled. This is typically set on the Warranty Claim Reconciliation form or the Warranty Claim Adjustment Posting form.