A guarantee the customer cannot find
A customer who had windows fitted three years ago finds a problem with a frame. They look for their guarantee and cannot find it. They ring you. The office searches and finds that the insurance-backed guarantee was paid for in the quote but never registered with the provider. Registering now is awkward, the customer is unhappy, and your business may end up covering the gap itself.
Why registration slips
Guarantee registration is a small task at the end of a job, done on a provider's website, often in a batch at month end. It competes with everything else the office does, and nobody sees when it is missed until a customer needs it.
- Registration is triggered by memory, not by the job being completed.
- Details are retyped from the job onto the provider's portal.
- Jobs completed near month end or holidays are missed.
- Documents from the provider are not filed on the job or sent to the customer.
- There is no list of completed jobs still to be registered.
What a guarantee covers and what your obligations to register it are depend on your provider and your own terms. The system tracks the admin, it does not interpret the cover.
What a missed registration costs
Customers expect a guarantee they were promised, and finding it missing at the moment they need it damages trust badly. Sorting it out later takes office time and may cost more than registering on time. And a gap in guarantee paperwork is exactly the kind of thing that comes up during a house sale.
Registration tracking we put in
- When the fitters mark a job complete, a guarantee registration task is created if the job includes one.
- The details the provider asks for, such as customer, address, contract value, completion date and items fitted, are pre-filled from the job.
- The office registers the job on the provider's portal, or through an integration where one exists, and records the reference.
- A dashboard shows completed jobs not yet registered, oldest first, against the deadline you set.
- When the provider issues documents, they are filed on the job and sent to the customer with their handover pack, along with any competent person scheme certificate.
- A monthly check compares completed jobs with registered ones and lists any gap.
| Job state | What the office sees |
|---|---|
| Completed today | Registration task, details pre-filled |
| Completed, not registered | Days since completion |
| Registered | Provider reference recorded |
| Documents issued | Filed and sent to the customer |
What the office and customers get
Registration happens as part of closing a job, not as a month-end scramble. The office can see at any time which jobs still need registering. Customers receive their guarantee documents with the rest of their handover paperwork and can find them later. And when a customer or their solicitor asks, the document is on the job ready to send.
Because the same completion step drives both guarantee registration and scheme notification, the two pieces of end-of-job admin stay in step, and neither depends on a separate memory.
It also gives you a clean answer when a customer's solicitor or surveyor asks, often years later, whether the windows carry a guarantee. The document, the reference and the date are on the job, and sending them takes a minute. That small moment of competence is often what a customer remembers when a neighbour asks who fitted their windows.
Is guarantee admin a gap?
- Guarantees are registered in a batch when someone has time.
- You have found a job whose guarantee was never registered.
- Customers ask for guarantee documents you cannot find quickly.
- Details are retyped from paperwork onto the provider's site.