There was a time when the warranty administrator wore many hats, unfortunately the first hat they put on probably wasn’t for claims processing. We appointed someone in the office to take on the job of managing our warranty receivables along with whatever else it was we really hired them to do. Since those people didn’t truly understand the process(s) involved in getting claims paid out the schedule would get pretty messy. Now if your a service manager and you’ve been in this situation you know hat happens at the end of the month so you can skip down to the next paragraph ! In many stores it will mean a visit from the GM or the owner, or lord forbid BOTH! The meeting usually starts with “how does this happen ? ” and ends with ” you better get a handle on this… or else “. So we scramble out to the office to visit or part time warranty / office person and start asking all kinds of questions they can’t answer, at which point they remind us that ” this isn’t what I was hired to do ” and all the finger pointing starts about who’s responsible for this anyway. In many cases we learn our lesson real quick and we make our office person a full time warranty clerk, that should fix the problem right ? No, most of the time it doesn’t because now we have a dedicated employee who really doesn’t know how to process, track, and get our claims paid. So, here comes the end of the month AGAIN.
Folks, you see where I am going with this. We hire the very best technicians so our cars are fixed right the first time. We hire the the cream of the crop to work the service drive and heck our cashiers and porters make us all proud because they too do an outstanding job in representing us but when it comes to collecting our money from Toyota we plug a warm body into a chair and walk away. Depending on the size of your store that can be a sizable investment your allowing them to control which greatly affects your cash flow. Why wouldn’t you want an experienced warranty administrator handling all that cash flow on a daily basis for you, making sure you asked for and received as much of your money on every settlement as possible ? I ask each of you to look at your currently warranty schedule and pay special attention to those that are other than current. Ask your warranty administrator what the status of those claims is but remember that with the exception of frame claims most should pay out in the under 30 category. If your at 91+ you have stopped treading water and your now sinking fast. Those are the kind of ” back burner ” situations I try to eliminate.Next, take a look at the write down for each department and find out why we ask for and didn’t get paid for the services we completed. We deserve to get paid for what we do. If there was a discount on a customer pay ticket we might be asking why, so why is a warranty claim any different? Its all money out of your pocket.