Almost every company that tracks its warranties started with a spreadsheet. It’s the default tool: free, instant, familiar. And to get started, it does the job. The trouble comes with time and volume.
What a spreadsheet does well
Let’s be fair: an Excel file or a Google Sheet lets you list equipment, record a purchase date and a warranty length, filter and sort. For five machines, that’s plenty.
Where it breaks down
1. It alerts no one. A spreadsheet is passive. Someone has to remember to open it, scan the “end date” column, do the math. Nobody does — until it’s too late. The warranty expires in silence.
2. It doesn’t store the invoices. The row says “warranty until 12 March 2026”, but the proof of purchase lives somewhere else: in an inbox, a network folder, a binder. The day you need after-sales service, you have the date but not the document.
3. It’s up to date for no one. Several versions circulate, nobody knows which one is authoritative, and everyone hesitates to touch it. After a year, it no longer reflects the reality of your equipment.
4. It handles neither roles nor locations. Who can edit what? Which equipment sits at which site? The spreadsheet doesn’t know — or only at the cost of tabs and color codes that nobody maintains.
The invisible cost of “it sort of works”
A drifting spreadsheet creates a false sense of control. You think you’re tracking your warranties; in reality, you’re documenting deadlines you’ll let slip by. Every missed warranty is a repair or a replacement paid for nothing — multiplied by the size of your fleet and repeated every year.
What you need instead
A tool that attaches the proof to the item, calculates deadlines automatically, alerts you before expiry, and stays shared and up to date for the whole team, across one or several locations.
Keept was built for exactly this
Keept keeps what the spreadsheet did — listing, dating, categorizing — and adds what it was missing: the invoice attached to each piece of equipment, automatic deadline calculation, reminders before expiry, and a shared multi-user, multi-site workspace. You no longer “maintain” a file: tracking happens on its own, and everyone sees the same reality.