Keep the warranty with the thing

A warranty is only ever needed at the worst moment, and it’s always in the wrong place.

Two halves, two rooms

The proof of purchase is in a drawer, an inbox, or gone. The thing it covers is in the kitchen, with the model and serial on a plate you have never read. To make a claim you need both at once, and the reason claims go unmade isn’t that people are careless — it’s that nobody keeps two unrelated objects in the same place for three years on the chance of a fault.

Photograph both, once

Photograph the receipt when it’s in your hand, and the plate when you’re near the machine. Keeplea reads what is on each — the model, the serial, the date, the retailer, the service interval — and both come back the moment you ask for the appliance by name.

That’s the whole method. There’s no form to fill in, no category to choose, and nothing to remember about how you filed it.

What comes out

• Model and serial, off the plate, without you typing a character of it
• The purchase date, off the receipt
• Service dates, off the certificate the engineer leaves behind
• The retailer, which is who the claim actually goes to

The honest part: no reminders

Most warranty apps are built around an alert that tells you the cover expires next week. Keeplea doesn’t do that yet. It won’t tap you on the shoulder.

What it does is make sure that on the day the dishwasher stops, the answer to “when did we buy it and who from” takes ten seconds instead of an evening. That’s a different promise, and for most people it’s the one that actually gets used — an expiry reminder is only useful if the paperwork behind it was ever captured, and the capture is the step that fails.

If a countdown is what you want, use a warranty app built for it. If what defeats you is the typing, start here.

Where to begin

The next delivery. Photograph the receipt before it goes in a drawer, and the plate before the box goes out. Two seconds each, and the pair is together for as long as you own the thing.