A single source of truth for your standard warranty
Warranty terms shouldn't live in a Google Doc that nobody trusts. You can now define your company's default standard warranty once, and have it ready everywhere it's needed.
Every operations team we've talked to has the same story: the "standard" warranty is whatever the last person who quoted it said it was. Sometimes it's pasted from a PDF on someone's desktop. Sometimes it's a paragraph copied from an old proposal. Sometimes it's just verbal. When a claim shows up six months later, nobody is sure which version applied.
This week we're shipping a small but load-bearing piece of the warranties system: a single, editable standard warranty that lives at the company level Set the Standard Warranty.
Why a default belongs at the company level
The instinct when building a warranty feature is to attach terms to each product, or each order, or each customer. That's where they end up applied — but it's not where they should be authored. The vast majority of what a company ships goes out under the same terms. Modeling that as N copies of the same paragraph is how drift starts.
So we made the standard warranty a first-class object on the company: one record, one editor, one place to change it Set the Standard Warranty. If your terms change — a new coverage window, a clarified exclusion, an updated remedy — you edit them once. Everything downstream that references the standard warranty picks up the new language.
What this unlocks
Making the default explicit is the prerequisite for everything else we want to do with warranties. Once there is a canonical "this is what we cover, by default," we can start layering on the interesting parts: per-product overrides, customer-specific addenda, automatic attachment to quotes and orders, and a real audit trail of which version of the terms applied to which shipment.
None of that works if the default is fuzzy. So we started here.
If you don't set a standard warranty, nothing breaks — the field is just empty, and you can keep authoring terms ad hoc. But we'd encourage taking ten minutes to write it down. Most teams discover, in the process, that the "standard" they thought everyone knew has two or three competing versions floating around.
What's next
With the company-level default in place, the next steps are product-level overrides and pulling warranty terms into the quote and order flow automatically. The goal is that by the time a claim lands, there's never any ambiguity about which terms were in force — because they were attached, by reference, the moment the deal was signed.