Core & Warranty-Parts Return Tracker: Stop Letting Credits Slip Away
Track every core deposit and warranty part you owe back to a supplier — what's pending, what's overdue, and which credits never showed up — so a coordinator confirms each shipment and approves the claim list before it goes out.
A web tool where each job that generates a core or warranty return is flagged, lands on a pending-return list with deadlines, gets alerts before the return window closes, and a coordinator confirms the shipment and approves the credit-claim list before it's sent to the supplier — then expected vs. received credits are reconciled and you can export the outstanding-credit report as a CSV.
Before you start
- A Supabase account (free)
- A Vercel account (free)
- A Resend account (free)
- Your returnable parts / jobs as a CSV or Google Sheet
- Your supplier return terms and core/warranty credit amounts
- Claude Code or any AI coding agent
The problem this kills
You ship a rebuilt starter, a compressor, a turbo, and the old unit — the core — is supposed to go back for a deposit refund. A warranty part fails, you swap it, and the supplier owes you a credit once they get the defective one back. On paper, that money comes back to you. In practice, it leaks.
The old core sits on a shelf past the return window and the deposit is gone. The warranty part goes back but the credit memo never lands, and nobody notices because nobody is watching the gap between "we sent it" and "they credited us." It lives in a parts coordinator's head, a few sticky notes, and a spreadsheet that's three weeks stale. Over a year, that's real money — hundreds of dollars per core, thousands in unclaimed warranty credits — quietly evaporating because no single system says "this is owed back, here's the deadline, and we still haven't been paid."
You don't need an expensive parts module bolted onto your ERP to fix this. You can build exactly the tracker your shop needs in an afternoon, and you don't have to be a developer.
What you'll build
A small web app, just for your team, that turns "stuff we owe back" into a list you actually work:
- Every job or part that creates a core return or a warranty return gets flagged and lands on a pending-return list with the supplier's deadline.
- The tool alerts you before each return deadline so cores leave the shelf in time and deposits stay yours.
- A coordinator confirms the physical shipment (tracking, date, who sent it) and approves the credit-claim list before anything goes to the supplier — the app drafts, a person signs off.
- Once a return is shipped, the tool tracks the expected credit and lets you mark the credit received, so it can reconcile expected vs. received and surface the credits that never arrived.
- It guards against duplicates so the same return ID or serial can't be tracked (or claimed) twice.
- You can export the outstanding-credit report as a CSV in the exact columns your accounting or ERP expects.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
A complete, paste-and-go runbook. It opens by interviewing you about your business — your current return process, the systems and sheets you use, how you name parts and return IDs, your typical and peak return volumes, each supplier's return window and credit terms, and your messy edge cases (partial credits, rejected cores, restocking fees). It reflects a short tailored spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up, so the tool fits your shop instead of being a generic template.
From there it walks you, prompt by prompt, through standing up the database, the pending-return list with deadline alerts, the shipment-confirm and claim-approval gate, credit reconciliation, the duplicate guards, and the CSV export — each step ending in a ready-to-copy prompt you paste into your AI coding agent.
It also includes a "No API yet?" fallback: start from a Google Sheet or CSV of returns today and produce the clean outstanding-credit CSV your system of record expects — so you can ship this even with zero integration to your ERP.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
This isn't a toy spreadsheet — it's built like an internal tool that handles money:
- Login, so only your team can use it.
- Row-level security, so people only ever see their own organization's returns and credits.
- A complete audit trail — who flagged a return, who confirmed the shipment, who approved the claim, and when.
- A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate — the app drafts the credit-claim list, but a coordinator reviews and approves before it's sent to the supplier and before a credit is treated as claimed.
- Duplicate guards, so the same return ID or serial can't be processed or claimed twice.
Who it's for
Parts coordinators, warranty clerks, and accounting teams in any shop that ships cores back for deposits or returns warranty parts for credit — automotive, heavy equipment, HVAC, industrial, fleet maintenance — anyone tired of watching deposits and credits slip away.
You've got this. Open the plan, paste the first prompt, and let the interview tailor the tracker to your shop.