The warranty list nobody wants to manage after a new build
Across 200 or more claims in the first twelve months, the warranty period is one of the most administratively chaotic stretches a vessel goes through. Here is how to track it by location, with an audit trail that holds up.
The delivery is done. The vessel has been accepted, the punch list signed off, and the yard relationship has transitioned from build contract to warranty period. For the captain or owner's representative taking handover, the next twelve months should be the most supported period in the vessel's life. The builder is obligated to rectify defects. The systems are new. The documentation is current.
In practice, the warranty period is one of the most administratively chaotic periods a vessel will go through. Defects surface across every department simultaneously. Some are cosmetic. Some are operational. Some are safety-relevant. Each one needs to be identified, logged with enough detail for the builder to assess it, tracked through a response and rectification process, and closed with evidence that the work was done. Across a large new build, there can be 200 or more warranty claims in the first twelve months.
Most of that tracking happens in a spreadsheet, a shared document, or an email thread. None of those tools were designed for yacht warranty management, and the gaps show.
Why warranty tracking is harder than standard maintenance
Routine maintenance on an established vessel has a rhythm. The team knows the systems, knows the failure patterns, knows the suppliers. The work is largely predictable, and the records build on an existing history. Warranty tracking is structurally different in almost every respect.
The defects are novel. No prior history exists because the vessel is new. Every fault is being documented for the first time, often by crew who are themselves new to this particular vessel and learning its layout while simultaneously trying to log defects in it. The spatial context that experienced crew carry about an older vessel does not exist yet.
The counterparty is external. Routine maintenance is managed entirely within the vessel's team. Warranty claims are managed in a relationship with the builder, potentially with subcontractors, and potentially with the owner's project manager — all of whom need access to the same information but none of whom should necessarily have access to the full maintenance record. The documentation has to be specific enough for the builder to assess the defect, complete enough to support a dispute if rectification is refused, and organised enough to be presented formally if the warranty relationship deteriorates.
The volume is front-loaded. In routine maintenance, defects surface gradually over time. In the warranty period, they surface in clusters: during commissioning sea trials, during the first charter season, during the first significant passage in varied conditions. A vessel that seemed to have twelve open warranty items on a Tuesday can have forty by the following Friday after a delivery voyage reveals issues that did not appear in sheltered waters.
A spreadsheet that is behind by two weeks is not just disorganised. It may be the difference between a valid claim and an expired one.
And the clock is running. Each warranty claim has a finite window before the obligation to rectify expires. Tracking which items were logged when, whether they were formally submitted to the builder, whether the builder acknowledged them within the contractual response period, and whether rectification was completed before the warranty expired is a compliance task as much as a maintenance task.
What yacht warranty management looks like in Map My Maintenance
The Project List is the natural home for warranty claims. Each defect is logged as a Project List item and carried through a defined status workflow: Initiated when the defect is identified, Progressing when it has been submitted to the builder or is under active rectification, Paused when it is awaiting a builder response or parts, Pending Review when rectification has been carried out and needs sign-off, and Sent to Vendor, Sent to Repair Facility, or Sent to Agent when the claim has been passed to a specialist or third party. That workflow mirrors the actual stages of a warranty claim without requiring a custom configuration.
Each warranty item carries a full detail record. The title and overview describe the defect clearly. Priority is set: Urgent for safety or operationally critical defects, High for items affecting guest or crew comfort during a charter season, Medium for cosmetic or non-urgent items. Proposed start and end dates track the submission and expected rectification timeline. The team and person assigned keeps accountability clear when multiple departments are running claims simultaneously.
Every defect is pinned to its exact location on the vessel's general arrangement plan, uploaded in Area Setup. The GA is divided into floors or decks, each drawn out as named spaces with specific location markers within them. A warranty claim for a leaking deck fitting in the crew mess is not logged as "deck fitting, crew area." It is pinned to the precise location marker on the crew mess space on the correct deck. Anyone opening that item — whether the captain, the owner's rep, or the builder's warranty manager reviewing a report — can tap View Location and see exactly where on the vessel the defect is. The builder does not need to interpret a text description. The plan shows them.
This spatial precision becomes operationally significant when the builder's service team visits the vessel for a rectification trip. A printed Project List report filtered to the items assigned to that visit — each with its precise location on the GA, annotated photos of the defect, and the relevant method or specification notes — is a structured work brief. The service team arrives knowing what they are looking for and where. Time on the vessel is used for rectification, not for location searches.
The evidence is captured where it is found
When a defect is photographed, the image is uploaded to the item and the Annotation Tool is opened. The crew member draws on the exact failure point, adds a Description of what was observed, a note on Possible Solutions, and any relevant Tools and Materials. That annotated image is stored against the warranty item and appears in the printed report — organised at the point it is taken, not assembled later from a camera roll.
For defects that require parts procurement, Special Purchases links the order directly to the warranty item. If the builder is supplying the replacement part, the expected delivery is tracked against the Required Delivery Date and Estimated Delivery Date fields. If the vessel is sourcing the part independently and pursuing reimbursement, the supplier quote is stored in the Companies Quoting section of the Special Purchase record, with the quote document uploaded against the relevant company entry. When the reimbursement claim is made, the documentation is already assembled.
Reminders attach to any warranty item and surface on the Dashboard under Today's Reminders on the day they fall due. A contractual response deadline, a builder visit confirmation date, a follow-up inspection after rectification — each gets a Reminder set at the time the obligation is identified. The deadline does not rely on anyone's personal calendar.
The Activity Log on each item records the complete history of that warranty claim: when it was logged, who logged it, every status change, every comment added, every image uploaded, every date revised. When a dispute arises about whether a defect was reported within the warranty window, the Activity Log shows the exact timestamp of the first entry. When the builder claims a defect was not formally submitted, the log shows when the status moved to Progressing and who made that change.
What a warranty period looks like managed this way
A new 50-metre motor yacht completes delivery sea trials and the captain begins the warranty tracking process. The vessel's GA plan is uploaded in Area Setup across five decks, with each space mapped and location markers added for every significant system and area.
Over the first three months, 160 warranty items are logged across engineering, interior, deck, and AV systems. Each is on the Project List, pinned to its location, with annotated photos and a priority set. The Dashboard shows the count of open items, how many are Urgent, and how many are Paused awaiting builder response.
The owner's rep, based off-vessel, has Guest access to the site. They can see every open warranty item, filter by department or priority, and review the annotated photos without needing a briefing call. When the owner asks for a status update, the owner's rep filters the Project List to Urgent and High items and generates a Full Report as PDF — every item's location, photos, status, and history — and sends it from the application directly to the owner's email. The update takes ten minutes, not an afternoon.
At the six-month mark, the builder's warranty manager visits for a rectification trip. The captain filters the Project List to items assigned to that visit, prints the report, and hands it over on arrival. The manager works through the list in location order, moving through the vessel deck by deck. Each item they complete is marked done on the mobile app. The Activity Log records the timestamp and their name against each closure.
At twelve months, the warranty period closes. The captain generates a Full Report of all completed warranty items as a PDF: 143 of the original 160 resolved, 17 disputed or outstanding. That report is the vessel's warranty record. It was built item by item across the year, not reconstructed from email threads and spreadsheet exports at the deadline.
The thing new-build teams find out too late
Here is the non-obvious point about yacht warranty management: the value of good documentation is not apparent during the warranty period. It becomes apparent when the warranty period ends and a disputed item goes to arbitration, when the vessel is sold and the buyer's surveyor asks for the defect history from the first year, or when a recurring fault on a two-year-old vessel needs to be traced back to whether it was reported under warranty or surfaced after the obligation expired.
The crews who manage warranty tracking in a spreadsheet are not being careless. They are using the tool that was available and managing an administrative load that was not anticipated in the delivery planning. The cost of that approach is invisible during the year and visible only in the specific moments when the record needs to be complete, precise, and legally defensible. Those moments are exactly when a well-maintained Activity Log, a complete annotated photo library, and a timestamped status history are worth considerably more than the time it took to build them.