The callback is a job too. It just does not invoice.
A warranty or defect claim is a job that costs you and earns nothing, on a timetable set by the Australian Consumer Law and your state regulator. Tracking it means linking the callback to the original job, the material to the supplier claim, and the credit to the accounts — so the cost is known rather than absorbed.
The clock is not yours to set
Consumer guarantees under the Australian Consumer Law apply to goods and to services, including that services be carried out with due care and skill and within a reasonable time, and they cover business purchases up to $100,000 including GST as well as household ones (ACCC, Consumer rights and guarantees, checked September 2026). They do not expire when your warranty does: the ACCC's position is that after a warranty expires "the consumer guarantee of acceptable quality usually still applies" (ACCC, Warranties, checked September 2026).
If you offer a written warranty at all, it has to carry mandatory wording. For services supplied after 9 June 2019 the text begins "Our services come with guarantees that cannot be excluded under the Australian Consumer Law" and goes on to spell out the remedies for a major failure (ACCC, Warranties, checked September 2026). A warranty document without it is a compliance problem before it is a customer one.
None of this is software. It is why the defect record has to exist and has to be findable years later — the same retrieval problem as compliance documents, with a customer on the phone instead of an inspector.
Queensland and New South Wales run different clocks
For building work the timetable is set by the state regulator, and the two largest states disagree with each other. If you work across the border, your system has to know which clock applies to which job.
- KNDR·01Queensland: 12 months for non-structuralA QBCC complaint about non-structural defects has to be lodged no later than 12 months from completion; for structural defects, within 12 months of noticing the defect, and QBCC can direct rectification up to 6 years and 6 months from completion (QBCC, Help with defective work, checked September 2026). The homeowner has to give you written notice of every defective item with a timeframe — QBCC's example is 14 days — before applying.
- KNDR·02Queensland: the home warranty schemeCover for non-structural defects runs 6 months from completion with claims within 7 months; structural cover runs 6 years 6 months from the earliest of contract date, premium payment or commencement, with claims within 3 months of noticing (QBCC, Home warranty for defective work claims, checked September 2026). And building work over $3,300 needs a QBCC licence in the first place (QBCC, When you need a licence, checked September 2026).
- KNDR·03New South Wales: 6 years and 2 yearsUnder the Home Building Act 1989 the statutory warranty runs 6 years from completion for major defects and 2 years for all other defects, with an extra 6 months to commence proceedings if the breach is found in the last 6 months of the period (Building Commission NSW, Building defect complaints, checked September 2026).
What a defect claim actually costs, and where it hides
A callback is booked as a job because that is the only way to schedule it. Then it is closed with no invoice, and it disappears. Nobody adds up the closed-at-zero jobs, so nobody knows what defects cost the business last year, or which supplier’s product caused a third of them.
Average weekly ordinary time earnings for Australian full-time adults were $2,083.70, seasonally adjusted, in May 2026 — about $55 an hour over a 38-hour week before on-costs. Add 12% super and the loaded figure is about $61 an hour before leave, insurance or a vehicle (ABS, Average Weekly Earnings, Australia, May 2026; ATO, Super guarantee, current rate).
Two tradespeople, half a day, plus the part: at $61 an hour that is roughly $490 in labour alone before the fitting and the fuel. Ten of those a year is about $4,900 in labour you did not invoice and probably did not claim from the supplier whose part failed. The hiding place is the job list, and the fix is a flag.
What the job systems hold, and what they do not
Both platforms we build against hold assets and service history. ServiceM8 creates assets against a client with a unique QR code label, completes inspection forms against them and generates a service report on completion — its feature page does not mention warranty dates or defect tracking (ServiceM8, Asset management, checked September 2026). Simpro's asset maintenance tracks test results, alerts when an asset "fails testing" and records failure points and recommendations through the Maintenance Planner add-on (Simpro, Asset maintenance, checked September 2026).
Neither has a native concept of "this job is a warranty callback on that job, and this part is claimable from that supplier". That is the join we build: a flag on the job, a link to the original, a link to the supplier bill the part came from, and a credit note expected in Xero or MYOB that somebody chases if it does not arrive.
It is deliberately boring. The clever version — a model deciding whether the defect is your fault — is the version we argue against, because that is a judgement a licensed tradesperson makes on site and a lawyer makes if it goes wrong.
What it will not do
Decide liability. Whether a leak is your workmanship, a failed product or the customer’s misuse is a decision, not a data point, and the software records the decision rather than making it.
Make you compliant. It makes the defect record consistent and retrievable inside the periods above. Whether your obligations are met is between you, the regulator and your adviser, which is the same position we take on every compliance question.
Fix a product problem. If the report shows one supplier behind a third of your callbacks, the automation has done its job. The next step is a conversation with the rep, and it is the most valuable outcome on this page.
Where this does not pay
A handful of callbacks a year. Write them on the whiteboard, put the supplier claim in a folder, and spend the money on quotes that did not come back instead.
Work with no material component — pure labour trades have defect risk but no supplier claim, and the record is a flag on the job that any system can carry without a build.
And if the original job data is thin — no photos, no asset, no materials booked — there is nothing for the callback to link to. Fixing capture on the first visit is the prior step, and it is the argument on the quote-to-invoice page from the other end.
What we have not measured, and what we would measure for you
There is no reliable published Australian figure for how long logging, linking and recovering the cost of warranty callbacks takes in a small business, and we are not going to borrow one from a vendor whitepaper to make this page more persuasive. Most numbers you will see quoted for this were produced by companies selling the fix.
What we would do instead is count it on one of your jobs. Follow a single job end to end, note every time a human touches this step, and multiply by what that person costs loaded. That is a real number about your business and it takes an afternoon.
You can run the arithmetic yourself first — the leak calculator uses ABS, Average Weekly Earnings, Australia, May 2026 for the wage default and ATO, Super guarantee, current rate for super, and returns a range rather than a single confident figure. If the range comes back under our minimum engagement, that is a real answer and you should stop there.
The questions people actually ask.
01Can’t we just book callbacks as no-charge jobs?
You can, and most do. The problem is that a no-charge job with no link to the original looks the same as a courtesy visit, and neither is ever added up. The flag and the link are the whole build; if your system already lets you report on them, you do not need us.
02Will it tell us whether we have to fix it?
No. It tells you when the job finished, which clock applies, and whether the customer’s notice arrived inside it. Whether the defect is yours is a decision for the person who looks at it, and sometimes for your lawyer.
03Where are your case studies?
Not published, because we do not have measured before-and-after numbers we can stand behind yet, and a case study without them is a story. Kindra AI was founded in 2025. When the measurements exist they will appear here with the sample size attached.
Stop bending.
Start shipping.
Bring the one flow that keeps costing you a Tuesday afternoon. We map it live and tell you what we'd build, what we wouldn't, and what it costs.