We delivered an AI Warranty Claims Manager for a second-generation West Ashley heating and air company running fourteen trucks — one that reads the technician's ticket and the data plate photo, registers every new install before the window closes, files each manufacturer claim in its own format with the labor allowance attached, and catches the covered repairs that were being billed to customers.

His father started the company in 1988 with one van and a listing in the Yellow Pages. It runs fourteen trucks now out of a yard off Savannah Highway, installs around 340 systems a year, and services several thousand more across West Ashley, Johns Island and down toward Ravenel. He took it over in 2014. The money was not leaking anywhere dramatic.

It was leaking through paperwork, in three separate places, and he had known that for years without being able to say how much. The first place is registration. Every system he installs carries a ten-year parts warranty if it is registered with the manufacturer within sixty days, and five years if it is not. Registration is a web form somebody has to fill out.

When the crew is running behind, it does not get filled out. A review of the last eleven months found 214 installs never registered — every one of them silently cut in half, and nobody would learn that until a compressor failed in year seven and a customer got a bill. The second is claims. A part replaced under warranty has to be filed with the serial number, the install date, the failure code, and in most cases the defective part physically returned inside a deadline.

His technicians write tickets on paper in a truck. The tickets come back smudged, sometimes days late, often missing the serial. His office manager filed what she could reconstruct. Approval was running at 61 percent, and a meaningful number were simply never filed at all.

The third is the labor allowance, which he had mostly given up on. Each of the three manufacturers he carries pays a flat labor amount per repair code, each has a different schedule, and claiming it means knowing the code and attaching it correctly. He was leaving most of it on the table because looking it up per job was not worth the time. The AI Warranty Claims Manager works from what the technician already produces.

A photo of the ticket and a photo of the equipment data plate. It reads the model and serial off the plate, pulls the install date out of his own service history, identifies the manufacturer, determines which warranty is actually in force — registered or not, parts or parts-and-labor, in window or out — and says so before any work is quoted. Then it assembles the claim. Right portal, right format, right failure code, the labor allowance looked up and attached, and the defective-part return tracked with its deadline.

Nothing sits in a pile waiting for someone to reconstruct it on a Friday. The defective parts get handled too, which sounds trivial and is not. Each manufacturer wants its returns in a different window and some want the failed part before they will pay. Every claim now prints a tag with the claim number and the return-by date, the parts go on a labeled shelf in the order they are due, and the ones approaching a deadline surface on Monday instead of being discovered in a milk crate in November.

The technicians get the other end of it. Before a repair is quoted, the warranty status comes back to the phone in the crawlspace — covered, not covered, covered for parts but not labor — so the number the customer hears the first time is the right one. His office manager no longer spends Friday afternoons reconstructing the week from paper. It went backward through the eleven-month backlog first.

Of the 214 unregistered installs, 96 were still inside a window the manufacturer would honor, and those were registered. Forty-one unfiled or partially filed claims were rebuilt from the tickets and submitted. The part he did not expect was the fourth leak, which nobody had been looking for. In going through the history it found nineteen repairs over two years where the system was still under warranty and the customer had been invoiced for the part anyway — not dishonestly, just because the tech in the crawlspace had no way to know.

He refunded them. That one is not a money problem. First quarter under the new process: $71,000 in claims filed, 94 percent approved, and labor allowance claimed on every eligible job for the first time since his father ran it. "We weren't losing to the competition," he said.

"We were losing to paperwork we already owned."