How to Keep Track of Warranties on iPhone: Receipts, Expiry Reminders and the One-Hour Setup for Everything You Own

The pattern is always the same. The dishwasher starts leaking, you are fairly sure it is less than two years old, and the receipt is either in an email you cannot find, a drawer of thermal paper that has faded to white, or a camera roll somewhere between a holiday and a screenshot of a recipe. By the time you find it, you have either missed the warranty by a month or spent an evening you will not get back.

This post is a one-hour setup for never doing that again, using Warranty Tracker & Receipt Log, a small iPhone app built for exactly this job. It also covers, honestly, when you do not need an app at all.

What the app actually does

Warranty Tracker & Receipt Log stores each product you buy with its receipt photo, purchase date, price, store, serial number, notes and warranty length, then counts down to the expiry and reminds you before it arrives. The home screen shows how many items are active, expiring soon or expired, and the total value still under warranty. Everything stays on the phone: there is no account, no cloud, no analytics and no ads. It is a one-time purchase of $0.99 on the App Store, requires iOS 17 or later, is iPhone-only, and is available in 19 languages.

That is the whole feature list, and the smallness is deliberate. There is no sync between devices in this version, no receipt scanning with text recognition, and no cloud backup beyond your normal iPhone backup. If you need those, this is not your app; if you want the receipt and the date in one place and a nudge before it is too late, it is.

The one-hour setup

Do this once, on a weekend, with a cup of something. The goal is not to log everything you have ever bought; it is to log the things that would cost real money to replace and are still inside their warranty.

• Walk the house with the phone. Kitchen appliances, laptop, phone, TV, headphones, the bike, power tools, the kids' tablet, the mattress (many carry long guarantees people forget), the washing machine. Make a list on paper first; it goes faster than adding as you go.
• Find the proof for each. For online orders, search your email for the store name and screenshot the order confirmation. For shop purchases, the receipt or the card statement line. For gifts, the giver's order email counts. A photo of the product's serial-number sticker is worth adding while you are standing in front of it.
• Add each item. Tap +, type the name and store, enter the price and purchase date, pick a category. Tap the warranty length: 6 months, 1, 2, 3 or 5 years, or type any number of months. If you bought an extended warranty, add it; the app combines the manufacturer and extended periods into one total coverage period with one expiry date.
• Attach the photos. Take the receipt photo in the app or pick it from your library; several photos per item are allowed and they are stored at full resolution with pinch-to-zoom, so a faded till receipt stays legible as long as the photo was sharp.
• Set the reminders once. In Settings, choose any combination of 90, 60, 30, 14, 7 and 1 day before expiry, and the time of day. The defaults are 30 and 7 days at 9:00, which suits most people. These are local notifications; nothing is sent anywhere.

Which reminder lead times to pick

The right lead time depends on what you would actually do with the warning. A reminder is only useful if there is an action attached.

• 30 days is the one to keep for everything. It is enough time to notice a fault you have been ignoring, book a repair, and get it looked at while a claim is still possible.
• 90 days is for big-ticket items where you might want to buy an extension, or where a service visit has a long waiting list.
• 7 days is a last call: if anything is slightly wrong with the item, this is the week to report it.
• 1 day is mostly noise unless you are tracking a short return window rather than a warranty.

When a reminder arrives, open the item, read your own notes, and give the product a two-minute inspection. Most warranty claims that are missed are missed because the fault was minor and tolerated, not because nobody knew the date.

Three habits that keep it working

• Add it on the day. The flow is built for phone in one hand, receipt in the other, at the shop door. Twenty seconds then saves twenty minutes later.
• Use the search. When something breaks, search by name, store or serial number rather than scrolling. The serial number is one tap to copy, which is what the support chat will ask for first.
• Export a CSV twice a year. The app exports every item to a CSV file whenever you like. Keep a copy with your insurance documents; a list of what you own, when you bought it and what it cost is exactly what an insurer asks for after a burglary or a flood, and the app has quietly built it for you.

Moving phones and backups

Because the app is single-device by design, the question people ask most is what happens when they get a new iPhone. The answer is the ordinary one: restore the new phone from an iCloud or computer backup and the app comes across with its data, since it is included in your normal iPhone backup. The purchase is tied to your Apple Account, so you are not charged again. If you want belt and braces, export the CSV before the switch. There is no sync between two phones at once, and no way to share the list with a partner's phone other than sending them the CSV.

When a photo album is enough

If you own three things with warranties and you are the kind of person who already knows their dates, make a "Receipts" album in Photos and stop reading. Add a calendar event a month before each expiry and you have most of what the app does for nothing.

The app earns its dollar when the list is longer than you can hold in your head, when the receipt and the date and the serial number need to be in one place, and when you want to be told rather than having to remember. It is also the right choice if you do not want receipts, which can show your address and partial card numbers, uploaded to a subscription service's server; this one never leaves the phone.

Warranty Tracker & Receipt Log is on the App Store for iPhone; the landing page at /apps/warranty-tracker has screenshots of the add flow, the countdown and the reminder settings if you want to see it before buying.