Most service centres start with a complaint register: a notebook at the counter or an Excel sheet on the front desk computer. It works until it doesn’t. This guide gives you the columns a good register needs, a free template you can use today, and the signs that you’ve outgrown it.
What is a complaint register?
A complaint register is the list of every service request your business receives: who called, what is broken, who is fixing it and where the job stands. For an AC, RO, appliance, mobile or electronics service business it is the single most important record you keep. If a job isn’t in the register, it gets forgotten.
The columns every complaint register needs
These are the fields that matter when a customer calls back asking “what happened to my job?”
| Column | Why you need it |
|---|---|
| Complaint number | A unique number the customer can quote. Never reuse one. |
| Date and time received | To see how long a job has been open. |
| Customer name and phone | The phone number is how you find repeat customers. |
| Address / area | To plan technician routes for home visits. |
| Product, brand and model | What you are repairing, e.g. “Split AC, 1.5 ton”. |
| Serial number | Needed for warranty claims with the brand. |
| Warranty / AMC / paid | Decides who pays for the visit and parts. |
| Fault reported | In the customer’s words, e.g. “not cooling”. |
| Assigned technician | One owner for every job. |
| Sent to service centre | For jobs you send outside: where, and when it went. |
| Status | Pick from a fixed list: Open, Assigned, Waiting for parts, At service centre, Ready, Closed. |
| Promised date | So you notice overdue jobs before the customer does. |
| Bill amount | What the job earned. |
| Closed on | To measure how fast jobs get done. |
| Remarks | Parts used, what was done, anything for next time. |
Download the free template
We’ve put these columns into a ready-to-use sheet with a few sample rows. It opens in Excel, Google Sheets or LibreOffice.
Download the complaint register template (CSV)
Three tips to keep it useful:
- Use a dropdown for Status. In Excel, select the column and use Data → Data Validation → List. Free text like “done?”, “ok” and “pending parts” makes the sheet impossible to filter.
- Add a filter row (Data → Filter) so you can show only open jobs, or only one technician’s jobs.
- Colour overdue jobs. Conditional formatting on “Promised date is before today and Status is not Closed” turns forgotten jobs red.
Signs you’ve outgrown the register
A sheet is fine for one person handling a few jobs a day. These are the signs it has stopped working:
- Two people edit the same file and changes get lost, or someone works from an old copy on WhatsApp.
- Technicians call the office to ask what their next job is, because they can’t see the sheet on their phone.
- Jobs at outside service centres disappear. Nobody remembers to follow up until the customer complains.
- You can’t answer simple questions like “how many jobs did we close last month?” or “which technician has the most open work?” without an hour of sorting.
- You re-type the same customer every time they call, with a slightly different spelling each time.
- Billing is a separate step, so you type the job details again into an invoice.
If three or more of these sound familiar, the register is costing you more time than it saves.
What complaint management software does differently
Software like Nova RCMS keeps the same columns, but everyone works on one live list from any phone or computer. When you type a phone number it finds the existing customer. Each job has an owner, jobs sent to service centres are tracked on their own screen, and overdue work shows up on the dashboard. You can print an invoice from the job and export everything to Excel when you need to. The documentation shows how logging and assigning a complaint works, step by step.