A lost bill is not a lost warranty

The bill is the paper most homes lose first. It is thermal paper that fades, it lives in a drawer that gets cleared, and nobody thinks about it again until the machine stops working and the service centre asks for it.

A warranty is the maker's promise about the machine. The bill is one way of showing when and where you bought it — an important one, but not the only one. Two consumer-commission orders show what happened when the original paper was gone.

What a shop owes you

The Consumer Protection Act, 2019 lists, among unfair trade practices, "not issuing bill or cash memo or receipt for the goods sold or services rendered".³ So ask for a bill every time. And if you lose the original, the shop that issued it is the first place to ask for a copy.

A duplicate bill was enough

In Salora International Limited vs Arti Gupta, the buyer had a mobile phone with a one-year warranty that gave trouble from the start. The service centre refused to take it because she had only a duplicate bill, issued by the dealer in place of the original she had lost.¹

The District Forum in New Delhi ordered the company to take the handset back, refund its price of ₹10,650, and pay ₹6,000 as compensation and ₹1,000 as costs. The company appealed, mainly on the ground that the order had been passed without hearing it. The State Commission in Delhi dismissed the appeal on 20 February 2008.

A lost card and an affidavit

In Samsung India Electronics Limited vs Satyavart Sadani, a television bought from the maker's authorised dealer abroad stopped working within its one-year warranty. The service engineer asked for the international warranty certificate; the buyer had lost it, and the company would not repair the set without it.²

He had the bill, and he filed an affidavit saying the certificate was lost. The District Forum in Raipur ordered the set repaired and ₹10,000 paid as compensation, with ₹3,000 as costs. The Chhattisgarh State Commission dismissed the company's appeal on 26 May 2014, noting that it had not been able to rebut the buyer's account.

Both buyers had lost a paper. Neither had lost everything.

What these two show — and what they do not

They are two orders, from two state commissions, each decided on its own facts. They are not a rule that every service centre or every commission will follow. What they do show is that the question a commission asked was whether the purchase and the fault were shown, not whether one particular piece of paper survived.

Notice, too, what each buyer still had: a duplicate bill from the dealer in one case; the bill and a sworn statement in the other. Neither went in with nothing.

What to keep

• The bill, or a clear photograph of it, on the day it comes home — before the thermal print fades.
• The online order's invoice, which usually stays in your account on the seller's site.
• The payment record — the card or UPI statement shows the date and the amount.
• The warranty card, with the date it was filled in, and the installation slip if there was one.
• Every complaint number and every service visit, with its date.