Companies that rent goods seem to get by with simple software. What you need are goods, a rental price, a rental period and a customer who wants to rent it from you. Not complicated you might say. So you can get started quickly with a simple piece of software. In practice, however, this turns out to be a bit more complex. In recent years I have noticed that there is much more involved, especially in my market. A few examples:
Planning
Obviously, you cannot rent out more goods than are present in your rental fleet. Good insight into what is rented out, which leases are about to start and which are about to end is therefore necessary to serve your customers well and make commitments. Possibly you will recognize that the rental fleet needs to be expanded by hiring temporarily.
Pricing structures
The pricing structure used by rental companies is not complex in itself. A price per week or month and an insurance surcharge of 8% does not seem complicated. However, it does get complicated when a customer rents something for a certain period of time, say a year, and you have a pricing structure with, say, a four-weekly rate. Because how do you deal with those last few days? And how do you deal with different rates for a certain period of time? And how do you handle when you have a combination of weekly and monthly rates and a customer wants to rent something for 4 weeks?
Billing
The above leads to the fact that preparing the periodic invoices is also arithmetically difficult. Especially when it turns out that the rented object could not be used for several days due to a defect. Or that afterwards it turns out that the rental rate used was incorrect. This in turn may lead to proportionally complicated credit notes.
Before and After Rental Service
Objects are often inspected prior to or after rental. They may not be rented out before that. If you have a small rental fleet this can still be kept up to date in Excel, but if you have an extensive rental fleet it is no longer possible to keep track of this manually. Also, the service department will want to plan this Before and After Rental Service and at the same time easily see which objects to check when will be rented out, but also which objects will return from rental when.
History
Renting out a machine is one thing, being able to easily see which machine has been where is another. And for certain machines it will also be interesting to know what the utilization rate has been. Possibly it is so low that you should consider what the added value of these machines is for your rental fleet.
Just a few examples that cannot be controlled with a simple piece of software. This requires more advanced software. If you want to know more about this, feel free to contact me.
Peter Gerhardt is Senior Lead Consultant Logistics at Dysel and helps customers achieve maximum results with its business software.
