Small rental businesses are always striving to keep costs down while growing and optimizing operations. One way to increase efficiency and impact the bottom line is to streamline your order management.
As you grow your customer base and increase the volume of orders, it is important to build a scalable, efficient, and accurate order management system. Few organizations approach order management from a holistic, integrated viewpoint to achieve a scalable order management process as the business grows. This can be an underinvested area but you can give your operations a boost by incorporating a small business order management software.
Benefits of small business order management software
The key advantage for small businesses is automation and customer satisfaction. Once you eliminate manual processes you will save time, reduce human error and cost. Small business order management software reduces the total time your team spends processing and fulfilling an order from hours to minutes. They can then spend that additional time on revenue-producing tasks such as customer outreach. As you improve speed and accuracy, it leads to satisfied customers who get what they need on time, and as promised.
Here are some key ways order management software can help your small business scale and ensure great customer service:
1. Automate the ordering process
A critical element of order management is the workflow that ensures orders are properly tracked. A small business order management software records all order details such as items, item quantities, shipping, and delivery addresses and every step of the process becomes easier.
Creating a rental order is easy when item availability is easily available for conflict-free bookings. Once the order is created, the software continuously tracks the order state as rented out or order complete and you can visualize it on the dashboard. The payments due are also automatically managed by the software.
Having the right items available at the right time for an order is crucial when you’re running a rental business. An integrated order management software for small businesses increases accuracy and reliability leading to customer satisfaction.
2. Real-time inventory management
Small businesses often find it challenging to maintain optimal inventory levels. Stock too much inventory and you can lose money as it sits on the shelf, but stock too little and you can lose revenue because you may not be able to fulfill orders.
This is when it’s important to have small business order management software to track and maintain optimal inventory levels. A stock manager can closely track key metrics via a snapshot view of all inventory-related activities. This can help to monitor inventory levels and reorder stock to meet future rental orders.
They can also use the software to set customized thresholds for different locations depending on the unique needs of customers. Set KPIs for inventory sold, low inventory, or inventory reservations, and always stay on top of statistics that matter the most.
Good inventory management can help small businesses reduce excess inventory costs and maximize sales. Small rental businesses can apply FIFO/AVCO inventory valuation methods so items are rented out in the same chronological order as when they were purchased.
Keeping track of inventory in real-time can help forecast demand, prevent stock shortages, and boost profitability.
3. Seamless invoice management
When you are a small business owner with slim profit margins, you need to be extra vigilant about accurate order invoicing to get timely payments and thorough insights into expenses. An order management software can generate and track your invoices smoothly.
Different projects require different payment plans so it is best to agree upon a set of invoices between customers and owners. The software allows you to generate multi-installment, recurring or single payment invoices according to the payment plan decided. Once the invoices are ready, the system automatically sends them to relevant customers and marks the status as sent. The payment process is also linked to invoice duration such as set to the bill after every one day after a week for recurring orders.
A seamless invoice generation and payment with order management software mitigate accounting problems, regularizes cash flow, and saves time.
4. Route management with small business order management software
Moving your routes to cloud-based solutions will help to modernize your small rental business. With a click of a button, you can optimize route planning in a couple of minutes and move to other important tasks.
With order management software, you can easily locate shipping and delivery addresses with GPS coordinates. Multiple shipping addresses can be linked to a customer for convenient delivery. You can also flexibly link items to the office, warehouse, or any other location. Track and visualize your items across different locations on an interactive map with location barcode management.
Efficient route planning can help simplify workday planning and increase efficiency.
5. Order management reports
A small business order management software will enable you to effectively use the data within the system to run business analytics reports. Use filters to specifically focus on data that is important to you and generate graphs to visualize results and trends over a period of time.
The most important factor for a small business owner is to continuously strive for an increase in rental orders. Here you can filter the peak days when maximum orders are rented out. You can then strategically analyze and set discounts on these days to increase orders.
Customized reporting capability enables deep business insights that can help significantly increase order management efficiency and impact your bottom line.
About EZRentOut
EZRentOut, a cloud-based equipment rental software can help. EZRentOut offers companies in numerous industries seamless rental management along with a host of other features. You can integrate your website with our EZR plug to keep track of all your rental Assets and operations.
