Equipment Rental Software for Long-Term Rentals
Managing facilities and retail stores, all the inventory and resources, saleable and rental items can really be a handful of tasks. Altogether, they make your life difficult and business complex. On top of that, rental businesses find it a daunting task that they have to manage periodic and long-term rentals. All those activities that involve scheduling rentals on different time periods and then preparing invoices for them. To help businesses out, an online equipment rental software comes in handy which enables them to set up recurrences for items that are rented out for long periods. This helps businesses generate invoices at regular and predetermined intervals that occur in a rental cycle.
Businesses and consumers continue to realize the benefits of renting and how it can positively impact the bottom line. As a result, the equipment rental industry continues to outperform the general economy as well as the industries it serves.
Short-Term Versus Long-Term Rentals
For businesses renting out their equipment and tools, the dilemma between long-term and short-term rentals has always been complicated. Being in the rental industry, you have to know that each of the two represents a different market segment of the rental industry and does come with its own challenges.
Say, you have rented out some lighting equipment to people who want to use it for an event that may go on for 3 days. For this rental, you’ll just book and bill the customer for 3 days and expect a return within 3 days. That’s more like a short-term rental. But when an RV is leased out for 6 weeks with weekly payments, that’s a long-term rental scenario. Same goes for renting a loader to a construction agency which will use it till the project is completed – that can be months or a couple of years.
Managing long-term rentals is much easier as compared to short-term rentals. Short-term rentals will require owners to keep managing bookings, check-ins, checkouts, and regular maintenance. However, business owners prefer short-term rentals – considering the total income per year, short-term rentals give higher income than long-term. They offer flexibility. Long-term rentals come with consistent payment plans and reduced monthly utility costs which can be charged to the customer. Both has its own set of pros and cons. Fortunately, you can find a solution that best manages both types of rentals.
Benefits of Using an Online Equipment Rental Software
There’s no denying the facts. Rental industry is at its peak and its forecast calls for a consistent growth. According to the ARA Rental Market Monitor 5-year forecast that was updated in early November, total rental revenue in the U.S. is expected to grow by 4.5 percent in 2018 to reach $51.5 billion, 5.5 percent in 2019, 4.9 percent in 2020 and 4.1 percent in 2021. Click here to know more predictions for rental industry in the upcoming years.
Below are some of the prominent benefits of an online rental software that your business can enjoy:
- It is cost and time efficient
- Businesses can enjoy complete data security and integrity
- It increases customer retention
- It helps you lower the upfront costs
- Businesses can decrease financial losses and uncertainties
- It offers customizability, scalability, and flexibility
- Increases online visibility via webstore
- You get complete access control over all inventory from anywhere and anytime
Read more: 7 Reasons Online Rental Software makes sense for your Business
How a Rental Software treats Long-Term Rentals?
Using an online rental software, you can set up recurrences and auto-generate invoices as per the desired billing period. Comes in handy when leasing an RV for 6 weeks with weekly payments. Special views for recurrences enables to track a single order instead of getting bogged down with dozens of invoices. The usual behavior in setting up a recurrence on an order involves activating recurrence to that order and configuring details like at what duration the recurrence must take place – e.g. a limousine to be used for 3 days every month on the 13th of every month for an event. You can create an order, add a rental limousine to it and activate monthly recurrence on it.
Here are some of the best ways an online equipment rental software helps you in managing your long-term rentals:
1. MONTHLY BILLING AND INVOICING
With the help of equipment rental software, you can set a default billing period for long-term rentals. This helps you eliminate all that invoice clutter by setting up recurring billing and auto-generating invoices every week, month or year.
Using the tool, you can generate an invoice against an order at any point in time. The software supports an invoice designer which lets you customize order printouts or invoices so that you can set up invoices as you like. Talking about long-term rentals, say, you’ve rented out a Ski bundle for 5 weeks, with the recurrence duration set to a week. Automatic invoices will be generated in the form of fresh orders every week for the next five weeks. You can also send the invoice to a customer directly from the order details.
An online rental software enables businesses to integrate with several third-party tools like accounting software for order and invoice management. QuickBooks is one of the most popular and top-rated accounting software. If you’re using QuickBooks, an online equipment rental software can be seamlessly integrated with it. All the equipment rental transactions appear in QuickBooks where the invoices are synced and payment are tracked. You can track all recurring orders’ invoices within the app as well.
Read more: Benefits of Third-Party Integrations with Online Rental Software
2. DETAILED REPORTING ON LONG-TERM RENTALS
Analytics help you shape better decisions and strategize effectively. With well-noted reports, you can get insights into customers preferences and equipment usage, and predict future trends for rentals – both short-term and long-term. With a handful of filters, you can easily make sense of large amounts of data. Growth graphs are also part of the package to show how you’re performing. This and more can be gathered through a rental software for long-term rentals.
It’s not necessary to only conduct detailed reporting to help you balance your financial books – in-depth reporting helps you gather data-backed evidence to make informed business decisions. Choosing the right rental software for your business, then, means researching and then shortlisting a system that supports reporting. This enables you to keep working long even after a particular rental has ended.
With online rental software, your transaction reports are sortable, searchable, downloadable, and updated in real-time. On top of that, you have the ability to customize and schedule all order and item reports via the same reporting feature. This gives you the access to data that’s most helpful and relevant to your rental business’s success. You can streamline all the data on long-term rentals in an online rental software under the reports module where you can set filters to track recurring orders. This and data on who created the long-term rental and sale orders, specific customers, order status, and the dates of order creation and completion can be filtered via detailed reporting – all based on your set preferences.
3. AUTOMATE RECURRENCE FOR BETTER ORDER MANAGEMENT
When you add recurrence to an order, the states of that order changes accordingly. An order starts off as a drafted rental order where you activate recurrence on it. You either confirm the order or rent it out. The next phase is where the order is active as a long-term rental and recurrence on this order will be generated automatically, e.g. an invoice will be generated automatically and items put to ‘rented out’ state, say, every 1 week for 2 days the next 5 weeks. The recurring orders feature allow businesses to link multiple orders together via a recurrence on the same page.
When recurrence is added to a drafted order, the availability cues shown take the full recurrence period into account. In a robust long-term rentals software, the fast way to keep tabs on all your recurrent orders is through the ‘Recurrences’ section. This is especially helpful if you want to be able to see the full order and payment history for a recurrence. They have the ability to stop or start recurrence to an order any time – though, manual intervention must take place to start and stop a long-term rental order.
The feature helps businesses streamline and automate orders and invoices. This helps them charge payments to customers seamlessly without having to send them invoices every time the rental cycle starts. Invoices are automatically created as per the frequency you’ve chosen when adding the recurrence to a long-term rental order.
Read more: Grow your Business using Rental Management Software
Choosing EZRentOut for managing Long Term Rentals!
EZRentOut keeps its fingers on the pulse of the rental industry. Our customers tell us they find the periodic and automatic invoicing of long-term rentals to be a challenge. This is why our Recurring Orders feature enables you to set up recurrences for items that have been lent out for long periods, generating invoices at regular predetermined intervals in the rental cycle. Learn More
Say, you rent out equipment such as projectors or learning devices to customers in the educational field for as long as they have a need for it. Charging payments for such rentals – that continue for a substantial duration is not helpful. One of the most common reasons includes facing cash flow problems because the money is all tied up in long-term rentals. With that, there’s always the risk of customers lagging behind on payments.
Creating new orders manually each time can consume a substantial amount of your company resources. EZRentOut addresses these problems by enabling businesses to add order recurrences automatically. This lets you split up the total amount payable over smaller periods – say, daily, weekly, or monthly cycles. The customer will also be notified of the impending payments each month. Your customers can also see the invoices when they log into their EZRentOut customer portal.
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EZRentOut is an equipment rental management software, used extensively by organizations and small businesses globally, for streamlined long-term rental management to increase business productivity and revenue.
