Taking Pricing Snapshots with Rental Software

Our rental software supports to ability to take Pricing Snapshots for ease in order management. Read on to learn more.

What is a Pricing Snapshot?

This feature enables you to freeze the rental rates of order items at the point the items were added to an order. This allows pricing consistency by ensuring changes to rental rates do not change these rates within orders.

Getting started

To start off, go to Settings → Company Settings → Policy → Pricing and Payments in Orders. Choose the setting highlighted below:

When can I use this feature?

Say you have the setting above disabled. You’d draft an order, and add an item to it. Note the price of the item highlighted in yellow below:

You might later decide to change the price of that item from the item’s detail page. If you go back to the drafted order now and take an action (such as renting the order out) or edit the order details (such as changing the time of return), the order will update to reflect the new rental rate for that item. This can be seen below:

This can be a problem if you don’t want Active orders to be affected by changes to item rental rates. You can prevent this from happening by using Pricing Snapshots.

When would the Pricing Snapshot kick in?

If the Pricing Snapshot setting is enabled, you could change the rental rates of items and have them not affect active orders when an action is taken or field is edited. The following sequence enables Pricing Snapshots to kick in:

The order has been edited or an action has been taken on it after enabling the setting.
The order is Active. Active orders are any orders that are not in a Completed state, and include any order that is Drafted, Rented Out, Payment Pending, etc.
The setting is enabled before the order is created. For orders created before the setting is enabled, go to the next section.

The process above can be explained as follows:

Please note that whenever we talk about changing the rental rate of an item, we mean changing them from the item’s detail page, not on the order page itself.

Orders created before enabling Pricing Snapshots

In some cases, you might have created active orders before enabling Pricing Snapshots, but would like the item rental rates within those orders to remain unaffected by changes to item rental rates. Pricing Snapshots will enable you to do that.

However, the Pricing Snapshot feature first needs to create a record of the preferred rental rate. This is not possible in the usual way if the order existed before the setting was enabled! In this case, even with the setting enabled, the rate would not revert to the original one. Therefore, you’d need to take a Snapshot manually by clicking the prompt below:

Here’s what that means in simpler terms:

Taking a Pricing Snapshot here manually will allow the system to create a record of the rental rate it should display from this point on.

Note: As shown above, if you’re editing an order after enabling the Pricing Snapshot and before changing an item’s rental rate, the action will serve the same purpose as manually taking a Pricing Snapshot. Think of any action on an order, or the manual Pricing Snapshot itself, as a signal to the system that an order exists, so that it can formally log its item rental rates.

Manually editing item rental rates in orders

You can always manually edit the price of an item in a Drafted order, regardless of the Pricing Snapshot setting being enabled or not. That can be done by clicking on the rate as shown below:

The important thing to remember is that a manual update to the item rental rates in an order will override Pricing Snapshots.

Important notes

Please note that the most recent rental rate preceding the Pricing Snapshot would be remembered by the system if the Pricing Snapshot setting is enabled. A few examples:

Say two or more users are simultaneously changing the rental rates of items before a Pricing Snapshot is taken. Anthony changes the rate to $25 and Rachel changes it a second later to $50. Then, a snapshot is taken. The rental rate would be fixed at $50.
Say you’ve set up ‘Normal’ rental rates for an item which you’ve added to an order, and then updated the item to ‘Advanced’ pricing. Under the Pricing Snapshot settings, your order item rates would be frozen at the Normal rates. To learn more about Advanced Rental Rates, click here.
If you’ve manually edited the rental rate of an item within the order itself and then taken a Pricing Snapshot, the frozen rate would be the one it was manually changed to.

The important point to remember is that the most recent change in rental rates will be preserved in the Pricing Snapshot. And that’s it, you’ve learned all you need to know about the Pricing Snapshot feature in EZRentOut!