Your rental inventory is the main source of your rental business’s revenue. From heavy-duty construction tools to small hand tools, maintaining your fleet can be a cumbersome task.
Therefore, you can’t afford to lose equipment, ignore maintenance issues, or have conflicting bookings. This is where an equipment rental system can really have your back.
A rental item’s useful life can be heavily impacted by negligence on your part resulting in hefty losses for your company. In order to avoid this fate, you need to keep your machines working at top functionality. The software solution helps you keep an eye on every aspect of your rental activity from a single platform, hence ensuring your business runs smoothly.
Here’s how an online equipment rental system streamlines your rental business:
1. Tracks the availability of your rental equipment
Don’t you think a real-time overview of your inventory should always be at your fingertips? It really helps you gauge company performance so you can always plan ahead. On the other hand, manually tracking rental equipment can be straining, time-consuming, and extremely prone to errors.
An automated system like an equipment rental system allows you to quickly view your inventory and tasks in real-time with an extremely user-friendly availability calendar. It lets you manage bookings efficiently and see if orders are overdue for return by customers. It also automates customer reminders so they too can always be on top of their orders.
With an online rental system, it takes a split second to know the status of your rental fleet. You can see all the equipment that has been rented out, the equipment that is out for maintenance, and the equipment that needs to be returned. This allows you to make alternate arrangements in case there is a shortage of a particular rental item.
2. Manage bookings and reservations
It is crucial for rental businesses to streamline orders so they can keep customers happy enough that they order again from your business.
It is a daunting task to manually reserve hundreds of orders and keep track of equipment available for bookings. Sometimes customers need to reserve equipment with specific details, for example, they want the rented out equipment to be delivered on a specific date and between a specific time mentioned. In case you forget to note this detail down, your customers will be frustrated.
This makes it essential to use an online rental system that can manage bookings and reservations for you. The system is capable of processing bookings and recording important customer information from reservations to your availability calendar. It saves specific booking details and alerts you when it’s due.
The system also informs you which equipment is available so it’s easier to reserve items and avoid conflicting bookings. If the rental equipment is unavailable and is still reserved, then the system will automatically warn you of a conflicted booking. Reserving available items saves you from the last-minute hassle of equipment non-availability.
During peak business hours, it is also possible that customers want to add more items or extend rental periods for their orders. With the help of an online rental system, you can easily update bookings as per requirements. Accommodating last-minute changes will make your customers satisfied.
3. Automate billings and payments
Payments are a huge hassle for equipment rental companies. Oftentimes, customers book equipment in advance but don’t show up for payment. This means that your equipment incurs losses during the time period that someone else could have booked it.
Online equipment rental software offers multiple payment options to customers, including prepayments via cash, credit cards, or PayPal. This way, your customers are not likely to bypass payments and you don’t have to worry about losing out on sales.
The equipment rental system allows customers to pay online via payment gateways like Stripe, Authorize.net, and PayPal.
The payment process is generally encrypted and protected by SSL security protocol which makes it a safe option for convenient payments. The system is also equipped to handle substantial data like transaction details and customer information which makes it a neat choice for managing rental payments.
4. Maintain rental equipment for long-term use
Keeping equipment in top-notch condition is important for the operational longevity of your fleet. In order for the equipment to remain in good condition, timely maintenance and service checks need to be done.
For example, you’re the owner of a construction rental business. You’ve rented out the heavy machinery to a customer outside the city. What if the equipment suddenly stops working? By the time you get there and figure out what went wrong, the damage could be serious and costly as well.
Frequent maintenance checkups can be easily done with an online rental system. You can create service alerts before equipment is checked out. You can service a checklist to conduct a thorough inspection before the item is rented out.
When the item is checked in, the online rental system automates the process of sending the items directly into maintenance. The system also alerts you of when maintenance is due and makes the equipment unavailable until it is completely maintained.
Regular maintenance and service checkups prolong the life of your equipment, improve performance, and keep the equipment in top shape.
5. Reports allow a simplified analysis of your operations
Competition in the rental industry is excessive which is why so many companies are trying to automate their work operations. In this pursuit, an equipment rental system can help provide in-depth visibility into your operations. It also ensures flexibility by generating various reports for you based on sales, maintenance issues, product utilization, profitability, and much more.
Furthermore, an equipment rental system can represent order information in easy-to-interpret graphs so you can keep tabs on your sales and make essential business decisions in a timely manner. Monitoring your operational performance on a swift and regular basis allows you to stay ahead of your competition.
6. Provides your customers with a live online store
It can be very frustrating if your customers are not able to view which items are available for renting out.
Equipment rental systems normally come with front-end online stores visible to customers. These online stores show item availability to customers in the form of a catalog so they can browse through available options and make bookings accordingly.
Moreover, many brick-and-mortar stores do not operate 24/7, whereas these live online stores work throughout the day, allowing your customers to order whenever they feel like it without having to deal with pushy sales staff and a long drive!
7. Sends customized emails to your customers
Quick response times are extremely essential to the rental industry. Equipment rental software allows you to customize email alerts for customers so that they can be sent for activities such as order booking, payment reception or order cancellation, etc.
Customer data can be synced with the equipment rental system and customized emails can be sent to customers. This greatly adds to your customer service and keeps your customers coming back, without you making a tedious effort of drafting individual emails for each customer.
Effective Rental Management Gears You Toward Success
Efficient rental management can directly lead to surging profits. This makes integrating with an equipment rental system pivotal to most rental operations. With a host of functions from order booking, payment processing, data management, to online store visibility and effective customer service in one platform, you can streamline the entire rental workflow.
It is also important to take note of the shifting trend towards online orders. Since most people now prefer placing orders online and receiving their deliveries as soon as possible, equipment rental systems that support an online store can help make your rental business more reliable, flawless, and accessible at all times.
About EZRentOut
We are an online equipment rental system, designed to offer businesses seamless rental management with a host of other features like asset tracking, maintenance management, a Webstore, and much more. Try us out today!
