Overcoming the Challenges of Bulk Equipment Rentals (eBook)

This is where robust management of losses becomes extremely important in your rental software. Whether you want to charge the customer for losses when they cut your assets down to size, or just charge them a cutting fee and accept the asset loss as a cost of business, you need to be able to track that within the software application. 

You also need to be able to easily adjust your fleet so that your availability information is visible. If you want to track the number of 20’ scaffolding poles you have against the number of 16’ scaffolding poles, then that means you need a quick way of telling your software that A has now become B. If that change is so significant that it also affects the value of your assets, then that means your change from A to B also needs to generate appropriate postings in your ledger and allow you to do a bulk revaluation of your new totals. 

When it comes to managing bulk equipment, you need to find specialist rental software that tackles these questions head-on. 

Rather than trying to make software designed with a focus on serialized equipment work in your business, look for software that has been designed with flexibility in mind, and can work for bulk assets as easily as it does for serialized assets. 

Of course, most job sites of this type are construction or engineering projects. This also means that ideally, your rental software needs to be able to track project and task codes at the rental line level. It makes it so much easier for your construction client to pay their bills on time when your invoices reflect the job costing system they have internally. Potentially, this may mean also splitting the invoices out by project and task code to make it easier for the customer’s AP team. 

The key here is billing flexibility. Throughout my time in the rental industry, I’ve realized that there is never just one way of doing something and customers drive diversity. Customer X prefers to give you a new PO for each delivery and have a consolidated end-of-month invoice for all their equipment. Customer Y prefers to use a blanket PO and add everything to the same order number even if the project runs for years. Regardless of their preferences, you need to be able to accommodate them both. 

Your rental software is critical in this situation. Everything depends on accurate dates and quantities on your deliveries and pick-ups and your ability to set the rules at a customer level. Mobile apps and quick return processes help support activities in real-time, so that you can limit the number of unloaded trucks in the yard and reduce the chance of inaccurate invoices. 

To back up all this activity you need great reporting. Tools that allow customers and your own internal users to see quickly and accurately how much they have on hand, what’s on rent and see how that total is made up. At the job site, the customer wants to understand not only their current net position, but also every delivery and pickup made since the beginning of the week, the month, the job site inception, or any other milestone that is deemed important. 

When you’re tracking volume rather than individual assets, the key is software designed to follow your business process. Look for flexibility to handle multiple partial deliveries and pickups, contract additions and changes and flexible billing that can be driven by customer preferences. 

In others, the timesheet is only used to capture the time and store it for reporting and costing purposes. In all cases, though, the demand for labor needs to be captured on the rental contract (or even a sales contract). It then needs to be scheduled and ultimately, a timesheet must be captured. 

Tracking the revenue is imperative if you are looking to expand your services to include various forms of labor. Accounting for labor costs (hourly wages, benefits, overtime, etc.) cannot be accurately captured when you set up your personnel as a rental asset. 

Also, take into consideration the labor requirements for specific tasks, or requirements as specified by the customer. Does the task require someone with a special license or certification? Meaning, can this task only be assigned to a particular team or a single person? 

Understanding the limitations of the job, task or your personnel makes allocating labor much easier. 

Also, bear in mind when labor will be needed during the rental process. Will it be at the beginning and end, during the rental, once a week, every day – single or double shift? Once you have defined the requirement, you can then plan out your labor schedule, allocating the right people to the right contracts. This is especially important if you find the need to swap people during the rental, covering multiple shifts or reallocating labor for any other reason.