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Table of Contents

• What is Equipment Rental Software?
• What are the common features of Equipment Rental Software?
• What are the benefits of Equipment Rental Software?
• How much does Equipment Rental Software cost?
• How to choose the best Equipment Rental Software
• Common questions to ask before choosing the best Equipment Rental Software

What is Equipment Rental Software?

Equipment Rental Software is an online tool that helps construction and rental businesses manage their day-to-day rental operations, track business inventory and valuable assets, and manage orders. The software also assists businesses with back-office operations, such as accounting and reporting of equipment. Businesses can use the tool to calculate asset depreciation and schedule their maintenance by tracking their availability and usage.

Equipment rental solutions allow users to assign barcode or serial numbers to their inventory, which makes it easier to categorize and assign equipment. The software provides rental businesses and equipment dealers with a complete overview of their entire rental department.

What are the common features of Equipment Rental Software?

• Billing and invoicing: Auto-calculates invoice amounts and enables users to send invoices and collect payments. The tool also helps users monitor payment status, overdue invoices, and payment history. It can also generate reports on revenue generated and outstanding payments to help businesses manage their dues more efficiently.
• Inventory management: Stores all asset-related information in one place and monitors their present and past usage to anticipate future requirements. Users can also track inventory valuation, depreciation, and gain and loss arising out of inventory sales with the help of this tool.
• Maintenance management: Tracks equipment metrics, such as maintenance dates and repair details to ensure that the assets are up-to-date and free from potential issues. The software also allows users to schedule asset maintenance based on their usage and availability.
• Reservations management: Manages the process of reserving equipment for clients. The software allows construction and rental professionals to track equipment availability, view equipment reservations, and schedule equipment rentals. Users can also use this feature to set reservation rules, such as the minimum and maximum rental tenure, and communicate the reservation status to customers.
• Quotes/estimates: Generates price quotes, estimates, and proposals based on details, such as the rental duration, insurance, or any other specialized pricing. The system also allows you to share the quotes directly with the client and even generate rental contracts out of it.

What are the benefits of Equipment Rental Software?

• Reduces equipment downtime: Equipment rental software tracks important metrics, such as the overall usage of the equipment, depreciation, maintenance dates, and repair schedules that help users schedule predictive and preventive maintenance. While predictive maintenance can be performed during machine operations to identify issues, preventive maintenance is regularly scheduled to prevent these issues before they occur. Both these help increase asset reliability, minimize construction equipment downtime, and reduce the possibility of asset failure.
• Improves equipment rental operations:. The software automates the process of tracking the availability of equipment, storing asset information, maintaining servicing schedules, setting maintenance reminders, and handling customer communications. The tool is also helpful in performing other operations, such as accounting and bookkeeping.
• Organizes equipment schedules: The software enables rental businesses to manage the usage and availability of their equipment. Organizations can use the tool to track their equipment, including when it is rented out, returned, or scheduled for maintenance. The software also allows users to send reminders to customers for equipment pick-up. Moreover, it generates reports to help business owners understand which equipment is rented most frequently and which one requires maintenance. All these features help them organize equipment schedules and make informed inventory decisions.
• Increases operational transparency: Equipment rental platform features a specialized reporting dashboard that offers a customized view of all the equipment information in a single place. The dashboards usually account for filters that allow managers to gain important insights into equipment type, last maintenance, scheduled maintenance, and time until rental is returned. Having a centralized dashboard gives different stakeholders, such as operators, managers, and finance teams unparalleled transparency into their rental operations.
• Manages invoices and documents: The software helps businesses manage essential documents, including their billing papers, invoices, and rental contract in one place to keep them organized and secured. Additionally, it provides easy restoration of documents so that you can easily access asset information, whenever and wherever required.

How much does Equipment Rental Software cost?

Most equipment rental software products are priced on a “per month” basis, and their entry-level pricing plan ranges from $19.5 to $149* per month. An enterprise product that’s priced higher may include additional features such as payment processing, asset lifecycle management, barcoding, discount management, and dispatch management.

*The pricing included is for the entry-level/lowest-priced offerings found on vendor websites as of March 27, 2023.

How to choose the best Equipment Rental Software

• Understand the contract management capabilities: While evaluating potential equipment rental solutions for your rental needs, make sure to look at the contract management capabilities of the software. The best equipment rental solution should help you streamline the rental process, from start to finish. It may include the features, such as contract generation, electronic signature, rental tracking, payment processing, and reporting that enables equipment rental businesses to manage their agreements with customers.
• Consider order management: An ideal equipment rental software helps you manage and fulfill customer orders with ease. Before you finalize a rental tool, ensure that your tool has important order management features such as order creation, scheduling, and invoicing to improve operational efficiency. Your software should also offer you real-time insights into equipment availability so that you can fulfill orders efficiently.
• Assess payment processing feature: Payment processing in equipment rental helps a rental company manage customer payments for the rented equipment. Consider a tool that securely helps you collect payments from customers, verify the payment details, and track payments, including paid and unpaid invoices. The software may also include a feature to help you manage refunds in case of cancellations or rental disputes.
• Look for a self-service portal for clients: A self-service portal in equipment rental software allows customers to check equipment availability in real-time, gain insights on inventory prices, download safety manuals, make payments, and share important information, such as their work location, pending rentals, and other details with you. An ideal equipment rental software offers you a self-service portal to ease equipment booking and reservation processes.

Common questions to ask before choosing the best Equipment Rental Software

• Does the tool facilitate asset tracking?

Your shortlisted equipment rental platform should be able to monitor the location, usage, and maintenance of your valuable assets. The feature typically helps you track devices or tags attached to each equipment. Once you’ve finalized your software, make sure that the system offers your insights into the demand and usage of your rental equipment.

• Does the software offer a barcoding feature?

Barcoding is an important feature of equipment rental software that tracks inventory using barcodes. Look for a tool that helps you assign a unique barcode to each inventory item which can be scanned further to retrieve information about the equipment. This is especially useful for maintenance scheduling, equipment tracking, and rental billing.

• Does the tool offer discount management?

Discount management in equipment rental software enables rental companies to create and manage discounts for customers. It helps businesses to assign discounts to an individual or a group of customers, monitor the effectiveness of their discounts in attracting new customers, and create different types of discounts, such as percentage discounts and fixed discounts.

• What kind of reports are generated by the system?

An equipment rental software must be capable enough of generating necessary reports, such as asset depreciation, repair schedules, inventory utilization, equipment downtime, and performance reports to help you utilize the assets to the fullest and schedule maintenance whenever required. These reports also provide you insights to make sound business decisions and maximize returns by tracking the revenue generated by the assets.