Tracking Rentals

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Tracking Rentals

One of the hot new niche marketing ideas the major wholesalers are pushing is tool and equipment rentals. Many stores are signing up for custom programs (like Just Ask Rental or Grand Rental Station), and others are just sprucing up their existing rental inventories to try out this potential market.

We just signed up for Cotter’s Just Ask program, and began investigating ways to track our rental items and revenues. At present, neither Triad or Tru Trac has any real built-in rental systems, although Tru Trac has a rudimentary "rental" function in POS. There are numerous PC-based rental programs available, but we wanted to avoid placing another computer system on the counter, and dreaded having to reconcile sales between multiple systems.

So, we’ve come up with a work-around using our present Triad POS programs, including Quick Recall. First, we set up a new department for our rental area. Then, we set up classes based on the numbering system recommended by Cotter for the Just Ask program. This will allow us to generate reports to compare our rental revenues easily with other Just Ask stores.

Then, we set up two SKU’s for each item in our rental inventory (one for EACH tiller, one for EACH spreader, etc.), once again using Cotter’s recommended numbering scheme. The first SKU was the actual rental SKU, and had an "R" at the start of the SKU (Example: R020201 for our first air compressor). The item was set "Keep Stock" No and "Keep Prices" Yes. The price was set to the one day rental rate. The item was also coded as "R" in the Tally field, to tell Quick Recall to retain the transaction.

The second item SKU is for the rental deposit. We used the same number, preceded by a "D", and set "Keep Stock" and "Keep Prices" to Yes. The QOH was set to one for each of these deposit SKU’s (Except for low cost items like chairs which we use only one SKU for and set QOH to equal the total number of chairs). This item was also coded as "R" in the Tally field, to save any transactions in Quick Recall (Note:

Check local laws as to how the Taxable field should be set for the rental and deposit SKU’s).

When an item is rented, you ring up both the rental and deposit at POS. At the end of the sale, you’ll be prompted for the customer information (if you have Quick Recall), and can optionally print an invoice for your records. This reduces the QOH for the deposit SKU to zero, so anyone displaying the SKU can tell if an item is available for rent. When the item is returned, you refund the deposit (less any late charges, which are rung under the rental SKU). The QOH is now back to one, meaning the item is available.

This method can provide useful information in a number of ways. First, we’ve put a Zero Quantity report in our nightly queue, sorted by date of last sale, for our Deposit SKU’s. Each morning, we can scan the report to check on all the items which are out, and which items might be late. We’re still working on an RQ report which will combine both the Zero Quantity and Quick Recall information, so we can see the items and customer information on the same report.

At POS, you can quickly check on an items’ status by displaying the Deposit SKU. If the item is out, or damage to the item is discovered later, you can display the most recent renter via Quick Recall, and reprint the transaction rather than digging into the files.

You can also set up a quasi-reservation system, using the Special Order system. By creating an order which includes the Deposit SKU, you can track committed quantities. By setting up the terminal to warn when none are available (function MTR), the clerk will be alerted to check the reservations first before renting an item. We haven’t thought this procedure out carefully yet, and it might be more of a hassle than it’s worth.

By running an RQ report selecting deposit SKU’s with more than a certain number of transactions, you can generate a maintenance report of sorts. If you want to do an overhaul of your tillers every ten rentals, you run a report for that class selecting items with YTD transactions higher than twenty (one transaction for rental, one for return). Once the maintenance is performed, set the YTD transactions field back to zero. The rental SKU’s YTD transactions field is still set to the proper value, and by checking IMU’s history screen for the deposit SKU, you can verify how many times the item has gone out since last service.

Theoretically, the net sales dollars generated by deposit SKU’s should be zero at the end of the year, while the rental SKU’s will show revenues generated by each item. This workaround doesn’t properly handle the aquisition cost of each item in your rental inventory, and you may want to exclude the rental department when running RIV reports for accounting purposes. Rental items are treated in the same fashion as fixtures or equipment, and will need to be tracked by your accountant for depreciation anyway.

This rental procedure can be useful for full scale rental operations, and for those of you who only rent a few carpet cleaners. It’s still necessary to do the normal paperwork (i.e. rental agreements), as presently the Triad doesn’t handle proper agreement forms. Hopefully, both Triad and TruTrac will begin to explore adding an integrated rental system to their packages, especially as more stores add rental departments to their product mix.