Like any other business, a rental company relies on sales and marketing to succeed. Having rental software that supports your sales and marketing team would be beneficial for your company to reach or exceed the target revenue. The good news is that it is much easier to carry out rental software nowadays because a lot of IT firms acknowledge the demand for simplifying business processes.
A company chooses to use rental software due to its ability to automate and simplify your business process; it reduces the work effort of your employees and allows them to focus on more essential tasks such as sales and marketing. Having rental software is also a great way to collect and store important raw data that can increase your company’s overall productivity. Here are a few other reasons why rental software helps increase A/V equipment rental:
Provides a Summary of Important Data
A company guided by data is more likely to succeed. Having a rental software helps business owners organize and store data that can be used to create their next strategy. As someone who manages a rental business, you will need regular reports about sales and revenue.
Without any software involved, employees would need to spend time populating reports regularly. On the other hand, rental software usually comes with a modifiable dashboard that shows you the data you need on demand. A dashboard that summarizes revenue reports, inventory overview, top-performing assets, etc., can help you make quick decisions about the actions you need to take to succeed.
Data can help you understand the trends that have transpired in the past. For example, you might have experienced that there’s usually an increase in renting A/V equipment related to wedding events during summer. Through time, the data you gather from your software will help you determine the needs within the company and plan your rates or packages accordingly.
Rental Software Helps Optimize Inventory
Information about your equipment is held inside your rental software, each carries a property tag that serves as a unique ID to describe the item. As your A/V company grows, the number of assets for rent such as cameras, lighting, sound system, etc. also grows. Regularly, you would need to optimize your inventory, replace less-productive A/V equipment from your portfolio, and focus on the more profitable ones.
Suppose there is a shortage of cameras and an oversupply of speakers or amplifiers. Without rental software, you wouldn’t be able to quickly pinpoint what A/V equipment needs to be replaced and what needs to stay. Instead, you would have to dig through your records to determine how much an item has generated in rental revenue.
The ability of rental software to gather a large volume of data would be useful in the long run as it can help optimize your inventory in more ways than one.
Real-Time Rental Availability
Having concerns about equipment availability is common in a rental company. Some might have found a solution to avoid this, but others still struggle to eradicate the problem. With a rental system, you can easily check the availability of a certain type of equipment with a click of a button.
Even better, if you have an eCommerce storefront integrated, the rental system can be linked to your website so that your clients can view the equipment’s availability in real-time. Having this feature available will make it easier for clients to know the status of your inventory.
Scheduled Rental Booking
The most convenient feature a rental software can give is its booking system. Normally, a customer interested in renting a piece of equipment would call your store to check if it is available and have it reserved. However, manually reserving an item can have issues that are mostly related to human error. There would also be no assurance that the customer would proceed with the transaction.
Through an eCommerce website, whenever an interested customer determines that the equipment is available, they can make a reservation online for a specific date and time. Your company can also decide to charge a down payment for the reservation to be submitted, giving you more assurance that the customer will indeed rent the equipment. All these online transactions are recorded and synchronized with your rental software to avoid double booking.
Preventive Maintenance
With a rental system, you will know how often the A/V equipment is rented out, how long it was in production, and if there were notable damages due to wear and tear. To maximize the revenue of your assets, rental software can help you schedule preventive maintenance.
There is also a strategy called “predictive maintenance” wherein the maintenance schedule relies on the condition of the equipment and diagnostics based on data gathered. Both preventive and predictive maintenance can extend the lifespan of your A/V equipment and reduce any unplanned downtime.
Simplifies Invoicing and Contracts
Upon checkout, there are two important actions for you and your customer, invoicing and signing rental contracts. Rental software makes it easier for both parties as invoices and contracts can be generated digitally or printed out as soon as the prerequisites have been accomplished.
Modern equipment rental software can also alert you about the movements of your A/V equipment and if the usage is beyond the terms of your rental contract. These factors can help you plan logistics better and bill customers for any extensions that happen.
Increases Customer Satisfaction
A centralized rental software allows your employees to access records of repeat customers to provide a customized deal and improve customer satisfaction. You can also create marketing initiatives involving discounts for loyal customers to keep them coming back for future rentals.
Generally, the features provided by rental software are a breath of fresh air for your employees and customers. There is also a higher probability of clients having a delightful customer journey due to the accessibility features of your rental software.
