Hire and rentals

Hire works differently from a job or an appointment. A booking is a window, with a pick-up and a drop-off, and it might run for an hour or a fortnight. What you are selling is a thing, and you only have so many of them.

Products and stock

The thing you hire out is a product: "Excavator, 1.7 tonne". "Kayak". "Trestle table".

How you count them depends on whether individual ones matter to you:

Tracked. Each one is a separate item with its own record: its own registration, its own service history, its own condition. This is what you want for vehicles and machinery, where knowing that this excavator has a cracked window matters.

Counted. You just hold a number. Twenty trestle tables. Nobody cares which twenty.

Set the tracking on the product. A tracked product's stock is the list of its items; a counted one is just a figure you type.

Items can be marked as retired or in maintenance, and those come out of the available count without disappearing from your records.

Rates

Hire is not priced with a single number. A day rate that bills a week as seven days is not what any hire business charges, so a product carries a rate card: as many rates as you actually sell.

Add a rate per minute, hour, day, week or month, and only the ones you use. A scooter shop adds per-minute and per-hour. A car depot adds day, week and month. Neither is shown a box for something they do not sell.

Each rate can carry its own rules:

• Minimum units, as in "three hours minimum".
• Booking fee, a one-off charge on hires priced at this rate.
• Minimum charge, a floor for the whole hire.

Tip: Check every rate you add. A rate left at zero will hire your gear out for nothing, and the booking page will let it happen.

What counts as a day

You can also set how a hire bills, as opposed to how long the customer physically has it. Without a rule, every calendar day the thing is out is billed, both ends included, which is what most depots mean by a three-day hire. Setting a charge period lets you say something more precise, like an overnight that is back by 9am counting as one day.

Bonds

A bond, called a security deposit in some markets, is money held against damage. It is set on the product, because it belongs to the thing rather than to the service: a bond on an excavator has nothing in common with one on a kayak.

Set a flat amount on the product's page. On a booking, the bond can be held, released when the gear comes back fine, or claimed against with a note about what went wrong.

Note: A bond is not a deposit. A deposit is a part payment of the hire and it is your money. A bond is held and given back. Bookables keeps them separate everywhere.

Pickup and delivery

By default the customer collects from you. With the Pickup & delivery addon on, a hire can instead be delivered to the customer, or run as a one-way pickup and drop-off, with a separate address for each end of the hire.

Operators and crew

With the Operators & crew addon on, you can hire the thing out with someone to drive it. A service can be set to dry hire only, wet hire only, or let the customer choose at booking time. The operator is booked alongside the asset, with their own availability, so you cannot promise a machine you have nobody to run.

What is next

Next: Classes and courses.