ERP Rental Software Features: Operations

Kate Miller

In our last blog post, we defined what ERP rental software is and who it's for. Now, we'll dive into greater detail about common features you can expect to find. We can think of ERP in three categories: operations, accounting, and reporting. In this post, we'll focus on operations. In our next post, we'll look at accounting and reporting. 

ERP Rental Software: Operations

Rentals and Sales

Everything you need to run your business efficiently:

• Manage multiple locations and multiple companies
• Write quotes, reservations and contracts
• View inventory availability and rates
• Set rates, including book rates, customer specific rates, and price agreements
• Customize periodic billing to meet your customers’ requirements
• Choose from a variety of methods including 28-day, bi-weekly and exact day
• Manage purchase order process for parts, merchandise, and equipment
• Run physical inventories against count sheets
• Conduct cycle counts
• Re-rent equipment
• Manage internal security so the right users have access to the right parts of the system
• Take key features on the go with a mobile app

From a purchasing and inventory control perspective, an ERP allows you to manage the PO process. Management can specify who is allowed to make purchases and for how much. The purchasing process brings items — parts, merchandise, and equipment — into your system so that from an accounting standpoint, you can properly account for them, and from the inventory side, you can expense them when you use them. A company that isn’t using an ERP — that doesn’t have a purchasing system and inventory control — generally has to expense parts at the time they buy them, they’re in use or sitting on the shelf. Hernan del Aguila, Owner, Partner Rentals

Maintenance 

If you work at a rental business, your life revolves around your equipment. With ERP software, you can help you keep your equipment running optimally and keep a “paper trail” of everything that’s been done to an asset:

• See what inventory is due for service based on hours or rental days
• Record maintenance history, including preventative maintenance, customer damage, and time entry for mechanics
• Record inspections
• Write internal orders and customer-billed work orders
• Track warranty claims
• Generate reports on equipment due for service and equipment last due for service

A rental ERP system should have a work order or service module were you can record anything you do to your asset, be it add value to it, fix it, or do preventative maintenance. This is important not only because you want to track everything you’re doing as you’re doing it, but because you want to be able to create a historic overview of what you’ve done to the equipment. That way when it comes to selling it or purchasing new equipment, and you need to analyze whether a piece of equipment has made you money or not, you can look at the maintenance history and it will help paint a clear picture. Hernan del Aguila, Owner, Partner Rentals

Dispatch

Connect your drivers, operations, and customers. Dispatch software, whether it is native to your ERP or integrated with third party software, can deliver many benefits. It can save your dispatchers time and headaches by making routing and scheduling easy; it can reduce fuel costs; and it can give your customers a better experience since they can track deliveries.

• Optimize routes to reduce miles, trucks, and costs
• Adhere to time window restrictions
• Accommodate scheduling changes
• Interface to real-time vehicle tracking
• Provide turn-by-turn directions to drivers
• Send customers delivery updates via email or text
• Run reports on planned v. actual delivery times

Equipment Lifecycle

Track the relocation, repair, and disposal of all your company’s assets. A rental ERP system will allow you to understand how much a piece of equipment costs you, how much you’re selling it for, and its profitability. You can search for an item to see any purchase orders, sales transactions, rentals, and maintenance history written against it.

• Bring equipment into rental fleet after PO is generated
• Search for POs and related documentation including vendor invoices
• Choose from depreciation methods for serialized and non-serialized assets
• Use data on utilization, maintenance, and more to drive purchasing and disposal decisions

Stay tuned for our next post on common accounting and reporting features.