Reducing Unsigned Rental Contracts with e-Signatures

Faith Kubicki

In an ideal world, you’d get a signature on every. single. rental. contract. you create.

In reality? Most of us end up with a handful of unsigned contracts here and there. Maybe a long-time customer calls in with an over-the-phone credit order, and the sales rep is too swamped to print one out and send it over. Maybe there’s nobody at the jobsite when the driver arrives with the machine, and they’re (appropriately) focused on getting to their next drop-off on time.

One or two un-signed contracts slip through the cracks, which turns into ten or twenty. And nothing goes wrong…until it does.

A machine is damaged on the jobsite, and you’re left without a way to hold the customer accountable for the cost of the repair.

A machine doesn’t get returned on time, and the customer stops responding. Your contract states that you can recover the equipment and collect for rent and damages, but the customer never signed it; now you’re facing a costly and time-consuming court case.

The customer runs a piece of equipment for 120 hours, but they were only contracted for 40. Now you need to bill them for excess usage…but without a signed contract, they’re pushing back on the additional charge.

Someone files a chargeback and your credit card processor asks for documentation so you don't automatically lose the case. You don't have a signed contract on hand to defend yourself, so you end up having to refund the customer and lose that revenue.

These situations are (thankfully!) rare, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t painful. That’s why capturing a signature on every single rental contract is generally recommended as a best practice. You can take the back-and-forth out of uncomfortable customer conversations and protect your hard-earned revenue.

How e-Signatures Can Help You Reduce Unsigned Rental Contracts

Electronic signatures are easier to collect than “wet signatures” (a.k.a., physical signatures on a printed piece of paper). They’re legally binding in the same way, but they’re more convenient – not just when it comes to getting them in the first place, but also in terms of saving them to the correct rental record and retrieving them quickly when they’re needed.

InTempo’s equipment rental app makes it easy to capture digital signatures on your rental contracts.

If the customer is at the jobsite when you drop off their equipment, your driver can pull up the contract in their mobile app. The customer can sign on your device; from there, you can save the signature to the rental record in InTempo. The system sends a copy to the customer for their own records, too.         

Need to sign multiple contracts at the same time? You can search by customer and pull up all their unsigned contracts; they can take care of all of them in one go.

It’s easy to determine which contracts are complete and which are still un-signed. Green checkmarks show you contracts that are fully executed; gray checkmarks show those that still need a signature.

And if the customer isn’t on-site when you make the delivery? (Or if some of the work crew is there, but your policy is to only accept signatures from the person whose name is on the contract?) No need to wait around for them to show up, delaying the next deliveries on your route. Email a copy to the correct person to take care of on their own time.

Select the app’s default option for “No One On Site”:

This triggers the rest of the e-sign process.

Once the customer receives the signature request, they can respond to it directly from their inbox. They don’t have to install any software, register for an account, or print and fax a hard copy back to your store. Once complete, the signed contract will be saved to the rental record – the same way it would be if the customer had signed it in person.

No More Misplaced Manual Paperwork

Because InTempo automatically stores e-signatures to the corresponding contract, you no longer have to worry about hard-copy documents getting lost or saved to the wrong file. If you need to refer to the signed contract in the future, it only takes seconds to retrieve it from your ERP.

Discover e-Signatures on InTempo’s Equipment Rental App

Want to see the InTempo Mobile App in action? We’ll show you all the time-saving features – from mobile contract creation to e-signatures – in a quick demo.