Keeping tabs on the status of your rental inventory is critical to business success.
Whether you rent event supplies, tractors, or outdoor power equipment, rental business software is a great tool for:
- Identifying and reacting to industry trends
- Ensuring you maintain adequate stock levels
- Tracking costs
Failing to successfully manage your rental fleet can have an array of negative impacts on your operation, including lost sales due to availability or excessive inventory costs.
Re-renting Trends
It’s not uncommon for rental businesses to re-rent equipment to meet their customers’ needs. It’s a fine balance because while you want to keep your clientele satisfied by providing a broad range of products, constantly re-renting equipment means you’re likely not achieving maximum profitability.
Your inventory management system will help you identify whether the demand for a particular piece of re-rented equipment:
- Is simply an anomaly that can be ignored
- Might be worth purchasing to augment your fleet
- Is best left as a re-rental item
For the latter point, re-renting equipment makes sense if the demand is sufficient, but the cost of ownership is prohibitive (i.e. it eats up too much of your capital).
To ensure you’re realizing acceptable profit margins on equipment re-rentals, your rental business software will track the re-rental costs over time. If they increase, you can adjust your prices accordingly.
Maintenance Trends
Maintaining a healthy fleet of rental equipment is important for several reasons:
- Customer satisfaction
- Proper equipment rotation
- Minimize labor and maintenance costs
Over time, as your equipment gets older and starts to suffer from ongoing wear and tear, your maintenance costs will begin to add up as you strive to keep it running.
With small business inventory software, you’ll be able to track these costs to determine when it’s time to consider replacing your rental equipment, rather than trying to maintain it. As a result, you’ll:
- Upgrade older equipment before it becomes a hindrance
- Free up available manpower for other tasks
- Offer customers up-to-date rental inventory
Lost Sales Trends
Ensuring you have the right products available for your customers is essential to earning repeat business. If there are gaps in your rental system, it’s important to find out why.
One of the first things you’ll want to find out is why the product wasn’t available:
- In the shop for servicing or maintenance
- Already rented
- Not enough inventory to keep up with the seasonal surge in demand
- Customers aren’t returning rental equipment on time
With an inventory management system, you’ll be able to track the reasons why your rental products aren’t available and take the necessary actions before they start costing you in terms of profits and customer loyalty.
For more on this, read: 3 Things Rental Software Does to Help Manage Your Business.
For rental business software that helps you manage inventory trends, talk to a Windward Software representative about Windward System Five.
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