Who doesn’t want a bargain? Successful businesspeople spend money wisely, so naturally we look for the best deals. The problem is that sometimes a „great deal“ can end up costing you much more in the long run—which is often the case when it comes to rental management software. C.J. Price, owner of Price Rentals & Events, is fully aware of just how expensive cheap software can be and she wants to help others avoid the same mistake. “While it may seem quicker to choose a low cost, basic rental software now, we learned the hard way,” Price said. “It cost so much more in the long run.”
Price Rentals & Events is an event rental and design company serving the Chesapeake Bay area of Maryland and Delaware. As winner of the 2016 WeddingWire.com Couples’ Choice Award, the business provides topnotch service and excellent communication to their customers. However, their previous software, while inexpensive to purchase, caused many inefficiencies and struggles that could have tarnished their reputation. In the end, Price Rentals & Events decided to make the investment in Point of Rental Software. Here were a few of their biggest issues and how they were able to resolve them:
Customer Correspondence
Problem: “One big issue was trying to e-mail customers instead of faxing,” said Price. “Especially to our brides, this was the most frustrating factor as today’s bride wants everything done by e-mail!” On their previous software, Price Rentals had to manually scan contracts and fax them to their customers. The cost of frustrated customers waiting for information, plus time for employees to manually perform those office tasks ended up costing the company a great deal more than the value it provided.
Solution: Now with Point of Rental Software, customers can access their own account through Price Rentals’ web portal, where they can see their quotes, reservations, on rent contracts, as well as full account information including current balance, last payment amount, date, and past due amounts. Point of Rental Software also automatically delivers invoices and statements to their customers by email or fax. It also can be setup to generate sending on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis and even set an invoice to send the same day a contract is closed.
Managing Inventory
Problem: Because they weren’t able to accurately track inventory between multiple locations with their old software, inventory loss added up. Price estimates thousands of dollars in time trying to find items and eventually the cost of replacing them. In addition, there was no way to track tenting kits, and the cost of doing it manually resulted in hundreds of hours of intensive time spent plus replacement parts.
Solution: Point of Rental offers multi-location inventory management, which helps track and move inventory from stores or off-site warehouses without creating transactions. Reports are quickly generated to show inventory available at each location. Equipped with dynamic kit functionality, the software allows you to set up kits for items such as tents and adjusts availability of tents when individual items included in the kit are on-rent. This functionality allows stores to avoiding overbookings or losing opportunities when items can’t be located among other stores.
Training time
Problem: “Our old program was not intuitive at all!” Price said. “As a result, we had to spend a lot of time training new employees on the old software.” Also, Price commented that most of the time, new employees for Price Rentals would still make numerous mistakes after training that resulted in a chain reaction of mistakes before it was caught.
Solution: However, Price said now it takes half a day or less for her to train someone on Point of Rental Software. “Point of Rental is so great with how it prompts you to the next screen, so if our newer employees forget — the program won’t let you move on until you complete certain functions.”
Scheduling Deliveries
Problem: “In the past, we had a binder that served as our ‘calendar,’” Price explained. “So. Much. Paper. It wasn’t organized, and some employees would forget to add deliveries into the paper schedule, or the time would change and it wouldn’t get updated, causing the whole day’s deliveries to be out of order.”
Solution: “The Day at a Glance function with Point of Rental is a huge lifesaver for us! You can see your entire day as well as weeks out in a moment’s glance. You know what’s going on with your delivery schedule when you are adding another one! Everything is there in one spot,” said Price. Day at a Glance is also updated in real-time, allowing all employees to see when changes are made and avoid any miscommunications.
Customer Notes
Problem: “Tracking notes for customers was a huge downfall with our old program — it wasn’t possible at all! We were always hand-writing notes on contracts,” Price said. Handwriting resulted in a lot of confusion and mistakes because one employee was aware of a change and didn’t communicate it to everyone else.
Solution: “Now? I basically tell my employees the only time you should have to look at a paper contract is for the signature. Otherwise, there is no reason why you can’t use Point of Rental to find everything you need,” Price said. “No more handwriting notes!” Point of Rental also tracks every time someone even looks at a contract. “There is no more confusion as to why a contract was changed, who changed it, etc., and no more customers watching us frantically try to figure it out!” Price added. The full customer history with contracts, orders, payments, deliveries, call logs, notes, etc., is always available in every customer file.
Results
In the end, the cheap software option cost Price Rentals a great deal more than they had factored in when making the purchase. “When we changed to Point of Rental, it saved us time, money, customer frustration and increased profitability of our business by 25%,” Price stated.