Using Excel to manage inventory, particularly when you’re needing to enter particular codes and then fill out invoices, just took too much time for Lease Crutcher Lewis – and worse still, the inability to scale didn’t jibe with the company’s growth plans. Point of Rental has helped automate that for their job sites.
Contractors also have additional rules that don’t typically affect other rental companies. Fortunately, Lease Crutcher Lewis partners with Point of Rental, and the two worked together to build reports that showed them the information they were looking for so they could keep their team operating legally and fulfilling their contractual obligations to their owners.
The data within the software also drives their investments – they’re able to see which equipment they need more of and which they can get rid of much more easily. See how Point of Rental can benefit your construction business by booking a call below.
Video Transcript
Yeah, the company didn’t really understand the billing of scale, so they were using Excel spreadsheets and sending those in. So the time it took to code and to pay an invoice, even internally through the yard, was a long time. You almost had one body just doing billing.
With Point of Rental, what that can do is automate that process, and we’ve been able to condense the billings into one billing each month for the job sites. And that really saves a lot of time and money for us.
So one of the things that really affects contractors is having to stop a certain amount of rental when you’re on a job site. So you have to charge – you can’t charge more than a certain percentage of what the unit costs. So we had to really go in with Point of Rental, work with them on a modification, and get a report that shows us where we’re at in that revenue stream to be able to make sure we shut off and fulfill our contractual obligations to our owners.
So working with them, we developed the system and then we still work on reports and do tweaks on reports to make that report more efficient for our people who do that manual cap process.
Probably about a year after I started – a year and a half after I started – we really saw a volume increase in our construction business.
We also invested over a million dollars in our fleet. And just that sheer amount of investment was huge to just to be able to manage and then also to track the costs and the pricing and the maintenance and the repair of that, those items something that we hadn’t done before as a company. We saw that through fruition through some calculators that we had built. And the really cool thing was, is after we got done with our first couple of years, we input the data from Point of Rental back into our calculators, and everything proofed out right, so we were thinking along the same lines.
The math matched up between Point of Rental and what we were expecting to see a return on. So that was really good to see, and that was really the point where we grew and knew we needed rental software like this. It helps us make buying decisions on what equipment we should buy, or what equipment we shouldn’t buy and we should rent from a third party.
So that data is really the driver for what helps us. And that’s been an impressive thing where we can just go into that really quick, pull our utilization stats, get the information, how many times we’ve rented that unit and see if it’s worth us investing more into those assets. I’d say the favorite thing I have about Point of Rental is probably being able to go in and – just seeing the amount of equipment that we have now and being able to look at that in certain snapshots of what temp power gear we have, what forklifts we have, being able to look at that historical data and play with those numbers and see what’s happening. That’s really the kind of cool thing that I find that is more fun to look at the backend numbers, look at what’s going on. But then also learning about how the database works and SQL database. And that’s been a really fun project for me.
I didn’t have a lot of experience before, but every time I play with it, I gain that experience to grow in my knowledge of what drives Point of Rental’s stuff. I would definitely recommend Point of Rental. I would definitely have some guidelines for them to help set it up correctly in the first place, especially for a construction company – I think that’s the biggest challenge for our industry. It’s setting it up properly the first time, making sure that you have all your ducks in a row and you understand how the software works before you go live and implement it in your job site and in your system at your company.