Owning and running your own rental business takes a lot of work, just like any job worth doing. However, there are common rental frustrations that can be avoided if you work smarter. You take on many responsibilities as a rental business owner, and if you don’t handle them properly, you can find yourself stressed out or facing financial trouble.
It doesn’t have to be this way, though, as many common rental frustrations can be handled easily with Booqable. Some of these are crucial for you to prevent potential issues and fix them once they have occurred. Join us as we examine five common rental frustration to avoid and how Booqable can help you solve them with our rental software.
1. Customers failing to return equipment on time
We’ve all been in the situation where a customer has rented something and not returned it at the agreed-upon time. This can be a headache for your management and other customers who are renting the item after them. This should be avoided as it can throw your whole schedule off, and you need an agreement in place to compensate for this issue.
With Booqable, customers who rent from you online will select a specific date and time to pick up items from your store and return them. Of course, we can’t guarantee they will stick to the agreed-upon times, but we do have a feature that can help prevent late returns. Once an item has been resturend you can update an order with a charge that you can request the customer to pay. It is also a good idea to adding padding time to orders in case customers do return something late, then your next customer doesn’t have to miss out.
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2. Items going missing
When it comes to keeping track of items, it can be a rather tricky job - especially if your inventory is quite large. As a result, you may find the odd cable go missing or even much more expensive items. This can not only cost you for the replacements, but if customers have booked an item and you can’t find it, you could lose custom from not only them but their friends too.
Our unique stock identifiers can help you to keep on top of which items are where at any given time. It’s also worth checking that every item has been returned before hitting the “Return products” button in the dashboard. In addition, you can add barcodes to your items and scan them during pick ups and returns to ensure everything is accounted for and reduce the chances of products going missing.
3. Double bookings
Something that can happen relatively often when you’re taking bookings manually over email, phone, or in-person is double bookings. Whether it’s from human error, a lack of communication, or paperwork going missing, this is something all rental businesses experience at some point. This is why it is critical to have a central system that is easy and intuitive to use and prevents double bookings from occurring.
When you or your customers place an order, stock levels and availability update in real-time. Whether customers book online or in-store, you know you can deliver what they want, when they want it. Double bookings are a thing of the past.
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4. Maintaining and repairing equipment
One of the most time-consuming tasks in a rental business is the maintenance and repair of equipment. Whether it’s from age or careless customers, every piece of equipment you rent out will need repairing, cleaning, or replacing at some point. So, you need to bear this in mind when you’re scheduling bookings.
Booqable allows you to add padding time between bookings to ensure you have some time to prepare your items for the next renter. Whether you need to clean dirty bikes, erase an SD card, or charge a battery, padding time helps to reduce your stress and decrease waiting times for customers.
5. Deciding which items to buy more, replace or sell
It can be hard to know what items are doing well or not in your rental business without some reporting. You may make a good guess based on your memory of what is rented out often, but nothing compares to raw data.
Booqable’s reports let you pull together a list of what items are rented the most, which ones are rented the worst, and which ones you should hold on to because they do reasonably well. This will help you inform your purchasing decisions, what trends to look out for and which items are no longer making you as much money as they used to.
