Meet Treasured Vintage Rentals, an event rental company serving clients in Penguin, a seaside town on the north-west coast of Tasmania, Australia. They specialize in renting out vintage props and furniture in pretty much any style imaginable, from rustic and vintage to country and bohemian.
In 2015, the company was founded by Jane McPherson as renting out antique furniture flowed naturally from her passion for sourcing vintage pieces. Because of her devotion, the company has now gathered a wide range of eclectic rental items. “We have an extensive inventory, the most popular items being our signing tables, peacock chairs, and chandeliers. And if our clients have special requests, we go the extra mile to find what they’re looking for.”
We chatted with Jane McPherson, who recently celebrated the fifth anniversary of Treasured Vintage Rentals, about why she chose Booqable to improve the rental management side of her business.
Before Booqable, there were spreadsheets
Like many companies, before switching to a dedicated rental solution, Treasured Vintage Rentals was using spreadsheets to manage their rental activities. These docs included a database of contacts, quotes they were working on, and stock they were tracking. All information lived in separate places.
“We’ve collected hundreds of timeless pieces over the years,” Jane says. “So ensuring that everyone had the most current information and were all working from the same inventory database was a tremendously important factor in what we needed. As it turned out, spreadsheets weren’t the right tool to do that.”
Before Booqable, Jane and her team faced challenges in tracking new requests, especially during busy seasons. It was difficult to track the number of items available for each inquiry unless they pulled them manually. Additionally, the lack of a professional quoting and invoicing solution was another productivity block.
And so the search for a rental system began.
Choosing a rental management solution
When Jane was searching for an RMS, she researched several different systems and eventually narrowed her list down to three solutions. When asked what her needs were when looking through her options, Jane’s answer was clear.
“Our criteria for choosing a new rental management system was twofold. It needed to be easy to use and give our team maximum visibility. Unlike the methods we used before, I wanted direct access to the information needed to help a client at any time. Reducing most of the manual work was my highest priority. And as quoting and invoicing is such an important part of our day-to-day, I wanted a seamless workflow for that as well.”
The other options had more bells and whistles, but Booqable had the features Treasured Vintage Rentals wanted and needed in a simple interface.
More insights, better rental management
Booqable made it possible to create a structured, real-time overview of all inventory items. The team also loves how the shortage indicators assist them with planning, which helps them avoid double bookings. The ability to create orders with these details at hand reduces the number of manual mistakes and streamlines internal processes.
“By entering every request into Booqable, we’re able to make items unavailable for specific durations. We can instantly start planning when we know the event date, without having to worry about overbooking our items. It transformed the level of overview within our business, and made our processes run smoothly.”
We can instantly start planning when we know the event date, without having to worry about overbooking our items.
In addition to improving planning activities and streamlining internal processes, Booqable’s quoting and invoicing tools were strong selling points too. “Smooth transitions of creating quotes, converting them into invoices, and the ability to add custom fields have been invaluable to our workflow,” Jane adds. “Building quotes and responding to our clients is much faster since we implemented a rental solution.”
The Treasured Vintage team is also a fan of Booqable’s reporting capabilities. “Booqable is our single source of truth for everything related to our inventory, and the software offers some valuable reports about our products.” The reports section allows Jane to filter data for a specific time of year. This means she can base future buying decisions on the performance and utilization of her rental items, and sell pieces that don’t generate enough revenue.
As Treasured Vintage Rentals continues to rent out their growing collection of items, Booqable is happy to help along the way. “We’ve recommended Booqable to industry peers as the software is well-designed and user-friendly. It proved to be a great tool for managing our event hire business.”
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