The yard at seven in the morning
The customer turns up before opening time, his site opens at eight, so the platform goes out, the contract gets sorted later, hour meter and condition of the machine end up on a sheet of paper on the counter, and by midday that sheet is under five others
In the evening the machine comes back, one of your staff unloads it while you're on the phone, and the return date goes into the rental software when somebody finds a spare minute, which is two days later, when nobody remembers the exact hour
The work that takes your hours away
It isn't the machine, you know that by heart, it's everything around it that somebody has to write down
- Rental contracts to fill in with customer details that have been on file since three rentals ago
- Deliveries and returns to record, with dates and times that then decide how much you invoice
- The condition of the machine on the way out and on the way back, hour meter, fuel, damage, photos taken on a phone that stay on the phone
- Servicing, scheduled maintenance and inspections with their due dates, machine by machine
- The customers' portals, because the big ones want documents and reports uploaded their way, and each of them has a way of its own
- The end of month invoicing, rebuilt by hand from the sheets of paper and from the memory of whoever was there
A return written down late is money
If the return isn't recorded straight away, one of two things happens, either you invoice days when the machine was already standing in the yard, and then the customer calls and you're the one issuing the credit note, or you lose real days and give them away without noticing, which is the worse case because nobody complains about it
Then there are the due dates, a missed inspection keeps a machine you had already promised standing still, and a machine standing still doesn't rent, while the lease payment turns up all the same
Examples of what the system can do
These are examples of jobs the system can do, not jobs already delivered for some rental company, we started recently and we'd rather tell you
- It takes the customer's details from a photographed document or from an email, checks them against the customer records, and prepares the contract in the rental software with nothing retyped
- It records the delivery and the return with date and time, and if a machine has been out for more days than were agreed it puts it on a list for you to look at, before the invoicing and not after
- It keeps the calendar of inspections and servicing, counts the days or the hours on the meter, and warns you when the date is close, with the machine and the date written out clearly
- It reads the delivery report in PDF or in Excel, pulls out the hour meter, the fuel and the notes on damage, and carries them into the machine's record
- It logs into the customers' portals with your credentials, uploads what they ask for and files the receipt in the job's folder
If your program has no integrations
Your rental software may well be the one from ten years ago, it runs on a computer in the office, it has no way at all of talking to the outside, and maybe whoever wrote it doesn't look after it any more
That isn't a problem, the system opens the screens and fills them in the way a person sitting there would, and it's exactly the house specialty, the same goes for the customers' portals you log into with a browser
What stays with you
The decisions, the price you give that customer, whether you charge for the damage or let it go because he has worked with you for eight years, whether that machine goes to the workshop now or after the long weekend
The system does the mechanical steps, and when something doesn't add up it doesn't invent it, it stops and sets the case aside for you, at the start it's worth keeping it on a short rein with more confirmations, then you widen it on the cases you have seen work
Why a rental business gains from it
The hours that today go into sheets of paper and retyping come back to the yard and to the customers, the end of month invoice reflects the real days, and you don't find out about a due date the day before
You don't have to replace your software, the system uses what you already have, and if you want an idea of how much time is at stake there's the page to work out the savings
Where we start
I'm Antonio Fuccillo, I write the automations myself and I answer the messages myself, so you're talking to the person who does the work
You show me a procedure, a screen recording with none of your customers' data in it is fine, I look at whether it can be done and I tell you the monthly fee before we start, and then that figure stays