perating a busy rental shop is tons of work! It certainly is rewarding work, and there are many tasks required to manage your rental fleet including bookings, maintenance, damages and delivery. Having a process in place to keep track of each unit in your fleet is crucial to a successfully run rental business. Whether you rent pontoons, jet skis, kayaks, jeeps, golf carts or RVs - each unit in your fleet needs to be tracked and managed individually.
Why is this so important? Here’s a few reasons, and I’m sure you can think of others that are unique to your business.
Why should you Track Usage?
- Your equipment is expensive! Ensuring that the usage is tracked will help with maintaining, servicing and keeping each unit ready to be rented.
- Tracking each unit’s usage will allow you to know if the unit is being misused or used when not authorized such as an employee taking it out after hours.
- Tracking usage will alert you as to which units are most popular or used less frequently. This will help you with your marketing efforts to know which units should be highlighted or advertised more often.
- Tracking usage will also indicate when it’s time to buy new equipment. If you can see that a unit is always rented, you may consider purchasing more of its type to accommodate the demand. Or if a unit has racked up the miles or hours and needs replacement.
Fleet Management has several functions, and Usage Tracking is the key to all of them. BookingCentral offers a built-in Fleet Management feature within the booking platform that allows you to easily keep track usage of your resources. BookingCentral offers several ways to input the tracking to meet the unique needs of each rental business.
So when is the right time to track your usage? The answer depends on how you rent your equipment and what works best for you.
When is the right time to Track Usage?
- Track Weekly - this is good for rental shops that rent equipment on a multi-day basis such as RVs, jeeps and pontoons.
- Track after every rental period. Using the Check In/Check Out feature allows you to input a unit's hours/mileage for each rental.
- Track usage every day - choose morning or evening tracking. An employee can be tasked with going through each unit in the fleet to record the day's usage.
Usage Tracking in BookingCentral has made it easy to add this task to your daily or weekly process without adding extra work to you and your employees. The tracking not only gives visibility into services and issues, but also records users that input the tracking. These are added benefits to ensuring each unit is accounted for and maintained.
Want to learn more about BookingCentral's Fleet Management feature? Reach out to our team today and schedule a demo to see it live in action!
