Every rental software has some type of built-in reporting. And every rental business has their own reports that they want to see. But some reports are more useful than others. We talked to one of our in-house experts, John Wooten (our Elite Product Manager and the former CEO of All-Star Rents), about the reports he used most as he grew his equipment rental business.
Here are 6 reports he recommends to help you build your own rental business:
Reports for Fleet Buying/Selling Decisions
The way you invest your profits into new fleet can be the difference between running a growing, robust rental business…and not having one. These reports will help provide the information you need to help you make smart buying and selling decisions.
Item Utilization Trend
This is a critical report to not only review both Time and Dollar utilization, it also displays data for three periods of time. This allows you to see gains or losses in performance over time. This additional information aids in making better buying/selling decisions.
Missed Rentals
Better understanding lost opportunities is critical to growing revenues. This report, along with the ability to customize reasons behind the missed rentals, is a powerful tool to help make buying decisions.
Item Quantity Overlap
This report allows a user to identify how often they have fleet out at one time. It can be incredibly helpful to answer the question: Do I have the right quantity of items?
Reports to Assess Fleet Availability
You can’t rent items that aren’t available. There are, generally speaking, two times in the rental cycle where equipment is unavailable and not producing revenue: When it’s down for repairs and when it’s been called off rent, sitting idle on a jobsite.
Maintenance Report
This report details what’s down for repairs, the value of the portion of your fleet that’s unavailable because it’s being repaired, and the total and average days – broken down by store – that items are down for repairs. This report helps you keep maintenance staff accountable and increases your uptime.
Off Rent Report
This report shows the value of fleet that isn’t generating revenue because it’s waiting on your team to pick it up so it can start producing value again. Discovering and eliminating this often-unseen waste can open up a surprising number of opportunities for additional rentals. If you’re using Elite, the Off Rent Analysis dashboard widget gives you this data at a glance, using days and rental rates to calculate actual lost revenues since the items were called off rent.
Reports to Maximize Sales Effectiveness
Once you know what kind of equipment you should have in your store and you’ve ensured it’s available as often as possible, it all comes down to getting it rented. And that means tracking your sales process.
Quote Analysis Report
If you use a typical sales cycle by writing and following up on quotes, this report can quickly show how effective the sales staff is at turning quotes into money flowing into your business.
These are just six of more than 400 reports available in our software; if there’s a report that’s been especially helpful to you that you think everyone ought to know about, let us know about it at [email protected]!
