Whether you run a rental business or rentals are just a component of your product offering, you ultimately must have your rental management system and retail management platform working in sync to serve customers and keep your store running. Paladin and Point of Rental work in tandem to streamline rental and retail operations, which elevates the customer experience.
“The integration bridges the gap between a business’s point of sale and its rental management software,” says Chris Kelly, technical partnership specialist at Paladin Data Corporation. “We partner with companies that are the best in what they do. Point of Rental is the best at managing rental businesses.”
Dinuba Lumber has been serving residents of California’s central San Joaquin Valley for over 100 years, but it is using the modern retail technology of Paladin and Point of Rental to serve a new generation of customers. The company has three distinct divisions – Dinuba Lumber, Ace Hardware and U-Do Rental. Paladin and Point of Rental are two of the lynchpins of the business that manage the company’s hardware and LBM inventory and sales and rental divisions.
Owner Brooks Schaffer and assistant manager Harmony Parker worked with Paladin and Point of Rental to create a rental portal where customers can reserve equipment that ranges from aerial lifts and air compressors to trenchers and welding equipment.
The integration of the two services allows stores to manage their rentals through Point of Rental’s Essentials product and handle all other aspects of their business through Paladin on the same platform. It all happens with scan-and-go ease, avoids duplicating effort on two separate systems, and it creates customer contact information in the store database.
Brooks’ favorite Point of Rental feature allows his store associates to shoot before-and-after photos of their rental equipment and attach them to the transaction record. The company rents a lot of trailer-haul concrete – ready mix in towable mixers – so monitoring the condition of the equipment when it is returned is crucial to the bottom line.
“It’s incredibly useful to have those photos. If there are any questions about whether or not the equipment was damaged when it was used, we can show them. It really encourages customers to take care of the equipment. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve had to chip (hardened) concrete off those things,” Brooks explains, adding Point of Rental’s dashboard as another favorite feature. “That’s real nice. We can tell what’s coming in and going out. We can track all our internet orders.”
Having an integrated rental and POS system enables businesses to track and manage rental activity from the same checkout terminal where they take payments. It also provides multi-store functionality, giving businesses the ability to track equipment, transactions and customers at the enterprise level across different locations.
Approximately 60% of Dinuba Lumber’s stock is from Ace Hardware with the remainder coming from specialty suppliers. Having Paladin’s Market Driven Inventory Management and easy-to-use retail platform simplifies all its business processes.
“Handling these transactions on separate systems doesn’t allow Paladin to flex its muscles. The integration not only streamlines the process, it also allows for rental and product returns, and partial payments,” Kelly explains.
Whether its cars, tools, heavy equipment, party and event accessories, bicycles, or towable concrete mixers, this integration makes Paladin the perfect platform for any kind of rental business.
“We love Paladin and we love Point of Rental. We made the right choices to select those companies and the software that goes with them. They’ve both been very good to us,” he says.
Want to know more about retail management? Join Paladin for a virtual class on November 5, 2:30 p.m. CT. during the Point of Rental International Conference.