Equipment rental software: what to check before you buy.

Most rental software demos well and falls apart on the second week of a long rental. This is the list I'd take to any vendor, mine included, written from running the software behind a working BC rental yard.

Use it on any product. If one fails half of these, the workarounds will cost you more than the licence.

Billing that matches the yard

A rental agreement: progress from created to picked up, the job site, contacts, billing cycle and rented equipment tabs. — What to look for: one agreement that knows its billing cycle, and an invoice you can credit or reverse without deleting anything. Rental Pilot running a demo company, Northline Equipment Rentals, with made-up customers.

An invoice with its total, payments, and buttons for PDF, credit, change company, email and reverse. — What to look for: one agreement that knows its billing cycle, and an invoice you can credit or reverse without deleting anything. Rental Pilot running a demo company, Northline Equipment Rentals, with made-up customers.

Daily, weekly and monthly rates on the same agreement

Different lines on one agreement often bill at different rates and on different cycles. Ask to see one agreement with three kinds of line on it, billed twice.

Partial returns and swaps

A customer sends back 40 of 100 panels, or swaps a broken heater for another. The agreement should keep billing exactly what is still out, from the day it came back.

Billing cycles off a bill-through date

Long rentals bill in cycles. You should see what is due before it is invoiced, and nothing should invoice until a person approves it.

Credits, voids and reversals with a trail

Mistakes happen. Fixing one should never mean deleting a record. Ask how an invoice is reversed and what the audit trail shows afterwards.

Sales tax for where you work

GST, PST or HST for Canadian provinces, and state tax if you rent across the border. Calculated per line, not typed in.

Everything you rent, not just serialized machines

Serialized units with their own history

Every machine: where it is, who has it, what it earned, what it cost to keep running.

Bulk items by quantity

Fencing, matting, blankets, cones. Counted, not serial-numbered, and still billed properly through partial returns.

Sub-rentals from your suppliers

When you rent from another yard to fill an order, the cost and the charge should both land on the right agreement.

Fuel and consumables delivered on site

Fuel logged against the machine with photos, then billed from the same record.

The field and the customer

The deliveries list: pending drops with customer, job-site address, date and assigned driver. — The office's deliveries list and the driver's view of the same day on a phone. Rental Pilot running a demo company, Northline Equipment Rentals, with made-up customers.

The field app on an iPhone: today's deliveries for the driver. — The office's deliveries list and the driver's view of the same day on a phone. Rental Pilot running a demo company, Northline Equipment Rentals, with made-up customers.

A field app that works with no signal

Deliveries, pick-ups, photos, signatures and timesheets on a phone, saved offline and synced when the truck is back in range. Ask to see it in airplane mode.

Deliveries and pick-ups as a dispatch board

Schedule, assign and reschedule, and see what is stuck on site or overdue back.

Exceptions that don't disappear

Missing, damaged, stolen or stuck equipment needs an owner and a next step, not an email that gets buried.

A customer portal

Customers see their rentals, invoices and requests and place orders without phoning the counter. Their site supervisors should see their crew's jobs too.

The questions to ask any vendor

Show me one agreement with a partial return, a swap and a fuel delivery, invoiced twice.
What happens to an invoice I need to reverse?
Does anything invoice without a person approving it?
Show me the field app with no signal.
Can it carry my brand and run at my own web address?
Can I get my data out, and in what format?
Who do I talk to when it breaks, and do they write the code?

Buy, build, or something in between

If an off-the-shelf package passes this list for how you rent, buy it. A custom build makes sense when the workarounds cost more staff time than the software saves.

Rental Pilot sits in between. It's the system that runs Super Sonic Equipment Rentals, white-labelled for rental businesses in 18 industries, and I can extend it to fit how you work. How it was built, or watch the demo.

Questions people ask first

What does equipment rental software cost?

It depends on how many users and units you have and whether you need a field app and customer portal. Ask every vendor for the price at your size, including setup and data migration.

Can we move off our current system without a shutdown?

Yes, if old and new can run side by side on the same data for a while. That's how Rental Pilot itself was modernized.

Does Rental Pilot work outside equipment rental?

It has 18 industry profiles, from heavy machinery and forklifts to RVs, events and site sanitation. It was proven in equipment rental.