Planning for a Bad Economy 1000th Installation - Point-of

A Publication of POiNT-of-RENTAL™ Systems
July—December 2008
POIT-OF-RETAL™ Systems, POIT-OF-RETAL™ Software, POIT-OF-RETAL™ Enterprise and License Swipe™ are trademarks of Overland Rentals, Inc.
Planning for a Bad Economy
W
e are told the economy is in a
recession, but talk to rental
operators in California and they may use
the word depression. Whatever it is, business is not as good as it was a couple of
years ago unless you are in Buffalo or
Michigan where business is never good.
So, how do you cope?
Increase Revenue
1)If you don’t have a website, get one.
If you do, improve it! It is the new Yellow Pages at a far lower cost. A good site
will reel in the customers…. especially
for party orders.
2)Run your Excessive Resale Inventory, Inactive Rental Item and Inactive
Sale Items reports. Sell inactive rental
items on e-bay. Offer special pricing for
excess sales inventory in house or sell
them on e-bay.
3)Increase your damage waiver fee by
a percent or two.
4)Charge for items that you now provide free. For example, if you rent a
trencher, do you provide the trailer for
free? Instead, charge ½ what your normal rental fee is if rented by itself. Is fuel
free for small items such as mowers, till-
1000th Installation Celebration!
Another milestone was reached in April 2008 when Northwood Rentals became
the 1000th store to install Point-of-Rental Systems software. Northwood Rentals is an
oversized general rental operation located in the town of Hyde Park, Utah. They rent
everything from costumes to party equipment to full size backhoes and Penske
trucks. Started in 1999, Northwood Rentals is owned by Alan and Linda Elder.
Back row: David, Curtis, Alan Elder, Travis, Jordan, and Rick. Front row: athan, Brady,
Linda Elder (holding cake) and Ashley.
ers and stump grinders? If so, charge two
or three bucks.
5)Do any of your rental items require
license plates? If so, charge a couple of
bucks a day for the VLRF (if you’re wondering… Vehicle License Recovery Fee)!
Hey, somebody has to pay for the plates.
6)Have a garage sale. Look around
the showroom and shop. Not only will it
bring in some revenue, but it will clean up
the place and give you some room to store
new rental inventory.
7)Be more vigilant of your receivables. Call your aged receivables customers more often. Get a specific amount
that they will pay by a specific date. If
they don’t come through, change the option status in their Point-of-Rental customer record to “Closed” or at least
“Credit Hold.”
8)As soon as you get wind of a store
near you closing, buy their phone number
and a list of their account customers preferably with history.
Decrease Expenses
1)Yellow Pages are dying! Cut your
spending drastically and use some of the
savings to fund your website, pay off debt
or pocket the remainder.
(Continued on page 3)
© 2008 Overland Rentals, Inc.
POiNT-of-RENTAL™ Systems
2
Getting the Most from your System > > > > > > > > >
Force Acknowledgement
Suppose you get a phone message from a customer that one of their employees is headed down to rent
something and the employee needs to call the office. Put a message in the customer call window and check the
“Force Acknowledgement” box. Then, when the employee arrives and someone starts to write a contract, the
call window will display until the OK button is clicked. This same feature is available in the contract record to
store notes that should be read whenever the contract is accessed.
Attaching Files
Files can now be attached to customer, item or contract records. Just click on “Add Attachment” at the top
left of the record display. Attachments can be viewed or printed. In party rentals, you may find it useful to attach PartyCAD drawings. Equipment guys may find it a useful place to store PDF files of permit forms and the
like. Note: Attachments can be added at any time to customer and item records. But, attachments can only be
added to existing contracts since the contract number is not assigned until the contract is created.
Instruction Files
Instruction files can be txt, doc, or pdf files. But, in the instruction file field you don’t put the extension
used. For example: stumpgrd instead of stumpgrd.pdf .
Searches
Call logs:
You can search for a “string” of characters in the contract and customer call logs by going into Search Call
Log located in Customer Reports on the Program Menu. Suppose you are certain you entered “call Wendy prior
to delivery” in a call log, but can’t remember which contract it was on. You’ll find it if you type “Wendy” into the
Search Call Log program.
Checks and Cards:
Contracts paid using a specific check or credit card can be displayed by using the Check/Card Lookup
search program that be found under Accounting on the Program Menu. Enter the check number or the last four
digits of the credit card number and the system will display all contracts paid that match the number you entered.
Is Your
Buffalo
Running?
Most recent servers that we’ve
sold include a Buffalo external
hard drive for backing up data
from the internal drive of the server. The server and Buffalo
should both be plugged into a reserve power supply to instantaneously provide power in the event of short term power outages.
Of course if you have a long term power failure and the reserve
power supply can’t provide power, then the server and Buffalo
both stop working. In that event, you should be aware that, once
power is restored, you need to power on the Buffalo by pushing
the power button on the front of the unit. Note: Since the Buffalo has a data cable into your router or switch, it may not be
physically located near your server. You may need another reserve power supply for it.
New Point-of-Rental
User Forum Online
You may already know that the American Rental
Association has a member forum on its ararental.org website.
To use it, you must be an ARA member. To access the forum, enter an ID (your ARA member number) and your password which is your billing zip code. There are many topics
related to rental and, if you’ve never looked at it, you should.
In like fashion, Point-of-Rental™ Systems recently
introduced a Users Forum. The forum is exclusively for the
use of Point-of-Rental™ users and is intended to initiate an
exchange of ideas, features and discoveries that existing users
have found that they want to communicate to the Point-ofRental™ Systems community at large. To register, read and
post, please click on Users Forum on the www.point-ofrental.com home page.
POiNT-of-RENTAL™ Systems
New Website
Hosting Features
Recently added features include a Customer Portal whereby you can authorize
customers to access their information from
your system. Customers can review their
last statement and view equipment that they
currently have on rent. A Web Quote import feature is also new. You can now import into Point-of-Rental Quotes that were
created by people using your website shopping cart feature. The import option can be
found under “Tools” in the upper left of the
Counter System Main Menu.
Planning, continued...
(Continued from page 1)
2)Employees are the number one controllable expense for a typical rental store.
Cut out all overtime. Consider 3½ or 4 day
work weeks for employees so you can cover
your open hours without paying overtime.
Sorry, Californians, this won’t work for you
since it is a state law that overtime must be
paid for hours worked in excess of 8 in a 24
hours period.
3)Over the most recent twelve month
period compare your payroll expenses to
your rental revenue. If you are 100% party,
this should be less than 40%. If you are
100% equipment rental you should be
around 30% or even 25% if you are into
heavy equipment. If you are a blend, depending upon income for the different segments, you should be somewhere between
30% and 40%. If you are higher than these
percentages, either you have too many employees or you are paying them too much…
or both.
4)Pre-pay your Point-of-Rental™ Systems support fee for a year. You’ll get a
10% discount.
5)If you are mailing closed contracts and
statements, get the Point-of-Rental™ System Mass E-mail and Fax module. For a
single store it is $1000, but with the price of
stamps, envelopes and people (stuffers) you
may recover this cost in two or three
months!
6)Review your expenses for services
such as telephone including long distance,
800 service, electric, gas, credit card processing and even uniforms.
3
Sub-Rent?
Point-of-Rental™ Systems Makes It Easy
While the word sub-rent seems to be a bad word in the rental industry, it is a
necessary evil. The greatest struggle with sub-renting is managing the process:
knowing what the equipment is, where it is, and when it is due back. Losing track of
sub-rentals opens you up to unnecessary expense and stress. If sub-renting is taking
too much of your time or you avoid it altogether, we think you should keep reading.
Before a sub-rental contract can be written, you will need to create a sub-rental
customer. In the customer ‘KEY’ make sure the word ‘SUBRENT’ precedes the
company name ‘SUBRENT-XYZRENTALS’. Now you can write a sub-rental contract. From the Counter System choose Tools; Contract; Subrental. The process is
the same as writing a reservation.
After choosing the item(s) needed, if you will be picking up and returning the
items, check box delivery and pickup. If not, leave them blank. Sub-rentals marked
as Delivery and Pickup will display on the Delivery and Pickup tabs on the Day-ata-Glance screen (if you have the Dispatch Center they will show there as well). A
Sub-Rent tab is provided on the Day-at-a-Glance screen to allow additional visibility.
Sub-rented items are also tracked on the Item Availability screen and the Overbooking report. When you resolve an overbooking by sub-renting an item, the item
will no longer show as overbooked. Tracking sub-rentals with this feature gives you
additional information to review when making purchase decisions.
For those who already sub-rent equipment, we would recommend writing subrental contracts to increase your visibility and operational tracking. And for those of
you who refuse to sub-rent because of the effort required, maybe we just gave you a
APC Reserve Power Supply Tips
If you have an APC brand BN1250 or similar reserve power supply for your
server, you can:
•Set the LCD display on the front of the unit to “Full Time Display Mode.” This
will display all sorts of interesting things such as voltage in, on line or on battery,
etc. To get the unit into this mode, simply (1) properly power-off your server, then
(2) with the APC plugged in, press and hold the “Display/Hold to Mute” pushbutton
on the front panel for 10 seconds. All five data blocks will flash. Push that same
button several times until all five data blocks are lit. In five seconds you will leave
the programming mode and the unit should be in the full time display mode.
•Use the software that came with your APC to automatically and properly shut down
your server when the reserve time reaches five minutes. To do this, (1) find the cable that came with the APC that has a ten wire phone-like connector on one end and
a USB connector on the other. Plug the USB connector into a port on your server
and the other end into the APC. Find the APC CD-Rom disk that came with your
APC and run it on your server. Select the automatic mode and you should be set!
New Employees Add to Support Team
In the last six months we’ve added two more people to our support team. David
Jensen worked ten years for a trucking company where he was responsible for the
installation of a computer aided dispatch system. He then spent three years managing Accent Party Rental in Santa Rosa, CA, and a couple of years as a sales representative for Academy Tent & Canvas. In 2003 he became the general manager of
the R&R Rental (WA) Party Rental division and spent five years in that position.
David is an expert on our Dispatch Center module and enjoys helping Point-ofRental users.
Jeff Mitchell is our other new employee. Prior to joining us he worked three
years in the telecommunication industry after graduating from Texas Tech with a
BA in Management of Information Systems. Jeff can help you with your network,
hardware and system software problems.
4
POiNT-of-RENTAL™ Systems
Welcome to Our New
Point-of-Rental™ System Users…
A to Z Rental Center, Eden Prairie, MN
AA Party Rental #1, Mountlake Terrace, WA
AA Party Rental #2, Fife, WA
Equipment Rentals #1, West Bend, WI
Equipment Rentals #2, Hartford, WI
Industry Lift, City of Industry, CA
E-Z Rent-All, Cincinnati, OH
Action Rental Center #1, Allentown, PA
Action Rental Center #2, Bethlehem, PA
Tri-County Rental, Bedford, IN
Delux Tents and Events, Ypsilanti, MI
Snow’s Wedding and Party Rental, Redding, CA
Midland Industrial Supply (Grand Eq #2), Midland, MI
Delphos Tent & Awning, Delphos, OH
Carolina Equipment, Fairview, NC
Grand Rental Station, Bloomfield, NJ
The Rental Center of Monticello, Monticello, NY
Thompson’s Grand Rental Station #1, Bensenville, IL
Thompson’s Grand Rental Station #2, Lombard, IL
Thompson’s Grand Rental Station #3, Des Plaines, IL
Thompson’s Grand Rental Station #4, Morton Grove, IL
Pampa’s West Texas Landscaping #2, Canadian, TX
Casale Rent-All #1, Clifton Park, NY
Casale Rent-All #2, Colonie, NY
Total Rental Center, Everett, WA
A-1 Rent-All #3, Nacogdoches, TX
Bowman Lumber, Lubbock, TX
Guy Rents #4, Gridley, CA
Equipment Rental Options #2, Hermitage, PA
ORE, Inc., Quakertown, PA
A Complete Rental, Henderson, KY
Chester Rental #4, Chesterland, OH
Dover Rent-All, Dover, DE
Fusco’s Rental World, Flemington, NJ
Great Plains Rent-All #4, Durant, OK
Southwest Tool Rental #2, Norton, VA
American Heavy Equipment #2, Coffeyville, KS
Dallas Party Tent & Event, Grand Prairie, TX
Dickerson Machinery, Castroville, TX
Perfect Setting Inc., Princeton, MA
G-Bar Agri Products, Whitesboro, TX
Lac La Biche Equipment Rental, Bonnyville, AB
Northwood Rentals, Hyde Park, UT
Location Equipment Supply, Toronto, ON
Eunice Rental, Eunice, LA
Area Rentals, Cherry Valley, IL
Nefco Rentals, East Hartford, CT
Grand Rental Station, Wauchula, FL
Rental One, Greer, SC
Andrew Tent Co., Albany, GA
Trench Shores #3, El Cajon, CA
Trench Shores #4, Fontana, CA
A to Z Rentals, Converse, TX
A Plus Equipment Rentals #1, Port Townsend, WA
A Plus Equipment Rentals #2, Sequim, WA
Aztec Rental of Hobbs, Hobbs, NM
Tool Shed Equipment #1, Escondido, CA
Tool Shed Equipment #2, Escondido, CA
Lewistown Rental, Lewistown, MT
A-1 Runs Despite Flooding
Seth Landuyt from A-1
Rental West in Cedar Rapids,
Iowa, reports that the recent
flooding in the Midwest put his
store under nearly five feet of
water. With heavy rains pushing the Cedar river over its
banks, thousands were forced
to evacuate their homes. Seth’s
house was destroyed too. However, he managed to save the server and most of the other computer hardware at his rental store. Business continued to run out of an RV, shown
below. Currently a job trailer serves as their office.
Smoking Server?
Suppose your Dell server smokes and, as far as you know, has never had a
nicotine addiction. Who do you call? The correct answer is… Point-ofRental Systems support at 800-944-7368. That’s right. Even if you are
within the Dell warranty period, your best option is to call us! We have
the experts that know the hardware and Point-of-Rental Systems software.
Sometimes problems that mask themselves as hardware are really much
more complex. So, do yourself a favor and call Point-of-Rental at 800944-7369 if you’ve got any problem. In the long run, you will save a lot
of time, money, and possibly even your database!
. . . And Those Upgrading from Legacy to Enterprise
“...Please feel
free to
use us as a re
ference
for any future
Pointof-Rental cust
omer
and we will ha
ppily
tell them how
pleased
we are.”
—Paul Hawth
orne
Toolshed Equ
ipment
Rental
Escondido, C
A
Taylor Rental Center, Fernandina Beach, FL
Gala Affair, Rock Hill, SC
S & I Equipment, Battleground, WA
Northwest Party Rental Center, Richland, WA
Red Door Party Rentals, Kennewick, WA
Roberson Rent-All, Brownwood, TX
General Rental Center, Old Town, ME
ABCO Rents, Tulsa, OK
ABC Rentals, South St. Paul, MN
Rental Land, Cape Girardeau, MO
Equipment Rental Options #1, New Castle, PA
Whitney Tool Shed, Machias, ME
Tye-One J Rentals, Ludington, MI
At Once Rental, Lancaster, TX