2015 Release Notes

 

 

Enterprise Software 2015 Release Notes

 

The excitement has been building.  The latest update of your favorite rental management software has been released.  As always, the bulk of the updates have come through suggestions from users like you. You will find a listing of many of the changes that were done.  There are plenty more changes that are either under the hood or just streamlined and not in this document.  We know you are anxious to see whether the idea you submitted made it in, so get reading.

Quick Summary

Contract Fulfillment:  In 1975 a Business Week article predicted that the invention of computers meant the death of paper.  Well 40 years later, reports of the death of paper were greatly exaggerated.  In fact, computers have been the single biggest boon to the paper industry.  However, this doesn’t stop us from trying to save the world.  The new Contract Fulfillment module gets you one step closer to a paperless environment. This new feature allows your counter staff, linen department, kitchen department, or anyone to prep/pre-pull inventory for reservations, load customers picking up equipment, unload customers returning, and do the final check in all from a tablet electronically in real time. Users can serialize inventory prior to sending out or after and the Counter System will auto serialize the contract. Hour meter readings can be entered and update the contract reducing the wait time for counter staff and your customer. As reservations are made or changed users see exactly what needs to be done in real time without the need to run a report. Item labels (actual labels or plain paper labels) can be printed and attached to the items for proper identification. As items are checked out an in, quantities are tracked to avoid missing items (both to the customer and back to the store when returned) and damages can be noted so proper charges can be applied to the contract. The contract processing screen has a new Fulfillment tab giving all employees access to see how an item processed through the operation and see exceptions or problems sooner than later.

Fulfillment Manger:  Fulfillment Manager is designed to assist employees responsible for closing and finalizing contracts by showing them what contracts are ready to process. They can see when a contract is taking too much time in the operation and push it along so invoicing can be done in timely manner. Users can see every step in the lifecycle and know who did it, when they did it, what they did, and any notes they made. Managers can also use this tool as an overview to gauge the performance/effectiveness of a department or segment of the operation.

Item Kit Quantity:  For those of you that rent tents, staging, scaffolding, or any other kit items be ready to get excited!  It was always cumbersome when changing the quantity of the base item for example going from 1 tent to 2 tents.  In fact, it was easier to remove the tent and add the 2 tents to handle all of the component items.  Well that is a thing of the past.  Simply change the quantity of the main line and you will be asked if you want to update all of the component lines.  It will then automatically increase each of the component items quantity to the proper number.  Ok, that is enough jumping up and down.

Custom Background:  In last year’s update, we had several man-years of programming in various cutting edge enhancements.  However, the enhancement that received the most applause from the users was the ability to define the background color of the program.  The programming staff was not ecstatic for this acclaim; however, to outdo themselves in this release, they have added the ability to define your own graphic for the background screen.  This can be your company logo or it could be a picture of your favorite programmers (we will send you one if requested).  This is defined in Parameters which means every store could have a different graphic as well.

SmartEquip Integration:  SmartEquip is the leader in electronic order processing between merchants, dealers, and OEM’s. Our integration with SmartEquip allows your mechanic to lookup parts using manufacturer’s exploded diagrams.  Then automatically adding the selected parts to a pending Purchase Order.  Once the Purchase Order has been approved, the order is automatically placed electronically with the vendor and billed to your account.  The mechanic no longer needs to spend hours of his time looking for the part, calling up the dealers, then writing PO’s, and then waiting for approval to then call the dealers to place the orders.  There is a setup fee paid to SmartEquip and a monthly service fee paid to them as well.  This is most useful to stores that do a lot of service so that the value of the increased efficiency is equivalent to the monthly fee.

RFID Integration:  The Holy Grail of the rental industry for the last decade has been RFID tags to locate and inventory equipment.  This has eluded rental stores until now.  We have integrated RFID tracking with a partnership with Positek RFID.  Positek and Point-of-Rental work together to match a specific item to a specific contract and therefore can be prepped and counted back in independently of the contract.  In other words, you can read an entire pile of linens being returned and properly mark each specific linen to each contract so you then know who didn’t return a linen and thus can charge for the missing items.  This saves many hours of counting and also gives you complete confidence in know exactly how many and which items went out to the customer and which items were returned.  So when the customer calls to complain about the missing items charge, you can be assured that the customer really didn’t return in.  After explaining to the customer that each piece is tracked with an RFID tag, they will be more accepting as well.

Credit Card EMV:  You have all heard the hype surrounding the new EMV credit card requirements that go into effect in October.  To keep you up to date, we have added support for EMV cards through VeriFone terminals.  If you are already using VeriFone terminals, then there will be some new setup and configuration to handle the EMV cards.  If you are using PC Charge, you will need to move over to the VeriFone terminals to handle EMV cards.  Please call the sales department to get a quote for that.

Sales Tax Jurisdiction:  Taxes are complicated!  Most government entities have no thought process of how a business is supposed to implement the policies they enact.  So we are left with wading through all of the details.  Many times it seems it cost more money to report than we actually collect.  Enough of the soap box.  We have added a new breakout for your Tax Tables called Tax Jurisdiction.  This will allow you to define that your tax table with 8% sales tax is actually made up of 6% State Tax, 1.5% County Tax, .4% City Tax, and .1% NFL Millionaire’s Tax.  Once you define that in your Tax Table, you will be able to run your Sales Tax Report broken out for each of the components to help your reporting requirements.

Contract Format:  There is a new option to print the Tax Jurisdiction breakout on the contract.  So if you have defined the breakout such as State Tax, County Tax, and City Tax, each breakout will print on the contract along with the amount collected for each of jurisdictions.

Tax Table Import:  Not only do governments make it difficult to collect the correct taxes, they constantly change the rates as well.  If you live in Coyote Acres, TX, it might not be too big a problem to update your 1 tax table; however, if you live in Washington state with its 46,000 tax jurisdictions, you will find the task more arduous.  To help out everyone not living in Coyote Acres, there is a new import routine that allows you to import all of your tax jurisdictions from a file.  Your state can provide you with an import file.  Once you have the file, you load it up in the new import routine.  If the Tax Jurisdiction already exists, it will create a replacement entry and set the dates appropriately so it will continue charging the correct tax today and if you write a future reservation it will charge the new tax automatically.  If the Tax Jurisdiction doesn’t exist, it will create a new entry in your table for you.  Now when your state changes every tax rate, you can keep your system up to date in just minutes.

WorkForce Edits Report:  Whether you are attaching equipment pictures to a contract, completing a service from the jobsite, or clocking in, you can now get a listing of all the edits that have been through Mobile WorkForce.  The report can be found under Override Reports.

Waiting List:  A customer calls up for a widget that is currently rented out so you want to add him to the Wait List.  Unfortunately you have to re-ask the customer all the information that you already know about him.  Well now you won’t have to beg for forgiveness.  You can look up the customer directly from the Wait List screen and it will auto fill in the customer information.

Header Record:  It is a balancing act to handle the needs for the majority of events while allowing the minority events.  Updating a Header record is a prime example.  On average when you update the Header, you would want the serialized items to be updated as well; however, if you made each serialized item an exact copy, then you couldn’t have serialized items that were different models, years, specifications, etc.  To try to come to the perfect balance, when updating fields on a Header record, you will be asked on each field you modified whether you want to copy the change to all serialized items.

Day at a Glance: A new column has been added to Day at a Glance that shows the Current Store of each item.  You can turn the column on by right clicking on the grid header and check boxes any columns you desire to see.

Section 179:  Extra depreciation charges through Section 179 has always been troublesome since you probably don’t know the amount you want to use until your taxes are filed months after the end of year.  We created a new tool to ease the burden.  The Extra Depreciation Allocation tool allows you to set the total amount you want to take, then will list all of the items you purchased during the year.  You can then either automatically apply the Section 179 to the items or manually select the desired items.  You are allowed to save your work in progress until you are ready to finalize.  Once finalized, the items will be updated and the depreciation re-computed for each item.

Delivery Address:  You are on the delivery screen and ask the customer for the delivery address.  You start typing it in and it sounds really familiar.  Wasn’t that the customer’s address?  You can’t be sure and you can’t see the customer’s address so you continue to ask all of the other details such as city, state, postal code.  Or the counter guy is on the delivery screen and he just hits enter, not paying attention that the default is “Use Customer’s Address”.  Of course the delivery driver (and the customer) is hopping mad when he delivers the backhoe to the corporate office instead of the job site.  Both of these situations have been solved.  The “Use Customer’s Address” is no longer the default and the customer’s address is displayed next to the delivery address so whether checked or not checked, you will still know the customer’s address.

Salesman:  As you read that word “Salesman” were you appalled? No, not because of their eating habits, but because it has the word “man” in it.  It is a sexist word and we won’t stand for any sexism so the word has been replaced with Sales Rep throughout the program.  Now you can focus on the eating habits of your salesmen sales rep.

Bin Location:  If you make a change to the Bin Location of an item, it will now log that edit in the Item Edit History.

Header Selection:  We have always trained our users to select the Header Item when writing a reservation for bulk items.  This allows you to easily move the contract from store to store and when your send out the reservation, it will pick the correct store item.  However, this has a fairly bad side effect.  When sending out a reservation with 2000 line items and almost all of them are bulk headers, it is a bit time consuming.  Therefore, we have a new parameter for Auto Select Bulk Store Items.  With this checked, whenever you write a new reservation and select a bulk header, your store’s item will automatically be selected.  Then when you send out the reservation, all of the bulk items have already been selected and you only have to worry about the serialized items.

Change Store:  Under Contract Processing you have been able to change the store of a contract for several years.  We have now enhanced this feature as it pertains to multi-store bulk items.  When you change stores, it will also update all of the bulk items to be the new store selected.  So if this contract was originally a store 2 contract and you change it to store 5, all of the -2 bulk items will be changed to -5 bulk items.

Multi-Store Reports:  You are spending the day in your remote store to help.  You go to run some analysis reports to show where they could improve; however, you can’t get to the store selection box because it is a remote store.  Well don’t fear.  Just double click on the store box and you will be prompted for an owner’s override password.  Once entered, you will have access to any of the store’s selection.

Vendor Markup:  You have created Vendor Markup’s to automatically update the sales price anytime the purchase price changes; however, with the sky rocketing price of shipping, the extra charges have a much bigger impact on the overall cost of the item.  To solve this problem, the Vendor Markup percentage will now be applied to the purchase price PLUS the extra charges to insure you cover all of your costs.

Loadslip Format:  Everyone has a different idea for how a Loadslip should look.  We have many different formats and were afraid we were going to run out of letters to designate all the formats.  To protect us from running out of filenames and to give you the most flexibility as possible, you can now choose the Loadslip format using the same functionality that you have on the contract format.  This allows you to pick the header, footer, and columns that printout.

Depreciation:  Ah, the thought of depreciation conjures up visions of peaceful valleys with birds chirping and lilies sway in the wind….NOT.  There are a million ways to do depreciation and we thought we had seen them all, but wait there is a million and one ways.  We have customers that want to do different depreciation method and years on the same item but with different purchase lots.  It seemed like a challenge so we accepted and conquered.

Straight Line Declining Balance:  What?  You have never heard of Straight Line Declining Balance depreciation method?  Well, we invented it.  It is actually a good method to track the current value for your used rental items.  Please note, we would encourage you to only use it for your internal schedules.  We are sure the IRS hasn’t heard of this method either.

AEMP GPS Integration:  The AEMP GPS integration allows you to get the hour meter reading as well as the location of items in your fleet.  To enhance this, your items will be polled at least once a day and the current meter will be automatically updated in the inventory record.  This allows your maintenance due and service due to be up to the minute all the time.  So if your customer is running your equipment 24/7, you will know right away that you need to go out and service the equipment onsite.

No Email:  A common request we have received is to individually mark a customer’s contact to not receive marketing emails.  The field has been added and you can exclude customers to your heart’s content.

Customer Notifications:  First we started with Salesmen Salesperson Notifications.  Everyone got jealous that the salesmen salesperson were always in the know so we added the Transaction Notifications.  Then the owners and managers were upset that they were left out so we added the System Notifications.  Now the customers are rioting in the streets for their turn so this revision we have added Customer Notifications.  With this feature you can set individual contacts to automatically be emailed when a specific event occurs.  There are numerous events such as Open Contract, Modify Contract, Call Off Rent, and Send Out Reservation.  In addition they can be notified for account events such as Contact Change, Over Credit Limit, and Payment on Account.  Now your customers will always be in the know.  Can’t think of any group that is now left out.  Maybe next revision will have the “Spouse’s Notification” that texts them when their spouse clocks out for the day so they won’t have to wonder when they will get home.

Item Lookup:  You can now lookup an inventory item by entering the GPS unit number.

Recompute Contract Price:  You have a quote that you wrote two years ago or you have a reservation that you have been messing with the pricing and in either case you want to get back to what your current rates are for this contract.  Under Set Contract Price in the Contract Processing screen a new option has been added to recompute all the items price to today’s rates.

Employee Logs:  One thing is consistent through the years.  You want flexibility.  For added flexibility you can now change the password level on employee logs previously written.

Reminders:  You have always been able to send reminders to everyone in an employee group, but what happens if you want to send a reminder to a number of people who are not in the same group.  Well this is where your copy and paste skills come in handy.  For those who don’t enjoy spending quality time with your keyboard, we have added the ability to select multiple employees to receive a reminder.  With your new found time, you might want to try Solitaire.

Phone Format:  We have a format war going between users.  Some think phones should be (xxx) xxx-xxxx.  Others think it should be xxx-xxx-xxxx.  While others think it should be xxx.xxx.xxxx.  And those crazy Australians think it should be xx xxxx xxxx.  To try to placate everyone, you can define your phone format under Translations.  It is number 212.

Payment Receipt:  Everyone desires custom messages for customer facing communication.  Probably the last holdout that was hard coded was the Payment Receipt email subject and body message.  But don’t fear, you can customize the subject and body all you want under Email Messages in Configuration.

Continuation Billing:  Tired of wasting paper every time you manually continuation bill a contract.  The program will now stop and ask you whether you want to print the closed contract.  If you don’t do anything with it, just select No Print.

Auto Continuation Bill:  A new option allows you to set the bill through date when doing Continuation Billing.  This can be used if you want to continue contracts from a particular date to a particular date such as the first to the first of each month.  This can also be used to get the initial contract opened through a particular date.  For example, mini-storages are usually rented month to month on the first day of the month.  With this feature, you can continue all of the contracts opened during the month to start on the first of the next month.  Remember that you can continue only contracts in certain Item Categories which is helpful to isolate just your mini-storage contracts.

Auto Continuation Billing:  Continuation Billing has always defaulted to billing for one month.  Under normal conditions that is fine.  However there are times and there are types of items that you want to bill something different than a month for example you might want to bill weekly.  So you can now select the number of days for rebilling.  If you want to do weekly billing, just set the days to 7 and it will automatically handle the rest.

Auto Continuation Billing:  Here is another change that is going to make some people’s day, week, or maybe even decade.  When doing Auto Continuation Billing for cash customers, you can take credit card payments during the continuation billing process.  You will be prompted to select the desired credit card.  It will then move on to the next contract to be billed.

Void Reason:  Your employee voids a reservation.  A couple of days later you noticed that the reservation for the big event is gone, but why you ask.  The employee doesn’t remember and you are left to make the same mistake on the next order.  Now the employee will be asked to enter the reason for voiding the contract.  You can then look up the reasons under the Cancelled Contracts Report.

Contract Format:  Several new columns have been added to the Contract Format for your formatting pleasure.  These columns include Rental Period, Rental Period with Time, and Line Item Comments.
Contract Legalese:  Through the years, there has been much debate whether the contract legalese should come before or after the contract when emailed.  The arguments on both sides are good so to appease both parties, there is a new option to select whether the legalese comes before or after the contract.  You choose and be comforted in whichever decision you pick, you were right.

Non-discounted Damage Waiver:  Just because you have discounted a line item doesn’t necessarily mean that you want to also discount the damage waiver for that item since the liability is the same.  So a new parameter has been added that allows you to charge the damage waiver on the non-discounted amount.  For example you have a $100 item that you gave a 50% discount on.  With the parameter checked, you will charge the damage waiver on $100 and not $50.

Non-rental Assets:  You can now select whether to include your non-rental assets (i.e. delivery trucks, buildings, boats, corvettes, etc.) in the Inventory Value Report and Items Purchased Reports.

Quote Notification:  A new System Notification has been added for “Quote over X dollars.”  With this notification set, you can get a notification each time a quote is created for over the dollar value that you have entered.

Email Letters:  You can add dynamic fields within your email letters for such things as the customer’s name, contract number, contract date, etc.  We have added several new fields as well: Delivery Address, Delivery Comments, Contract Total, Contract Paid Amount, Contract Owed Amount, and Contract Deposit Paid.  Simply add the special fields into your standard letters and those fields will be replaced with the appropriate value for your contract.

Vendor Lookup:  It is very frustrating when you are looking for a vendor that you know is there, but can’t seem to figure out how it is spelled.  Well now, as long as you can spell part of the name correct, you can search anywhere within the vendor’s name, product, or contact.  So for example, you could type BOBCAT and get every vendor that has Bobcat in their name or product rather than just the one that begins with Bobcat.

Default Email Messages:  Previously in Parameters you could setup a default email message by contract status such as Open, Quote, Reservation, or Closed.  This was great; however, if for some reason you wanted to use the default Closed Message on a Reservation contract you couldn’t see it.  Also, it meant going to two different locations to update email messages.  So the email messages have been pulled out of the Parameters and put under Configuration; Email Messages.  Now all of the email messages are together and you can select which message is the default for each status.

Item Lookup:  Everyone uses the system differently.  Even within the same store different employees have different functions and therefore have different needs.  One of the areas that we get lots of requests is on the Item Lookup screen: “always show serialized items”, “don’t show sales items”, “don’t show rental items”, “show parts”, “show inactive”, etc.  To handle all of the different needs, we now store the default check boxes by user.  You can check or uncheck each box you would like, then right click on the grid header.  When you click save, it will save your checkbox settings along with column widths, column order, and grid sort field.  Remember that each program stores its own settings which allows you to have a different setting for File Maintenance than you have for Counter System.

Rental Purchase Option:  Your customer rents your item for 6 months and then he decides he wants to buy it.  Not only does he want to buy it, he also wants you to apply all of the monies he has paid in rent for the last 6 months.  After you calmly explain that you charge for time out and that is the way you stay in business, you negotiate a more reasonable percentage of 12% of rent paid.  Now how do you do that without getting out your calculator?  It is easy.  Just right click on the item, select Asset Sales, and you will be prompted for the percentage to apply towards the purchase.  Enter 12% and it will compute it and deduct it from the sale.

Account Customer:  A customer starts out as a Cash customer, but then he applies for an Account.  You change him over to Account and he still has three contracts opened.  When they are closed, the customer expects that he will simply be billed; however, since they were opened as a Cash contract the system wants payment in full on close.  To relieve the tension, when converting a Cash customer to an Account customer, you will be asked whether to convert all of his open contracts to Account.  Answer Yes and he will automatically be billed on account when closed.

Day at a Glance:  A new column has been added for Contract Link to Day at a Glance.  This allows you to see the Subrental, Service, or Repairs ticket that is associated with that line item.  Double click on the Link field and that contract will be opened.

Closed Customers:  A new check box has been added to the Customer Lookup screen to show or hide Customers with Closed Accounts.  With this unchecked, you will only see the customers that are relevant to you.

Credit Card Inquire:  You are a multi-store system and you want to know that the credit card numbers match at a remote store.  What do you do?  Now you simply have to chose the store drop down menu and select the store you would like to inquire.

Purchase Order Attachments:  You have been able to add attachments to Contracts, Items, and Customers for a long time.  Now you can add attachments to Purchase Orders.  This allows you to attach the actual invoice from the customer and thus eliminate the digging through reams of paper later.

Finance Charges:  Governments love to “help” out businesses.  A couple of states now require that the finance charge percentage prints on the invoice so this will now print along with the total amount the finance charge was computed from.

Internal Repair Order:  Many people use Item Availability to find information about an item.  While they are there, you might want to mark the item out of service for repairs.  You can now do that under Tools.

Internal Maintenance Order:  While you are in Item Availability you might decide that the item needs maintenance so under Tools you can select to create an Internal Maintenance Order for the item.

Customer Dashboard:  When you are finished modifying or closing a contract, the customer or you might have questions about the customer’s account.  Now on the final menu you will have the option to go directly to the Customer Dashboard where you can see all other contracts for this customer whether they are Quotes, Reservations, Open, Closed, or unpaid.

Save Contract Forms:  Transfers and Subrental contracts will now default to the plain paper printer instead of your contract printer.

Company Branding:  We have added a new option for Company Branding.  This allows you to set a Company Name, Address, Email, Web Site, and Logo that is different than your store info.  This can be used if you have a different business housed in your store such as a specialty rental items or maybe an event rental.  Please contact Sales if you are interested in pricing for this option.

Contract Format:  A new option has been added to the Contract Format for showing the Discounted Rates.  With this checked, any line item that has a percentage discount will print the discounted rates for that line item instead of the standard rates.

tem Modification:  You know that Greek image of punishment where the person could see the grapes but were just out of reach?  Well that is how Purchase Orders has been described where you can see the item record; however, you can’t modify it.  To remove you from Purgatory, you will now be able to modify the item record directly from Purchase Orders without having to go into File Maintenance.

Country Code:  For many years we have forced our Canadian brothers to endure spelling “Cheque” as “Check”.  Well no more!  You can now set the Country within Parameters.  With the country set, several changes will occur especially in areas of postal codes and formats.

Asset Sales:  You can now define the General Ledger Account Number for the Asset Sales Income by Item Category.  If you leave the account number blank in the category table, it will use your default number defined in your Account Number table.

Commission Reports:  You can now select a specific salesperson to run the Commission Reports against.  In addition you can choose to only include a specific store for the report.

Commission Reports:  A new selection has been added to the Commission Reports: Posted Contract Sales Rep, Customer Sales Rep, or Jobsite Sales Rep.  With this selection, you can choose how you want to compute commissions.  For example, you could give 50% commission to the salesperson from the contract and the other 50% commission to the salesperson on file for that customer.
IRO, IMO, ISO History:  You have probably been sitting around the house on a weekend and said, “I sure wish there was an easy way to see the history of Internal Repairs, Maintenance, and Service on any given item.”  Well we heard you.  Now under the Maintenance Menu of an item record, you can select the IRO, IMO, or ISO history to be displayed.  So now you need to find something else to think about on your weekends.

IMO Creation:  You are in File Maintenance looking up an item.  While doing the research you figure out that this item needs some Maintenance.  No longer do you need to exit out and go to Counter System to create an IMO for this item.  Simply click on the Maintenance menu and select Create IMO.  Then you are done.

Reservation Report:  A new option has been added to the Reservation Report that will allow you to select a store region.  This is handy for multi-store companies that have groups of stores together but further away from the other stores.  This allows you to see all of the reservations for just the stores in your region.

Aging Report:  Some multi-store companies do their receivables by region so a particular AR person is in charge of the East Region for example.  Now you can print your Aging Report by store region to handle this.

Email Messages:  You can now define your Email Letters by store so that you could customize the Reservation Reminder message or the Quote message to be specific to a store.

Show Quantity by Store:  You are modifying a reservation and the line item says that it is “Store Short”.  What are you going to do?  Maybe another store has some available, but which one?  Simply right click on the line and select “Show Quantity by Store”.  You will now see how many of the items are in stock at all of your other locations.

Delivery/Pickup Screen:  You are writing a reservation for delivery.  The Delivery Screen is shown with all of the deliveries and pickups for that day.  There are a lot of them and you are having a hard time separating all of them out to make a decision of when is available.  Well, we have added two checkboxes for “Show Pickups” and “Show Deliveries”.  You can simply uncheck “Show Pickups” and now your list will only show the deliveries or vice versa.

Delivery/Pickup Screen:  You are writing a reservation for delivery.  The Delivery Screen has a lot of contracts shown for that day.  Are those big contracts or small contracts?  Well now you can click on the plus sign next to any of the contracts and get a listing of all the items on that contract.

Parameters:  The Parameters had multiple tabs that were more related to other areas of the program, but this has been rectified.  The Security tab has been moved to Security; System Security.  The Reports tab has been moved to Configuration; Reports and Notifications.  The Email tab has been moved to Configuration; System Configuration; Email Letters.  While it might take a couple of tries to remember where they have moved, in the long run we believe you will appreciate their new logical location.

Charts:  Everyone loves pretty charts with dots and lines and colors.  Well you can now see a couple pretty charts under Income History in an item record.  The first chart is the Yearly Income History chart.  This chart shows the income each year for this item.  It is a visual way to quickly see the trend for the preceding years.  The other chart is the Monthly Income History chart.  This chart shows the total income on a monthly basis with each year stack on top of the other.  This chart will allow you to see the seasonality of an item.

Reservation Value Comparison:  You think things are going great.  Seems like you have a lot more reservations this year than last, but did you really?  Well now you can answer your questions with the new Reservation Value Comparison report.  This report will show you what your reservation value was on your selected day for the last several years.  It will compare the value of pending reservations for the next month, quarter, and year.  With this information you can tell whether your future earnings will be up or down.

Optional Items:  You create a quote for a customer and put the items on it that he requested, but you would really like to show him some additional items he could get as well.  If you add those items to the quote, it will also increase the price and might make the customer not place the reservation.  There is now a solution to this problem.  You can create another quote with the optional items on it.  Then link the second quote to the first as optional.  Now when you print or email the quote to the customer, they will see all the items you put on the quote and the total pricing for those items.  In addition there will be a section for optional items that will list all the items from the second quote.  Since they are in the optional section, their prices do not affect the quote price.

Item Due for Maintenance:  There is a new System Notification that will send a notification anytime an item is returned and is due for maintenance.  This will allow the Service Manager to get a head start.

Item Due for Reorder:  Anytime an item is sold below its minimum reorder level, the counter person is notified that the item is due for reorder; however, how often does the counter person actually inform the person who does the ordering?  Well now, you can setup a System Notification for when an item is due for reorder.  Now the Purchasing Manager will never miss the need to order additional quantity.

Prorate Continuation:  We have had a parameter for many years that will prorate the rental rate on the final billing of a continued contract.  This works great except it might not work like you think if your default rate is Iterative Rate.  The nature of the Iterative Rate structure is that overtime is calculated from earlier rates rather than prorating.  For example an item that has been rented for 2 weeks 3 days and 4 hours, under non-Iterative Rate structures would pro-rate that to probably 3 weeks.  But the Iterative Rate would charge 2 times the weekly rate, 3 times the daily rate, and 4 times the hourly rate.  So needless to say, the parameter basically didn’t change anything for Iterative Rate.  The program has been changed so that if you are Iterative Rate and you have the parameter checked to prorate, then the final billing will be based on a daily rate of 1/28th of the monthly rate.  The update will uncheck this parameter if you use Iterative Rate so you will need to change the parameter if you really want to prorate.

Item Rate Amount Analysis Report:  Over the last year, what is your average daily, weekly, or monthly rate that you charged for a specific item?  What is your low or high rates?  There is a new report that will give you that information.  If you find that your rates vary greatly from your base rate, it is time to investigate to see if your base rate needs to be changed or your employees need to be changed.

Sales Tax Report:  The Sales Tax Report now has a store selection option so you can run the report for just a single store if desired.

Purchase Order Printout:  You can now add the General Ledger Number to the Purchase Order printout.

Allow Other Store’s Rental Items:  Are you tired of another store “stealing” your items?  Now you can set a password level required to allow a store to book another store’s rental items.  This is by store so you could set different password levels at each location.

Allow Inactive Items:  You have marked certain items as being Inactive for a reason, but certain employees continue to rent them anyway.  Well now you can put a stop to that once and for all.  Simply set the new parameter for Allow Renting Inactive Items to require an Owner’s level password.  Of course this only solves the problem if it isn’t the owner that keeps renting them.

Edit Call Log:  There seems to be lots of regrets over what is typed in the heat of the moment in Call Logs since we get so many requests to change it.  We relented a couple of revisions ago to allow an Owner level password to change an existing Call Log.  That still wasn’t enough flexibility so now you can set the password level required to modify an existing Call Log.

Set Stop Date Earlier:  Previously if someone tried to stop the rental time on a contract to a date in the past, it required a Regional Manager password level.  Now you can set your own level required to make that change.

Allow Write Off’s:  A new security parameter has been added for you to set the password level required to Write Off an existing contract using the Write Off routines in Counter System.

True Value Analysis Report:  With many Grand Rental and Taylor Rental users, True Value requested a customized analysis report that they use.  We figured if it was good enough for True Value to use, it was good enough to give everyone an opportunity to gain Dollar Utilization and Times Utilization insights as well.

Data Management Tool – UPPER Case:  New options have been added to the Data Management toolbox.  One tool is the ability to update text fields in certain tables to all UPPER, lower, or Proper Case. This is a nice feature to clean up customer names, contact names, item names, etc… when formatting is not consistent from employee to employee.

Data Management Tool – Item Category Merge:  With the Data Management module you can now merge categories.  While it doesn’t occur very often, it is quite a timesaver when you need to combine two categories that previously were separate.

Data Management Tool – Damage Waiver Update:  You can now update the damage waiver percentage selectively across your inventory.  You can select based on Division and Item Category as well as by current damage waiver percentage.  Once selected, you choose the new damage waiver percentage and then click Apply.

Data Management Tool – Item Percentage Update:  You can update the Item Percentage across your inventory.  You can select based on Division and Item Category as well as by current Item Percentage amount.

Load Slip:  If you wanted to have a place on the Load Slip for your customer to sign that says you didn’t damage their vehicle, you can do that.  If you want a place to fill in the meter readings, fuel level, or mileage, you can do that too.  You can accomplish this by defining the verbiage that prints out on the Load Slip.  You will find this under Configuration; System Configuration; Printout Fields.

Load Slip Item Tag:  Even after a complete redesign to give everyone what they want in a load slip, we were still able to come up with ways for you to add customizations to your load slips. Load slip messages by item! Now you can create a message specific to an item or machine to make certain the right information is gathered or communicated to the customer when the item is being sent out. The message will print below the item. Check out NetHelp for instructions.

Report Generator:  The Report Generator is a bit of a pain because it is the last program that goes directly to the printer instead of showing the report to the screen first.  After the Sierra Club filed suit against us for destroying the forest, we have made changes.  Once you have created your format and your selection criteria, the results will be displayed in a grid on your screen.  As with all other grids in the program, you can sort, filter, and best of all export to a spreadsheet.  Now if all of that doesn’t give you what you want, you can still click the Print button.  Just make sure the Sierra Club isn’t looking.

Tear Sheet:  The Tear Sheets will now display the Manufacturer, Model Number, Model Year, and Hours if applicable when an item has been marked for sale.

Aging Headers:  Under Translations you can now define the header for “Current”, “31-60”, “61-90”, “Over 90” to be your own customized words like “Pay Now”, “A Little Late”, “Bum”, “Politician”.

Quote Legalese:  The legalese that prints on a Quote contract can now be modified to different languages so the printout will match the language for the customer.

Email Signature by Language:  You can now define a different default email signature for each of your languages defined.

Pre-Lien Report:  This report shows the jobsite information as well as customer information for open contracts that are eligible for pre-lien.  It allows you to mark contracts as Pre-lien Completed when you are done.

Inventory Count Report:  If you only want to count rental items that are currently on lot, you are in luck.  A new option has been added to the Inventory Count Report for “Show Items with Quantity on Hand”.  With this checked, only the rental items that you currently have on hand will print on the report.

Inventory Count Report:  This report has been enhanced to landscape to display more information. Serial number, rental status, and contract# (if the item is currently on a contract) columns have been added. Rental status will show ‘Ready to Rent’, ‘On Rent’, ‘In Repair’, and ‘In Maint’.

 

Dispatch Center

Dispatch Notifications:  Send the customers who have elected to be notified a message the night before to alert them of your planned arrival. You define what time of day these are to be sent for confirmed routes due the next day. The message templates are defined by you and include keywords that are substituted by Dispatch Center at the time of notification, such as the planned arrival window and contract number. Additionally you can allow real-time notification of actual arrival or departure.
For Example: Define 5PM as the cut-off and after 5PM on Wednesday all of Thursday’s stops will be notified: “Your Delivery for contract 12345 has been confirmed for Thursday 10/29 between 10:00AM and 12:00PM” and once the crew arrives: “We Delivered contract 12345 at 9:57AM”

Lock/Unlock Reservations:  You can mark a contract or all contracts on a route as ‘Locked’ or ‘Un-Locked’ by right click of the contract or route. This saves you from having to jump into Day at a Glance to accomplish this task. ‘Locked’ contracts require a password to modify. The password level you have defined to modify a ‘Locked’ contract is also required to use this feature in Dispatch Center. 
Driver Task L-Ticket: This is a Logistics Contract that is not linked to any other contracts. They can be added from the ‘Tools’ menu or by right-clicking on a route. This is for free standing tasks such as ‘go pick up donuts’ or ‘take the truck to be inspected’.

Standard and Letter Messages in Email:  You can access your defined message templates when crafting an email or text for employees or customers within the Dispatch Center. This will help keep your communication style consistent.

Move to Any Day:  You can now pick any day to move a contract to as long as that day has not passed. This allows you to move a pickup for next Friday up to this Friday if the situation arises. Previously contracts could only be moved forward.

Schedule Unassigned Contracts while some are Locked: When a contract in the unassigned group is locked, you will be warned, but allowed to continue to the scheduling screen with all of the other non-locked contracts. Previously if any contract in the ‘unassigned’ group was locked by Counter System or another dispatcher, you could only view the stops in the ‘No Edits’ mode.

Send Terminal Message:  You can send a message to the terminal that has your contract locked. They will see your message come up on their screen and presumably finish up or come pay you a visit, so be courteous.

Warn if Crew Start is after Route Start:  If you are saving a route with a discrepancy between planned route start and the crew’s assigned start you will now be warned.

Dispatcher Notification:  With this option enabled and a dispatcher assigned to a given route, they will be notified when a stop’s arrival or departure is late. This way the dispatcher can be kept informed about the route status without being in front of their Dispatch computer.

Multi Grouped Employee Selection:  When adding multiple crew members to a route that are from different employee groups or stores you will see a small list containing the employees you have selected in addition to the list of employees. This fixes an issue where as you changed the group or store filter your previous selections were lost when we just had the one list.

Use Customer Address Option in Address Verify:  When validating an address you can double-click the label containing the customer’s account address to have that fill in the address search boxes. Previously you had to pick each part of the alternate addresses from the drop down lists if you wanted to change from the address entered on the contract for delivery.

Read-Only Mode:  There is an option to view a route without locking the route and contracts. This option will allow other employees to access the same route/contracts while you are viewing them. If you need to make changes, you will have to close the route and start again without the ‘Read-Only’ option selected.

Only Print Instructions for Deliveries:  When a driver packet is printed only the delivery contracts will include their item instructions when you select the ‘Include Instructions’ option.

Highlight Selected Row: The contract row that you have selected or the group of contracts is now highlighted in blue so that you can tell which one(s) you are working with.

Enhanced Multi-Contract Drag Process: No longer requires maintaining the held key during the drag. i.e. Hold CTRL and click each contract to multi-select, but then you can let go of the CTRL key to actually drag the contracts.

AutoScroll of Tree: If you have more trucks and trips than are visible on the screen, as you drag a stop/trip towards the top/bottom of the tree, it will automatically scroll for you.

 

                                                                                                                        Mobile WorkForce

Capture Route Begin/End:  Your drivers can log the time that they left and returned the rental yard. These entries let the route status report provide a round-trip total for billing based on complete drive time. This also allows the dispatcher to see that the truck is back in the yard.

Select Serialized:  Your employees can select the serialized unit for a contract at the time of delivery. The item will be added to the contract in place of the header item.  – Requires the Fulfillment Module.

Mark Delivered:  Your crews can record where and what quantity were delivered to the customer. When the pickup is scheduled your representative will have the option to use the GPS location of one of the items in place of the original delivery address. – Requires the Fulfillment Module.

Mark Picked up:  Your crews can record the quantity and make notes for each line item as they pick them up from the customer location. – Requires the Fulfillment Module.

Prep In/Out:  Your yard employees can record quantity and make notes as they prepare or unpack an order. This allows real-time monitoring of prep operations. – Requires the Fulfillment Module.

Fuel Level:  Your yard employees or dispatch crews can record the fuel level on rental items with a fuel tank defined as they prep out, pick-up, or prep-in inventory. This will add the appropriate amount of fuel to the contract prior to billing. – Requires the Fulfillment Module.

Item Search by Bin Location or Category:  This is helpful when doing an inventory cycle count.  It allows easy synchronization between the counting employee and the manager finalizing the results of the count.

Customer Call Logs:  Your employees can add call logs for active customers. They can also see the last 90 days of call logs on an active customer’s account in WorkForce.

Call-Off Rent:  Your employees can mark a contract or an item called-off rent. This will create a call log on the contract which triggers a notification for any employees that you defined to receive call-off notifications.

Real-time update of WorkForce Actions: As a task is performed, the WorkForce App will complete the action in the app database. Previously the result would not show until the POR data had been refreshed.
For example: 
When you mark a stop arrived, the arrived button goes away and the arrival timestamp is displayed in the contract information.
When you mark a service contract closed, its status shows closed.
When a stop is marked departed, and or as a closed service, the stop is hidden from the route. This way you only see what is left on a route. You can select ‘Show Completed’ to see them.
Improved display of Task Confirmation: We are showing the latitude, longitude, geo accuracy and local time the task was submitted. 
If the user has not allowed the porwork.com app to use the gps data from their device the latitude, longitude, and accuracy will be 0 and shown in red. 
If the accuracy is poor the data will show in red. This means that the gps data has a variance of more than 65 meters.

Time Clock Groups: If you use these to separate clock in/outs for different job types per employee, the user can select the appropriate group when performing a time clock on WorkForce.

Contract Comment on Services: This is only available on a Service Contract. When a call log is made and no call log type is selected, the text will be imported into Point-of-Rental as a Contract Comment. This prints when a contract is reprinted, and is shown on the Service History Report.

Multiple Image Upload: You can now upload up to 8 images simultaneously as Contract or Item attachments.

 

Employee Scheduling

Overview:  This module allows you to define the daily work schedules of your employees. It allows your employees to view, print, email, and import their schedules into 3rd party calendar apps. Your employees can request time-off which will alert their manager for them to approve or deny the request.

Shift Definitions:  A shift basically consists of a start time and duration. For example ‘First shift’ starts at 6AM and lasts 8.5 hours. Each day can have the same, different, or no shifts depending on your operating hours.

Employee Requirements by Group:  Employees are assigned to a shift by employee group. You define how many of each employee group is required for a given shift. For example ‘First shift’ requires 2 mechanics and 3 counter employees.

Shift Manager per Group:  You assign a manager of each employee group per shift so that time-off requests can be directed to the appropriate inbox. For example ‘First shift’ mechanics are managed by Erica and ‘First Shift’ counter employees are managed by Fred on Mondays.

Assign Employees to a Shift:  You can select employees that have a repeatable schedule to the appropriate shift for each of their work days. This template will be used as the baseline as you build the schedule for a new period. For example: Sally has a static schedule of: ‘First Shift’ Monday, Tuesday, Friday and ‘Second Shift’ Wednesday and Thursday.

Copy / Paste Shift Definitions:  Since you have to build each shift, group requirements, and assign employees from scratch initially, we have a right click option to copy any or all of those elements and paste them into the next day’s template. When you add or lose employees, the copy/paste will help you quickly make the adjustments. For example: you can copy everything from Monday template and paste it into the Tues., Wed., Thurs., Fri. template days if your employees all work the same shifts Monday to Friday.  You can also copy just the shift start times and durations without the employee assignments or only a specific shift or many combinations to cut down on the ‘data entry’ part of establishing your base templates.

Schedule Building:  After you have defined your shift templates you can start literally building out the schedule. Your shifts will show who is assigned to a given day and the calendar shows who has actually been scheduled or who has approved/unapproved time-off. You can also define a shift on the fly or view employees that do not have a static schedule so that you can schedule these ‘flex’ employees when you have a shortage.

Auto-Scheduling:  Building each schedule day by day and employee by employee can be fun, but in case you want to push a button and have the next 1 to 31 days automatically generated we have the auto schedule button. This can generate all shifts based on templates for the whole company, a specific store, a specific shift, or a specific employee group. Once the schedule is generated, you can see the days where a vacation presents you a challenge and focus on those days to add flex employees or start hiring new ones.

Request Time-off:  Your employees can request single or multiple days off. The must select from one of your defined time-off reasons and can include a note. An email will be sent to their manager with the request details.

Shift Swaps:  Your employees can request a shift swap with another employee. This creates a time-off request for employee A and an unapproved shift for employee B. A manager must approve both sides for the swap to be accepted.

Approve or Deny Time-off:  Managers can approve or deny individual requests or bulk-approve a list of requests. Employees will be sent a message containing the approval or denial status and any notes the manager included.

Viewable Schedules:  You and your employees can view the schedule on a calendar view. Employees only see their own schedule by default, but you can grant them rights to see all or only same group/store employees.

Printable Schedules:  You and your employees can print monthly, weekly, daily, or list views of the shifts and time off.

Google / Outlook Calendar Integration:  Each schedule can be imported into 3rd party programs as appointments.

Email Schedule:  You can email the importable .ICS file or simply a text version of the schedule.

Inter-Office Schedules:  For those employees who use the traditional Point-of-Rental Inter-Office mail, their schedule will be waiting for them in a text only format.

 

Website Integration

Is your website beginning to look stale?  Are you tired of updating it manually with your latest inventory and pricing info?  Do you wish to increase your business by making your website available 24x7 for taking online quote requests?  If the answer is yes to any of these questions, you need to consider our integrated websites design/hosting services!   New layouts are being designed each year by our sister company RentalHosting.com, offering fully integrated online catalog, shopping cart for submitting quote requests, integrated features, search engine optimization (SEO), and professional looking websites to help your store stay competitive on the internet.  For latest info on our integrated website layouts and options, please visit http://www.rentalhosting.com/ or send inquiries to[email protected].

Smart Phone Optimization:  Did you know Google made an update to its mobile search algorithms in April 2015, penalizing any website which is not optimized for smart phone devices?  If you are not keeping up with Google’s recent changes and need an effective, fully integrated smart phone optimized website, visit http://www.rentalhosting.com for more info.

Mobile App:  Do you need a mobile app for your business to reinforce your branding & name recognition and help you stand out from your competition?  Do you want better customer engagement and help generate repeat business?  You can do so now through our new mobile apps for both iphone and android platforms!  For more information on our mobile apps, please visithttp://www.rentalhosting.com/  or send inquiries to [email protected].

Online Payments:  Interested in reducing your phone calls spent on taking credit card information from customers all day?  You can now have your customers make online payments for their reservations through the new WebPay Link feature.  This is how it works: Your customers will receive the emailed PDF reservation with the additional WebPay link at the bottom of the email.  They can review the reservation one last time and then click on the WebPay link to make an online payment with a credit card.  Once approved, the credit card payment gets reported back and accounted for in your Point-of-Rental Software.  For more information on the WebPay Link, please visit http://www.rentalhosting.com/ or send inquiries to [email protected].