With HireLogic we have made it easier for you to get a clear picture of your hire business. This short post is going to explain why it is important to know your numbers, and how our hire and rental software has made it easier for you to know them.

The data stored by technology companies has been a hot topic in the news for the past year or so.  We have become used to frequently seeing an article about some silicon valley giant misusing the data provided to them by their customers. It is a complex issue that no doubt will be wrangled in courts around the world for years to come. The other side of this coin is the underuse of data. The collection of data is an unavoidable side-product of managing a complex organisation like a hire or rental operation, however all too often this data is not put to work in a meaningful way.

Think about all of the data you can enter into a hire management software: all of the contracts you add; the items you place on hire; the fees you charge to hire these items; and not to mention the data about the customers you are serving. There is tremendous value in much of this data, it can allow you to analyse and review your past actions as well as forecast and make predictions about the future. But you can’t just take data, and make decisions based on those numbers, before you can get any real value from it, you need to turn that data into information; and to turn it into information, you need the right software tools.

At HireLogic, we have been thinking about the data we hold on behalf of our customers, and how we can turn it into useful information to help them analyse their past performance and make decisions about their business.

As a result of this, we have redesigned the dashboard within our software to give a detailed snapshot of a hire company. Previously, we displayed lists of information about various types of transactions that are recorded in the application, such as active hires, contracts pending payment, bookings, and deliveries. This information is still available on the dashboard, but it is now more organised, and easier to scan.

We have split the pertinent data up into 4 different tiles, visible in the screenshot here.

The first tile, titled “Active Hires” shows you some quick numbers about the equipment you currently have on hire, the main number is the count of active contracts, below that you can see exactly how many items are on hire. Underneath that we have included the number of items that are returning today, the number that are overdue to be returned, and the number of items that have no estimated return date added. Clicking on any of these numbers will bring up a detailed list, filtered by the typ you clicked on.

The next tile shows pending payment – this tile could be particularly useful to the management team. The main number here is the total number of contracts with an outstanding balance still to be paid. The second number is the total value of those outstanding balances, so you can see at a glance exactly how much money is owed to your hire/rental business.

The third tile contains information about your bookings. All of the information about your prospective future hire revenue is contained within this tile, so it is the most detailed of all of the tiles on the dashboard with 7 different statistics contained within it. The main number is the total count of bookings that have yet to be progressed to a hire contract. As with some of the other tiles it also splits this number up into overdue bookings, bookings due today, and bookings due this week. The 3 other numbers are a breakdown of the status of each booking:

  • Requests: These are requests for bookings that are waiting to be replied with a quotation or a confirmation of the booking.
  • Awaiting Customer Response: This represents bookings for which you or a member of your team has responded to with a quotation and is pending a response from the customer.
  • Confirmed: This is the total number of upcoming bookings that have been confirmed by both your team and the customer.

The fourth and final tile (for now!) contains information about your deliveries. Like some of the other tiles, it gives you a breakdown of the deliveries overdue, due today and due later this week. This should help you keep your deliveries organised and your customers happy.

Most of the figures on these tiles can be drilled down for further analysis at the click of a button, just click on the figure, and it will bring up the list of contracts, bookings, or deliveries that make up that number. These can then be further filtered by customer, user, or location.

We hope this latest piece of functionality makes it easier than ever to run your hire or rental business efficiently.