It’s Time To Ditch Your Spreadsheets & Whiteboards..
Lets face it. The spreadsheet is a fantastic tool to quickly create details of things you need to track in your rental business. Whether you use Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets or any other spreadsheet it tis a very user friendly and easy tool to quickly create various documents, ranging from inventory lists to creating statement of outstanding accounts.
The biggest strength of a spreadsheet is also its biggest weakness. While its easy to create a list and clone it to many others, it suddenly creates problems not only for you but also for your staff. Things can totally get out of hand and you have to keep on top of data accuracy.
How many versions of inventory lists can you maintain before you start to question yourself the very purpose of creating such lists?
Follow These Three Approaches To Learn How To Ditch Your Spreadsheets And Improve Your Decision Making Efficiency!
Approach 1: Consolidate Inventory List
Viberent provides simple import functionality that bring together all your inventory in one place. Do it once and do it right.
Prepare a consolidated list of all your inventory. There shall only one version of truth. This single list is the one that is used by all your staff to check availability (is it out or in or in repairs or sold off).
No more duplicated lists, no more inaccurate stock count, no more frustrated staff or customer!
Approach 2: Tracking Transparency
Think you are in total control of your inventory? Think again.
Creating an invoice in your accounting system and/or making a note in your spreadsheet doesn’t mean you are in total control.
Can you easily identify what your stock levels will be in three weeks time when a prospect is on the phone wanting to make a booking?
Your whiteboard can only show few days at a time or you can only remember so many transactions in your head?
What if your staff has confirmed the same item to another customer for the same future period but forgot to note on your whiteboard or your spreadsheet? Or worse, forgot to tell you.
With multi-user functionality and a cloud solution that can be used anywhere, you and your staff can enter all your rentals in one place and tracking them is now a breeze. Whether it’s a short-term rental for few hours to few days or long-term rentals for few months to even few years, Viberent rental tracking will totally streamline your end-to-end rental operations.
Approach 3: Eliminate redundant data entry
Accounting systems today make it really easy to raise invoices, link to your bank accounts to process bank statements and keep the overall business accounts accurate. But we all know that you have created the job on your whiteboard, duplicated the same details in your accounting system. Its going to be either you or the staff in your office to ensure the multiple sources are in sync. Before you realise, you have spent 1-2 hours each day duplicating data in various places. That is 8-10 hours each week. Yes you are right, you just spent a day each week duplicating data in multiple places.
Viberent’s integration to accounting systems such as Xero, MYOB or QBO, totally eliminates such redundant data in multiple places. You enter it once in Viberent and it flows through seamlessly to your accounting system with you even knowing it. what did you achieve through this? you just saved yourselves 8 hours every week. Imaging using those 8 hours to meet new customers, creating new products or services or additional marketing or sales initiatives. This 8 hours gives you that much needed time to work ‘on’ your business rather than ‘in’ your business.
Result?
What is the end result of the above approaches? Yes, you get your 8 hours back but that’s not all of it. Most importantly, from your business’s point of view, you get a handle on your business performance.
While spreadsheets allow easy collection of data, extracting meaningful information from them such as equipment utilization, future inventory forecast etc require time consuming complex spreadsheets setup. Businesses regularly make decisions based on ‘gut feel’ rather than facts or raw data. The data can paint a totally different picture to your gut feel sometimes.
If you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it.
Viberent is not only good at managing your inventory and ensuring accurate invoicing, the system can also provide you deep analysis of your business information. From proposal effectiveness to inventory utilization reporting, Viberent’s 30+ powerful reports will ensure you can base your business decisions on proper data turned into meaningful information and business insight.
