Inventory and Categories

Inventory is the catalogue underneath every module in Ceretta App. It is always available, whether or not you use Rent, Sales or Services. A single catalogue holds two different kinds of thing, and the difference between them matters for everything else in the system.

Rentable versus sellable items

Rentable items are tracked one unit at a time. If you own four identical concrete mixers, Ceretta App stores four separate records — mixer nº 01 through nº 04 — because at any moment one might be out with a customer, one in maintenance and two on the shelf. Each unit carries its own status:

• Available — on the shelf and bookable
• Rented — currently out with a customer
• Maintenance — being repaired or serviced, and excluded from availability
• Retired — no longer in service, kept for history

A rentable unit that is booked over a date range is automatically excluded from availability checks for those dates. You cannot double-book a unit.

Sellable items are tracked by quantity on hand. You do not care which individual cutting disc a customer walks out with, only that you had 40 and now have 39. Sellable items can carry an optional SKU. Their stock is decremented automatically when they are sold in a sales order or consumed as a part in a service order, and restored if that order is cancelled.

The purchase report above flags every sellable item that has fallen below its minimum and shows how much to reorder. It is the fastest way to build a supplier order.

Categories

Every item belongs to a category, and the category does a lot of work. Create your categories before you start adding items — changing an item's category later means revisiting its custom fields.

A category defines:

• Name and description — how the item type appears throughout the app
• Custom fields — extra fields that appear on every item in that category
• Rental period — for rentable categories only, how long a standard rental runs
• Preparation times — for rentable categories only, how long staff need before pickup and after return

Custom fields

Custom fields let you record what actually matters about your equipment without Ceretta App having to know about your industry. Each field has a name and a type:

Fields defined on a category appear automatically on every item in that category, including items you added before you created the field.

Rental periods

Rentable categories add a few settings that drive the rental screen:

• Period length — the default number of days a rental of this category runs. When staff pick a start date on a new rental, the end date is suggested from this number, which prevents most date-entry mistakes.
• Period type — whether that count uses calendar days or business days. A three-business-day rental starting on a Friday comes back on Wednesday.
• Rental rate cadence — how the price is expressed for this category.

Preparation times

Two more settings on rentable categories feed the Preparation queue:

• Pre-pickup hours — how long staff need to get a unit ready before a customer collects it
• Post-return hours — how long a unit needs after coming back before it can go out again

These hours are what make an item show up on the prep screen at the right moment. If you leave them at zero, items are assumed to need no preparation and become available again the instant they are returned.

Practical advice

• Be generous with categories. It costs nothing to have more of them, and each one gets its own custom fields and rental period. One category per genuinely different kind of equipment is about right.
• Name rentable units consistently. Something like Concrete mixer 400L nº 01 reads well in a rental list, a prep queue and a receipt.
• Set minimum stock levels on your consumables. That is the only thing that makes the purchase report useful.
• Use Maintenance rather than deleting. A unit marked Maintenance keeps its rental history and comes back cleanly; a deleted one does not.