Rentals
Requires the Rent module. If you do not see Rentals in the navigation, the module is switched off for your company.
A rental books one or more rentable items to a customer over a date range. Sellable items cannot go on a rental — if a customer needs consumables as well, that is a sales order.
Creating a rental
- Pick the customer. If they are new, add them to the customer book first.
- Pick the start date. The list of available items refreshes for that date, so anything already booked disappears from the picker — this is why you should never pick items before dates.
- The end date is suggested automatically from the category's rental period. Change it if this rental is longer or shorter than standard.
- Add items. Only units that are genuinely free for the whole range are offered.
- Adjust pricing per item if needed, then save.
If you change the start date after adding items, re-check the item list. Availability is recalculated and a unit that was free before may no longer be.
Per-item discounts
Each line on a rental can be discounted independently, either as a fixed amount or as a percentage. The final rate stays editable, so you can also just type the number you agreed with the customer and let Ceretta App work backwards. Discounts are per line, not per rental, which means a long-standing customer can get a break on one expensive item without discounting the whole booking.
Rental statuses
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Scheduled | Booked for a future date, not yet collected |
| Active | Picked up and currently with the customer |
| Returned | Come back, and the rental is closed |
| Overdue | Past its end date and not yet returned |
| Cancelled | Called off — items released back to availability |
| No-show | The customer never collected |
Moving a rental through its life is deliberately a single click: mark as picked up when the customer collects, and mark as returned when the equipment comes back. Everything else — unit availability, the prep queue, the dashboard counters — follows from those two actions.
Payments on a rental
Every rental shows a payment summary: Paid, Partial, Pending or Upcoming. Pending payments on active rentals also surface on the dashboard, so nothing quietly goes uncollected. The payments themselves live in the shared ledger — see Payments.
The preparation queue
Preparation is a screen built for the staff who clean, test and check equipment, rather than for the counter. It has two halves, both driven by the preparation hours you set on each category:
- Upcoming pickups — units that need preparing before a customer arrives, colour-coded by how urgent they are
- Returns awaiting prep — units that have come back and need attention before they can go out again
Each entry shows how many prep hours the category calls for and where the unit currently stands. Staff with the Prep role see only this screen, which makes it safe to leave open on a workshop tablet.
Things that trip people up
- An item won't appear in the picker. It is almost always booked for part of your date range, in Maintenance, or Retired. Check the unit's status on the Inventory screen.
- The end date looks wrong. Check whether the category uses business days rather than calendar days.
- A returned item is still unavailable. Its category has post-return preparation hours, so it is waiting in the prep queue.
- Cancelling versus deleting. Cancel a rental that will not happen — it releases the units and keeps the history. Deleting throws the record away.