In our work with small to mid-sized businesses, we have identified nine obvious signs that a rental business has outgrown its existing rental management software. Sometimes, just one of these conditions is painful enough and costly enough (in terms of lost opportunity) to warrant a change. Other times, rental equipment companies exhibit multiple symptoms and are buried in a flurry of paper-based customer relationship management and manual workarounds to get the accounting reports they need.
One or all of these signs could indicate that your company has outgrown your existing rental management software.
One Sign is Paper Chasing.
If you have to chase paper in order to answer a customer inquiry, research contracts, schedule maintenance, you are one lost document or folder away from a damaged customer relationship. If information is being recorded on paper that is then routed to accounting for data input, the inefficiencies and opportunities for error are numerous.
Chasing paper is truly a penny-wise, pound-foolish endeavor. In addition to not having accurate information about your business in a timely fashion, there are enormous and often invisible costs in managing by paper. These include:
- the time it takes to track down and correct errors
- stalled or incorrect data entry due to illegible handwriting
- the risk of paper documentation being lost or damaged due to spills, water damage or fire
- the risk of mis-filed or lost documentation
- the potential of losing a customer because equipment isn’t available as promised or contracts not reflecting correct pricing
- the cost of space to store paper documents.
A solid system is not only a more reliable repository of critical business information, it is more accurate, it provides quicker access to information and allows you to respond to a customer with a complete set of documentation that can then be shared (via email or fax) directly from the system.
You can learn more about this sign plus eight others by frequenting this blog, or by downloading our white paper ”Moving Up to Rentals for Adagio Accounting” on our website.