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Hire company software


jenniem

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Just wondering if anyone has any experience of using equipment to manage their hire stock. We're a medium sized company that currently uses rental desk by navigator (or mental desk as it's more commonly known by our team!) and have just about lost the will to live with it - it's unpredictable, buggy and unreliable. We've persevered with it for a while now but can trust it no more..

 

We really need a system that can manage our stock and create hire agreements and despatch notes for us. It doesn't need to be all singing, all dancing or make the tea - it just needs to work!

 

Any suggestions..

 

Thanks in advance

 

Just moved this to 'The Office' forum... been a long day!

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I am looking into this also. I have used rental desk in the past and it is not only rubbish but quite old school also!

 

I am quite a fan of "Cloud computing" and currently there is nothing out there worth looking at for hire management (There is flex rental but that is overpriced and over complicated) I cannot understand why people like Navigator have not produced a cloud version of Rental Desk! (And of course a version that is intuitive and does not crash every 5 min!) I have heard there are a number of people looking to developing a cloud hire app but nothing has come around yet. (If your reading this and one of those please hurry up!) With so many people going to MAC (Like ourselves) using tablet devices etc and requiring access to such systems remotely it seems a no brainer.

 

Anyway currently we use "my head!" for equipment tracking, prepping and costing. I can highly recommend the following systems:

 

For Accounts: www.xero.com - Very powerful and widely used accounting software.

Quotations: quotientapp.com - Very simple and effective quotation software.

CRM - http://capsulecrm.com - Simple to use CRM system

 

Most these systems cost £10 - £15 per month and often provide updates (unlike Navigator!)

Better still they also work and integrate together. i.e. CRM takes address details straight from Xero. Quotient raises invoices in Xero.

 

If your an IT cloud app developer then there is a huge opportunity here.

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Hire Track is pretty good and very stable.

 

I have not used HireTrack extensively but my impression is it offers loads of features which most small/medium size companies don't need and it looked very complex to use and set up. There is a market for small/medium AV companies and these people do not want to spend £2.5k plus on software where you don't get any updates and they have to manage themselves.

 

Beauty of cloud software:

 

Regular updates (we hope)

Subscription based,

You don't have to manage the IT system,

Access through any browser anywhere in the world on your PC, MAC, iPad.

Easy API integrations to other online services - ie Xero, Quickbooks, Gmail etc

 

I don't understand why navigator is not doing this for there rental desk market. Missed opportunity.

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Must admit, I use Rentaldesk day-to-day, and whilst pretty counter-intuitive a lot of the time(!), once you figure out its little foibles, then you can work pretty effectively with it. Notwithstanding the fact that if you are a very small company, it's free!
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We've been using Easyjob4 live for almost 2 years now and, although it has its 'quirks', it has been pleasantly stable and scales well as the data set has grown. Feature-wise, it should cover all the requirements of any hire business and has an acceptable sales module to handle that side of the business also. As with any package, you have to learn to do things the 'Easyjob Way' and the reports need quite a bit of customising before being fully usable. Protonic do offer consultancy services to aid your implementation if you don't feel up to it yourself. Thankfully, I have an IT background so was happy to do the ground work myself and have even done a little bit of modification at the DB end to suit our particular requirements.

 

Steve

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Easyjob all the way. We're running V4 since 2008 and will go to V5 at some point in the not so distant future.

 

It does everything we need, and I know one or two others that are being creative linking the SQL DB to their website. It's easy to schedule both kit and people, issuing PO's invoicing everything at the end. It's easy to integrate PAT results in too, and Barcode is built in from the start. So if you're planning on growing, then I wouldn't start anywhere else.

 

I would whole heartedly recommend it, and think its well ahead of the competition.

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Hiretrack is doing Enlightened well.

 

As the company has grown we have grown into more and more features that Hiretrack offers. Our latest implementation is barcode scanning of all equipment. Yes there are some strange bits, but it does the job pretty well for us. Navigator say NX is due soon, but I think we will be waiting a while before upgrading.

 

While Hiretrack has been very stable (though slow at time) Navigators support is not bad either. When in the crap they have always sorted us out. With staff in America (and I think Australia) they have almost round the clock support.

 

Reference cloud based solutions - Personally I am hesitant... Reliant on an internet connection is one aspect, but reliant on someone else's servers and teams. I cant imagine any company offering the bespoke software required would have the skill set in place to be able to offer the peace of mind, redundancy, back up, disaster recovery, SLA etc to satisfy me... How long can you be without your hire system?

 

I have never heard anyone give their rental system such a glowing report as Pete though! The thought of changing systems though is not one to contemplate for us.

 

Good luck and pick wisely!

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The few times we've needed tp get assistance from Protonic, they have been very good, though it has only been once or twice over the course of the 4 years here, and then 4 years prior to that with another rental company.

 

Hasn't NX been due for the last few years? :P :P That said EJ5 took about 12 months longer than hoped to get into the wild.

 

I too am hesitant about a cloud based solution. maybe I'm a luddite, but having the server in the unit means that if we looses the internet, we can still work at the office. Being a mixed Mac and PC environment, we simply use Remote Desktop to access it on any non PC hardware, and can do so just as easily from my desk here in work as from my sofa at home or coach D of the 12:45 Cheltenham Spa to Paddington train (well once you're passed swindon and the 3G is solid enough..). I think the internet is the biggest issue for me, in that despite being about 2 miles from the exchange, and on the edge of a reasonable sized city, we are only getting 2Mb broadband, and Fibre To The Cabinet has only just arrived here. The thought of being at the mercy of the internet for everything we do was too much.

 

As Andy say's choose well, as once you're using a system, the thought of changing is just too much. And think through the back up plan, and how and where you will store the back ups. I know I have an offsite back up of the Database from 01:00 this morning, and if need be could walk into PC world, buy a laptop, install EJ and be up and running in about 2 hours (including buying the PC) if the unit burnt down...

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I do understand peoples reservations about Cloud based systems. The issue of security and reliability does come up time again.

I think in time more and more people will get used to it. People are doing more and more in the cloud. From keeping files on dropbox, emails in Gmail, streaming your music collection etc. As I mentioned before the accounts system Xero is expanding at a huge rate by small/medium size business simply because of the flexibility and ease of use it provides including the ability of both yourself and your accountant being able to look at up to date accounts without exchanging backup files. (like Sage)

 

I think the ability of having a cloud based hire management system would benefit small/medium AV companies with (for example) project managers in a hotel being able to quickly and easily cost up jobs, check warehouse stock, raise POs etc through a standard web browser.

And of course it works on any computer or device.

 

 

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Another vote for Hiretrack from us, yes it has some quirks and the back end is seriously outdated but that's why they have been developing a completely new version for several years. It's certainly been pretty damn stable for us and on the odd occasion we've had issues we've managed to get it sorted pretty swiftly.

 

Hasn't NX been due for the last few years? :P :P That said EJ5 took about 12 months longer than hoped to get into the wild.

It has indeed and much to many Hiretrack users frustration but it is on it's way soon and is looking pretty damn good from what I've seen.

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If you do go cloud you could up your resilience by purchasing a router that can fail over to a backup Internet source, such as a 3G dongle.

It ups your communications resilience, but it does nothing to stop you being buggered by someone else's technical problem (server side)...

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