The nvisin tool for this: Rental Manager. Rental tracking, billing and contracts for container and equipment rental companies.
Most small rental companies start with a spreadsheet: one row per unit, a column for the customer, a column for the rate, and some colour coding that only the owner understands. It works until the fleet passes a few dozen units, a second person starts taking calls, and a unit sits on a finished job site for two months without anyone billing for it.
Tracking doesn't need to be complicated. It needs four things kept separate: what each unit is doing, the rental it's on, what's moving this week, and what's been paid. Here's how to set them up. It's how Rental Manager is laid out, and the same structure works in a spreadsheet.
1. Give every unit one status
A unit should always be in exactly one of these:
| Status | Means | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Available | In the yard, checked and ready | What you can promise a caller today |
| Going out | Booked, delivery scheduled | Not available, even though it's still in the yard |
| On rent | On a customer's site | Should be earning, so it should be on a rental with a rate |
| Coming back | Called off, pickup scheduled | Will be available after pickup and a check |
| In the shop | Being repaired or cleaned | Still part of the fleet, and still costing money |
The two in the middle are the ones spreadsheets usually miss. Without "going out", the same unit gets promised twice. Without "coming back", nobody knows whether a called-off unit has actually left the site.
2. Keep one record per rental, not per unit
If the customer, site and rate live on the unit's row, every new rental overwrites the last one, and the history is gone. Keep rentals as their own records instead: unit, customer, delivery address, rate, billing cycle, start date, end date and the signed agreement. A unit then has a list of rentals behind it, and a customer has a list of everything they've rented.
This also makes profit per unit possible. Add up what each unit has earned across its rentals, take off what it cost to buy and repair, and you can see which units have paid for themselves.
3. Plan the week from a moves list
Drivers don't need the fleet list. They need this week's moves:
- Deliveries: unit, customer, address, date and any access notes.
- Pickups: from off-rent calls, with the date the customer is ready.
- Swaps: a full bin or a broken machine out, a fresh one in, in a single trip.
- Service visits: refuelling a generator, pumping a portable toilet, checking a heater. These don't change where a unit is, but they still need a truck and a time.
Mark each move done when it happens, and let that change the unit's status. A delivery done means on rent; a pickup done means back in the yard. That one habit keeps the status list honest.
4. Track payments in a grid
Put rentals down the side and months (or weeks) across the top. Each cell is a payment: paid, due, or overdue. A rental that's three months behind shows as three red cells in a row, which is hard to miss in a grid and very easy to miss in a list of invoices.
If you bill most customers on the same day each month, the grid also becomes your collections list on the 2nd: everything still unpaid from the 1st.
A worked example
Here's a fictional equipment yard, Ridgeline Tool & Lift, with 40 units, in the first week of a month:
| Status | Units | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| On rent | 27 | One light tower on a job that finished three weeks ago |
| Going out | 3 | Two scissor lifts Tuesday, one generator Thursday |
| Coming back | 2 | Both called off Friday, pickups booked Monday |
| Available | 6 | |
| In the shop | 2 | A compactor waiting on a part |
Utilization is 27 of 40, or 67.5%. Two things come out of the monthly check. The light tower is on rent but its rental ended in the records three weeks ago, so either it's earning and not billed, or it's sitting on an empty site. And one rental has two unpaid months in the grid, which nobody noticed because the customer pays most invoices on time.
Both are found in ten minutes because each unit has one status and each rental has its own payment row.
The monthly check
- Units on rent with no open rental. Either the rental wasn't entered or the unit is lost. Both cost money.
- Open rentals with no payment this month. Chase them now, not at the end of the quarter.
- Units in the shop for more than two weeks. Decide whether to fix, sell or write them off.
- Utilization by type. See rental utilization rate for how to read it, or run your numbers through the free rental utilization calculator.
- A yard count against the units your records say are available.
Common mistakes
- Colour coding as the only status. Colours don't sort, don't filter, and mean different things to different people.
- Updating records at the end of the day. Moves entered from memory are the ones that go missing. Mark them done when they happen.
- No unit numbers. "The small blue one" isn't a unit. Number everything, including accessories that rent separately.
- Payments only in the accounting system. Your bookkeeping knows an invoice is unpaid, but not which unit is still on that customer's site.
Frequently asked questions
What's the best way to track rental equipment?
Give every unit a number and one status at a time, keep a separate record for each rental (customer, site, rate, start and end), and plan the week from a list of deliveries, pickups and service visits. A spreadsheet can do this for a small fleet. Rental software does the same with less copying between tabs.
How do I know which rentals are overdue?
Keep payments in a grid with one row per rental and one column per month (or week). Anything past its due date without a payment is overdue. Checking the grid once a week, instead of waiting for month-end, catches late payers while the amount is still small.
What is a good utilization rate for a rental fleet?
It depends on the equipment, but many operators aim to keep each type around 70–85% on rent. Much higher and you start turning customers away; much lower and money is tied up in idle units. Measure it by type, not just for the whole fleet.
How often should I count the yard?
Once a month is enough for most small fleets, as long as every delivery and pickup is recorded the day it happens. Compare the count with the units your records say are in the yard, and chase any difference straight away.