What is Rentalsforce?

Rentalsforce uses a Salesforce Opportunity to record each asset rental. The rental can be recorded directly into Salesforce or through a website using Web Services.   

Rentalsforce Terminology

Product: A category of rental like single rooms, chain saws, Toyota Corollas or two berth campers.
Price Book: Typically a date range to be used against a product (like the summer, autumn, winter and spring season dates). The price book does not necessarily need to contain a date. It can be used to identify products that have attributes that may change like age or condition. 
Asset: An individual tangible item like room #23, chain saw #4 or vehicle #12. Every asset belongs to a product.
Opportunity: The location of individual bookings. Under the Opportunity tab, new bookings can be made.
Booking: Under the Booking Tab is a visual representation of asset bookings shown as a time line.

Entirely built within Salesforce, Rentalsforce intelligently and automatically allocates bookings to assets or services. Here are some of the features of Rentalsforce:

• Salesforce Native: Benefit from all the advantages of using Salesforce like free storage, no admin costs, universally available, rapid development, automatic scaling to meet your needs etc. It makes very good sense to put your data into Salesforce.
• Data Maintenance: Utilize Salesforce Customer Portal and Partner Portal to self maintain data or expose data to other users.
• Smart Asset Utilization: Rentalsforce assigns assets intelligently and automatically. This means there is no need to search the status of existing assets and their bookings over a required period – just enter the dates and Rentalsforce will sort it. There are some areas left for humans to deal with. A question mark is placed over a booking if there is clear capacity for the “core” rental, but there did not appear to be time to prepare an asset for rental. In these cases the booking is made provisional/stand-by and the intention is a person would get back to the customer. From an asset utilization point of view the principle here is that the operator can monitor the asset allocation to achieve a full 100% utilization that would otherwise not be possible.
• Rentalsforce Handles Asset Availability: Add periods of unavailability to an asset as well as assigning the pre and post rental periods to the product.
• Product Extensions: Rentalsforce allows additional rental items to be associated with a rental asset. For example, an extra bed could be associated with a room rental. There is an option to track assets either by unique identifier, or by asset class assuming there was capacity. For example, booking the add-on insurance option does has not availability checks, it is just assumed to be available.
• Customer identification: Existing customers can be found easily and new customers created fast. It is very difficult to add duplicate or corrupt data. 
• Analytics: Determine customers types, where they come from, and run dozens of other queries by running customs Salesforce reports.
• Price Segmentation: Price books allow a product to have different pricing at different times of the year.
• Rentalsforce Web Services: All Rentalsforce objects can be accessed and changed from web sites using the built in web services.
• Payment Processing and Cost Calculation: The automated processing of credit cards is not currently part of RentalsForce. This is typically handled via a public website. FuseIT can build new or configure existing Microsoft based websites and use their Salesforce connector to talk to Rentalsforce.