Do you find yourself spending way too much time in the weeds with complicated excel sheets trying to manage your business? That time could be better utilized elsewhere so you can focus on what matters most: the customer experience and growing your business.
It’s time to move away from Excel and Google Sheets and invest in rental inventory management solutions.
Should I Use Excel for Inventory Management?
Many business owners who are just starting out use Excel or other spreadsheet programs like Google Sheets for various business management tasks, including:
- Budgeting
- Client invoicing
- Inventory tracking
- Time tracking
These tools are useful because they’re typically free, which makes them more accessible to new business owners with minimal budgets. But as your business grows, juggling several different Excel sheets becomes more cumbersome and less convenient.
This is especially true considering spreadsheet software like Excel and Google Sheets come with a bit of a learning curve, not to mention all the manual tweaking and customization required to make them work for your business.
At some point, Excel sheets simply don’t cut it when you need to manage constantly fluctuating items like inventory and financial statements.
When you reach this point in your business journey, it’s time to look into dedicated solutions for business management software to find a platform that meets the specific needs of your business: in this case, equipment rental.
6 Reasons to Invest in Rental Inventory Management Software
If you’re searching for a new business management software, you likely have your own reasons for wanting to invest in a new solution. Here are six common reasons business owners like you choose to invest in a comprehensive rental inventory management software solution.
1. Manually updating a series of spreadsheets takes a lot of time.
Imagine you’ve just rented out a piece of equipment.
First, you go into your inventory spreadsheet and mark it off. Then, you transition to your financials spreadsheet and put down the amount the customer paid (or agreed to pay).
Perhaps you have an accounts receivable spreadsheet, as well, where you have to make a note regarding any outstanding customer payments. Finally, you navigate to your CRM spreadsheet to note which customer rented what.
That’s already four different spreadsheets you’ve been forced to update manually.
With inventory management software, you can make all those changes in one place, and have them automatically communicated to relevant fields across the software.
2. Spreadsheets that need manual updates are prone to human error, raising your risk of potentially costly mistakes.
Not only does updating multiple spreadsheets take time, but it also leaves lots of room for human error since all of these changes are manual.
Excel isn’t exactly beginner-friendly. Unless every member of your staff knows what they’re doing and never makes mistakes, manual updates are bound to produce errors. And in many cases, mistakes in inventory or financial tracking can be quite costly.
While errors are a possibility anytime humans are involved in anything, the risk is decreased with inventory management software. That’s because the software does formulaic calculations behind the scenes, meaning you and your team can’t make mistakes.
3. Inventory management software provides a more streamlined, reliable way to keep your equipment in good condition.
Unless you have inventory management software, you’ll have to deal with another spreadsheet to track and make notes on the condition of your equipment. This includes any potential damage caused while the equipment was rented out.
With inventory management software, everything you need to know about a piece of equipment is displayed in one convenient place: whether it’s currently rented or not, who’s renting it, what condition it’s in, and when it’s due for repairs or maintenance.
4. Do you know where each piece of equipment in your inventory is at all times? This is a major challenge to handle manually with spreadsheets.
When tracking inventory through spreadsheets, you have to record what’s been rented, who rented it, what they’re using it for, how long they’ll have it, and when it’s due back, among other details. That’s a lot to keep track of.
With inventory management software, you can simply click on the piece of equipment you’re interested in and view its status, with no spreadsheet-hopping or back-and-forth required.
5. Inventory management solutions like Quipli create a seamless end-to-end customer experience that also integrates with your inventory management for accurate tracking.
Using inventory management solutions like Quipli, your customers will be able to locate your products and make reservations to rent the desired equipment. These reservations are communicated to the point of sale, which automatically updates rented equipment for accurate tracking.
This creates a quick, convenient, pain-free experience for your customer and makes life easier for you and your team.
6. Quipli is fine-tuned for gathering useful data — data you can turn into strategies to grow your rental business.
Quipli constantly gathers data behind the scenes while you perform your day-to-day operations. You can use this data at any time to make informed business decisions.
For example, you can pull data on what products are renting, which ones tend to sit longer than others, and which products may be due for replacement due to overuse, all without any tedious manual Excel reporting.
Learn How Equipped Saved 10 Hours a Month by Automating Inventory Management with Quipli
When and Why Excel Falls Short for Managing Your Rental Business
Excel can be a useful tool at the beginning of your business journey. At a certain point, however, it no longer passes muster as an organizational aid.
Why Excel can be useful early in the game
Here are some of the reasons Excel is useful early on:
- It’s free
- It comes standard on many operating systems and devices
- Most people have some experience with digital spreadsheets
These are all great attributes, but they’ll only serve you for so long.
Where Excel falls short every time
As great as Excel can be for tracking simple inventories and transactions, it falls short when it comes to certain aspects of inventory management. For example:
- It can be a headache to make sure information is accessible to everyone who needs it
- It requires manual input, increasing the margin for human error
- It doesn’t update automatically
- It doesn’t provide an at-a-glance overview
Remedying these issues is necessary to help you manage and scale your business.
When Is It Time to Switch to Software for Your Inventory Management?
You’ll know it’s time to switch to an intelligent software for your inventory management when:
- You regularly have to audit the same errors in Excel tracking
- You spend too much time on Excel and not enough time on other important areas of your business
- You’re ready to level up and scale your rental business
If any of these circumstances apply to your business, it’s time to invest in inventory management software.
Upgrade to Quipli to Scale Your Rental Business
Inventory management doesn’t have to be difficult, at least not when you have access to tools like Quipli.
With Quipli, you get access to POS integrations, customer logins, website integrations, reservation management, inventory management, and critical data — all of which can help you grow your business.
Contact us to learn more or schedule a demo today.
Click here to learn more about quipli’s inventory management software
