I’m now on the next part of my app and struggling a little. The user needs to create rental jobs, which book a number of items out for a period of time.
I have a table of items (rental equipment), each of which has a quantity against it, so 10x item A, 4x item B etc. Some of these items also need to be associated to each other, for example if I select one of Item A I also need 2x Item E to make that item work. I also have my table of jobs, where the user selects the dates of the job. The items added to the job then need to be taken out of the “total counts” within the items table, for the period of time the job exists for.
I’ve followed the various videos and help within the community, but I cant find a way to work with multiple items (and associated items) within a booking system. There are a few guides on single-item booking and creating orders (holiday rental, vehicle rental, shopping cart etc) but nothing which links them together, and this is where I’m struggling. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
For my sins I used to run a very large/complex rental company several years ago. And to give qualified answers it would help to get a quantum of how large/complex is your requirement.
Because…
Simple booking systems typically have two states - available or not available which is analagous to in stock or out of stock. This is not the real case in rental businesses. There is usually preparation time and restoration time before and after a rental where the stock is being worked on, not available.
So there are usually more than two dates to content with (and simple calendar type apps will struggle with this).
Preparation date - when is it taken from stock to prepare for hire
On hire date - when does the customer want it
Off hire - when does the customer want to return it
When will it return to stock after restoration
You also talked of associated items or bundles. What is unclear is whether the (Item E in your example) are viable as rental items on their own - or are always components of Item A ? or are consumables of Item A ( they will be used up and not reteurned at end of rental) ?
In general the usual approach I have seen is to think of all renatl Items as Bundles and have these in one table and associate them with their components in a separate table.
Imagine…
The A Bundle - which has a single component Item A
The A + 2 E Bundle - which has a single component Item A plus 2 E
By having bundles in a table and components in an alternate table linked to them you can use equation fields to build the config and rollup fields to calculate the ‘stock’ of Bundles from available components
Billing is another issue - and not sure if its in scope for your app.
For Rental can be very variable. It may be billed upfront, or on return, or periodic or a mixture. It can have variable items, consumable items and service costs too.
Im not a rental expert but Martin’s data model tip does make sense. Might want to add unique serial number for each equipment, for example you may have many qty of Item A. capacity planning and forecasting should be considered… You need to know in advance when demand exceeds supply unless the business is prepared to say No to customer wanting to book equipement during peak periods.
Use resource component to display bundles calender dates horizontal, and kanban for jobs
@mtif You are right that the item needs to move through the selected > prepared > booked out > deprep’d etc stages. I will need to think some more about how this works.
The bundle idea is a good one, thanks, I had been struggling with how to create kits. Their is a mixture of associated items which can, or cannot, be used with other items, as well as consumables. I will investigate rollups in more detail.
@Shumon Yes, forecasting and planning is crucial to see what is available. Thank you for the suggestion re resource and kanban component.
You might want to have a look through these first if you havnt done so already. It’ll save you lot of time, in particular, the stock count equations will take you ages to figure out so well exploring the templates plus videos on how each one was created.