This is the actual system.
Not a mock-up, not an artist's impression. Screens from Rentflow as it stands today.
Hire desk, workshop, transport, drivers and customer portal — in the browser, from one supplier.
Plant · Tools · Lifting · Powered access · Welfare · Generators · Pumps · Air conditioning · Site accommodation · Events · Specialist If you hire it out, Rentflow runs it.
“create a booking for next Tuesday for a 6 ton dumper”
Nothing listed as “6 ton dumper”. Did you mean one of these?
Who is it for, and which depot?
“avon and warwick”
£195.00 / week
Booking · Avon Landscapes · Warwick
One line has no fleet number yet — this booking cannot go out until it does.
Ask in plain English. It drafts, you approve.
Someone rings wanting a three tonne excavator next Tuesday. There is only one thing they want to know, and they want it now: have you got one or haven't you?
Rentflow answers that in seconds. Across every depot, allowing for what is already booked, what is due back, what is still out and what is sitting in the workshop. Not a screen you go away and look up, and not a ring-you-back. The answer while they are still talking — and if it is yes, the booking is already half made.
Ten seconds instead of ten minutes sounds like a small thing. It is the difference between taking the order and the customer ringing somebody else.
Not a mock-up, not an artist's impression. Screens from Rentflow as it stands today.
Most hire systems were designed twenty or thirty years ago by people who knew the business well, and they did the job at the time. What happened since is that every new thing a hire company needed got added on the side.
A desktop product with a web page bolted on. A driver app bought in from someone else. A portal from somewhere else again. That is four or five suppliers, four or five contracts and four or five support numbers — and somebody has to keep the joins between them working, forever.
That is not anyone's fault. It is what happens when you spend three decades adding to something. It is just not what you would build if you started today.
One system, one supplier. Everything below is in it — no third-party app for the drivers, nothing to integrate. The customer portal is the single exception, and there is a straightforward reason for that.
Why the portal is the one thing priced on its own. Everything else is used by your staff, so we can count it. The portal is used by your customers — and nobody knows how many of them will log in, this year or next. Charging you per user would either sting you for being successful or put a cap on something that ought to be wide open. So it sits on its own bill.
It is still the same system, from the same supplier, with the same data underneath. Not a separate product bought in from somebody else and wired up afterwards.
Most systems build their reporting overnight. You come in on Tuesday and look at Monday's position — before Monday afternoon's deliveries, before the off-hires that came in at five, before the machine that came back this morning. By the time you act on it, it is a day out of date.
Rentflow has no overnight run, because there is nothing to run. Reporting reads the same live data the hire desk is typing into this second. Utilisation, revenue, what is out, what is overdue, what has never earned — as it is now, not as it was last night.
The customer portal works the same way. Your customer sees what they have actually got on hire right now, not a snapshot taken while everyone was asleep.
It works because the figures are worked out from the movements themselves, every time, rather than held in a summary that has to be rebuilt each night. There is nothing to reconcile and nothing that can quietly drift out of step with the detail underneath it.
Rentflow is not a desktop product with a phone app bolted on the side. It is the same system, and it works properly on a phone.
Say what you want and Rentflow works out what you meant, asks who it is for and which depot, and asks whether they are collecting or want it delivered — the same questions anyone on a hire desk would ask.
Then it stops, and shows you exactly what it is about to do.
Nothing has changed yet.Rentflow will not touch a record until you press the button.
Press it and you get a real booking on a real contract — with the rate, the delivery charge, and a warning if it cannot go out yet. Not a chat window. The work, done properly, in the system.
Rentflow is being built by people who have spent their working lives in this industry. Four decades from driver to IT Director at two of the largest equipment rental companies in the country. Four more running one of the largest rental businesses in the world. And four decades in software, including a company built from nothing and sold to a plc.
Between us that is eighty years in hire and forty in software — and, just as usefully, most of it spent on the customer's side of the table, buying and living with systems like this rather than selling them.
It shows up in small places rather than big claims. The system knows operated hire is the one that pulls a contract into CIS reverse charge. It counts the machines that have never earned, not just the ones sitting idle. It knows a booking with no fleet number against it cannot go out on a lorry.
Those are not things anyone puts on a brochure. They are what you only know from working a hire desk on a Friday afternoon in July.
If you run a hire business and your system is holding you back, we would be glad to talk well before then. Contact details are going up here shortly.