Two of them are sitting at the other yard. A size up is free the whole time. And the one that is booked comes back Thursday, so if they can start Friday you have it. The counter cannot hold that in their head, so they say no — and the job goes to the yard down the road that said yes.
No card. The demo is a real two-yard fleet on a live board.
Every rental system will draw you a calendar. What none of them do is answer the question the phone is actually asking, which is not “is one free?” but “what is the cheapest way to say yes?”
Free for the whole window, right class, right branch, with the turnaround accounted for. Costs nothing to promise, so it ranks first.
Free for the hire and the road time either side — because a machine that is only free for the hire cannot actually get there. Named with the distance.
Substitutions are directed: a bigger machine can stand in, never the reverse. The customer pays what they booked, so the margin you give away is quantified rather than quietly handed over.
“I have one from Thursday” wins jobs. The nearest window each machine could actually do, with what is blocking it until then.
One button writes down the ask you could not fill. Nobody logs a lost sale, which is why nobody can say what to buy.
A machine cannot be written onto a second ticket for overlapping dates. The server refuses — not a warning, a refusal — because a double booking is found on delivery morning.
Rental is not priced per day. Every class has a day, week and month rate, and the bill is the cheapest legitimate combination of the three — which is a shortest-path problem, not multiplication.
Five days must not cost more than a week. If it would, the correct charge is one week and the customer keeps the machine for the other two days at no extra cost. The trade calls it “falling into the weekly”. Yardline works it out on every line, shows the customer the breakdown, and reprices it on the actual days out when the machine comes back — early or late.
Straight day rates would have charged $5,700 for that last one.
Time utilisation tells you how busy a machine is. Dollar utilisation — a year of rental revenue over what the machine cost — tells you whether owning it was a good idea. The trade lives by that second number and almost nobody at this size can produce it.
Days out, time utilisation, revenue, dollar utilisation and whether it has paid for itself yet — including repairs. Sort by the worst and you are looking at your sell list.
Every ask you turned down is replayed through the availability engine over the same window. Usually you had one. That is a dispatch problem, and it is the cheapest money in the building.
Only demand that genuinely could not be served counts toward a shortfall. Telling an owner to buy a machine they already own is how a number loses its credibility.
Every customer gets a link — no account — showing their own hires, what each has run up so far, and two buttons: keep it longer, or come and get it.
Both are money. An extension nobody wrote down is a machine the board expects back on Friday and a hire nobody is billing for. A collection nobody was told about is a machine earning nothing on somebody else’s slab while you turn away the customer who wanted it.
An extension is a request, never a change. The machine may already be promised to somebody next week, and only the counter can see that.
On fleet size, not seats. Everyone who books a machine should be on the board.