Booqable

Overall: Time savings and management. Simple as that.

Pros: Number 1 - Customer support. I've never dealt with a company who works with you on such a personal level and takes care of basically anything you ask for. These guys are true professionals. After that, its all still so great. The fact that I can manage my inventory, while also populating my website and show what equipment is available to rent saves me an insane amount of time. On top of that, it's integrated with quoting and invoicing. You work out of one database and are able to use it over multiple uses. It honestly couldn't be easier or time saving.

Cons: There aren't many issues that I have with this software. One of things I brought up was to have the calendar subscription for iCal or Google Calendar show not only the Reserved items, but also what items are Concepts. The built in calendar works great when you're on a computer. But when I need to use my mobile, I generally look to my Google Calendar to get a quick glance of whats going on. Going on all of that, a stand alone app would be great as well. These aren't really cons, just things that would improve the experience.

Overall: It really is great software for helping rental businesses manage their inventory online, and allows customers to shop and reserve those rental items. However, it lacks a bit of nuance and forces you to find work-arounds if you need something that isn't strictly for rentals. Also a huge turn off is the lack of security deposit feature, which seems ridiculous to me.

Pros: This software does a great job providing solutions for rental businesses. My client originally had a Woo Commerce account connected to her site to help manage her rental business, and it was basically one big work around. Woo Commerce had a rental option, but it clearly wasn't built for the rental business and was insanely expensive. Booqable solved this and provides great, easy to use software for renting out items to businesses.

Cons: It lacks nuance - for example, it has no feature to take security deposits. Customers either have to pay for their whole order up front, or you have to invoice them for the security deposit and then for the final payment...for a rental business, this seems silly. Booqable help says they will "take my suggestion" for further development. For payments, you either have to turn payments on checkout on or off - for my client, she offers retail items and rental items. Because Booqable doesn't have a security deposit feature, we had to turn payments on checkout off. But now we cannot allow our customers to buy through our site. Customer support suggested that we turn on Squarespace commerce...which means there would be two different shopping carts on our site: one for rentals and one for retail, which is an absolutely insane suggestion to me.

Overall: This has drastically simplified my life as my inventory grew in my first year of business. I would not have been able to stay organized without this software!

Pros: The inventory management is the most critical component in my mind. While managing multiple rental products, I would have been unable to track each order easily, and manage knowing availability for each item based on what each client was interested in, given that this is a side business and was sometimes managing up to 10 clients per week during the summer. The orders are easy to create, the views and the sorting making it easy to find upcoming jobs to stay prepared for what's to come, and I could confidently tell new clients what was available on their desired date!

Cons: There are a few bugs in the software that resolve themselves when the page is refreshed. Not inhibiting my ability to accomplish desired tasks

Reasons for Choosing Booqable: The entry level price was super attractive to me for my first year. It made it easy to dip my toe in the water and I am strongly considering upgrading for Year 2.