Cash flow is crucial to the success of every business, especially to hire businesses and rental management companies.

Delayed customer payments can tighten your company’s access to working capital, thereby restricting your capacity for growth. This is the most common discussion topic amongst our customers – payment deferrals by major accounts and long term hires.

We use Ezidebit to manage our cash flow and payments, it has worked brilliantly for us. (please note we have no financial relationship nor related business ownership with Ezidebit.)

Ezidebit provides you with tailored payment solutions to minimise these cash flow concerns and enable your business to grow and prosper into the future. Ezidebit offers a fully automatic collection solution, suitable for regular recurring fees, variable invoiced payments or payment plans.

We have found that with Ezidebit’s direct debit payment system we have gained not only gain greater control but a real reduction in outstanding payments. More importantly we no longer have the emotional and time drain spent in chasing payments.

Ezidebit can have your business set up and signing up customers within a day.

Their contact information is www.ezidebit.com.au , phone 1300 763 256 or email info@ezidebit.com.au

About Us

HireEzy is the complete business management solution for hire and rental companies. Not only does it include digital marketing, web integration it also includes social media marketing tool integration. For more information email us sales@makinglifeezy.com.au

Poor Information management costs hire and rental companies money!

Given the current financial conditions, it is a cost that can be avoided.

Take a typical day

Here are some common sample questions faced in the daily operations of Hire and Rental Companies.

Does anyone know where we are up to with XYZ lead, have we sent them a quote?

• Did we email it or print it and give to them?
• Can you remember how much it was for, do you know where we saved it too?

I have a customer here who says that they won’t pay for damages because they never received the installation instructions:

• Did we send the instructions to them or did we give it to them when they collected the items?

Customer says they called us and spoke to someone here and claims they were offered an extra gas bottle at no charge:

• Does anyone know who took the call, and what was said?

 I have a customer on the phone - says they submitted a web inquiry, does anyone know:

• Who got it and what we did with it?

Causes

The above examples are indicative of some of the common information management problems facing most hire and rental companies. The key causes are:

• No single point of Document Storage; and
• No workflow tracking.

How Many Places Does Your Business Store Data?

• Accounting system;
• Customer Management system (CRM);
• Mulitple spreadsheets
• Email – yours and others;
• Post It Notes;Hard copy files;
• Soft copy files – stored in various system hard drives;
• etc

How do you search to find some information if it is spread accross mulitple locations?  How long does it take to find, and is it the right copy and version when you find it?

Workflow

When you allocate a task to someone, how do you do it, via email, verbal or written note. Do you rely on memory to recall who was tasked and if they had completed it?
With HireEzy the task management or workflow is inbuilt. You can find out who was allocated the task and the progress of the task.

So what are the benefits?

Well the clearest benefit is that your customer service improves, because accurate information and tracking of issues is a great way to provide customers with a consistent service level.
Secondly, a substantial reduction in wasted time, lost sales and financial transactions related to sales and returns because you have the information at hand.

Finally

There is a Latin quote, that translated means Knowledge promotes strength!
Information is a critical element of knowledge, if you have the information then you have the strength to respond confidently to customer related problems. No longer are you on the defensive with “you said” “they said”

Furthermore you are in a position to ensure that your staff are keeping on top of allocated tasks.

Some days the task list of things to do is overwhelming,

where to start,  what to next, who should do it etc etc.  For most small to medium business owners of hire or rental companies this is the daily reality.  Stressful enough to think about as you drive to work, without the background radio comments of from dire predictions of economists and commentators.

Everyone will suggest to keep things simple, easy to say harder to do.  But one very helpful way is to have a simple mental image of your hire or rental business.   Here is one simple mind map.

How to use the map.

In simple terms, the reasons you undertake marketing is to create leads. Once you have a lead, you focus is on converting that lead to a sale or booking, as quickly and efficiently as practical. Managing your stock effectively is a broad term, but encompasses all things to do with your inventory, servicing, delivery and collection costs.  Having the right stock, ready to hire at the right time in the right condition. Financials is an interesting one, what you do and how well you do it drives your cashflow and accounting transaction.  You are in business to make money, what you do is how you make money, the two are intrinsically linked.

The final stage, manage your existing customers is often forgotten.  Estimates on winning new customers range from 5 to 15 times the cost of maintaining an existing customer.

So as you drive to work, you break the broad problems you have down in to the simple stages.

Marketing to Create Leads: If your sales are declining, consider what you are doing to market to generate new leads?  Thinking about it this way, enables you to quickly think about your current marketing approach.  Are we web marketing effectively,  or newspaper advertising etc.  Where is the problem?  With HireEzy you can quickly analyse your lead sources to identify problem areas.  You can also read other posts on this site that suggest or discuss different marketing ideas.

Manage leads to bookings or sales: If you are getting the leads, are you getting the sales or bookings conversion, or are the dollar size of the hires relatively too low or are the taking too long.  Again analysing sales using HireEzy can assist in determining where the problem lies.

Effectively manage your product assets: Such a broad area, with so many potential problems.  So lets take an example problem – sales being lost because of insufficent stock.  What is the cause, is there a sufficient inventory relative to current and forecast bookings, has there been a change in product demand, is too much of the current inventory not available for hire, due to servicing, cleaning or repair requirements,  Where is the problem?  Again use the analysis reports in HireEzy to identify the cause.

Financials driven by your bookings: What you do should drive your accounts.  Not sure what your cashflow forecast is, then it is probably because your booking forecasts are not visible in your accounts.  This is the most common problem facing companies who have an accounting package either separate from or being used to manage their business.  Ideal for the accountants terrible for operating the business.  This problem is solved with HireEzy as the accounting package is integrated into the solution.  A confirmed booking creates an immediate accounting transaction entry.

Manage your existing clients:  Back to feeding your market leads, are you getting word or mouth referrals or repeat business from existing customers?  No, then look at some of the tools in HireEzy and the business improvement suggestions made in this blog, such as renewing old leads.  Remember your customers can be your best marketers.

This mind map tool is just a way of helping to simplify you business, to make sense out of the myriad of issues and problems you face daily.  Try using it and see if it helps you.

Making Life Ezy is the name of our company and the objective of our products like HireEzy, for more information go to www.makinglifeezy.com.au Available through out USA, Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, UK and Singapore.