Before you can start renting your items, your equipment needs to be added to your inventory. Use this video to learn how Party Rental Planner can help you manage your equipment.
Understanding how to manage your products with Party Rental Planner is essential to making the software work for your business. In this tutorial I will show you how to add products to your account so they are available to place on estimates and invoices. To start, you must already be logged in to Party Rental Planner.
Before we begin with the interface, it is important to know how the Party Rental Planner Product management system works. There are two important things to be aware of: Product classes and Products. Lets start by going over each term.
A product class is like a bucket which all your products of the same type will fit into. For the sake of organization, the items you place in this bucket will all be similar. For example, it could be a bucket of rocks or pens or hats. To make sure anything which goes in this bucket is the same, we place a label on the front of the bucket. The label has a list of things which each item should have when you place it into the bucket. For example, if our bucket is going to hold pens, we may put something like the ink color or the manufacturer on the label.
This bucket is very much like a product class. It doesn’t hold any products but is more like a container for the products and gives us a way to describe the products in the bucket.
Now that we know what a product class is, lets talk about products. Products are the items which you place into a bucket. Continuing with this example, a pen would go into our pen product class. The pen is our product. When adding the pen to the product class we record the color of the ink and manufacturer.
Now that we have those two terms defined, lets go to the Party Rental Planner interface to create a product class and add products. To manage your products, use the Main Menu and select "Products & Services". You will be taken to the products management screen.
To create a product class click the “Add” button. Party Rental Planner will then ask you about the details of your product class. Remember, this is just our bucket and will describe the items we place into the bucket.
Under the product definition tab, enter the product class name and description. An example name could be Bounce Houses or Popcorn Machines. The description should help describe the product to your customers or staff. . Once you are done entering the name and the description, click the ‘Save’ button. If you’ve done everything correctly you will see a message indicating that the product class was saved.
Now, remember we talked about the label on the bucket? The label helps us describe what goes into the bucket. In technical terms, our labels are called fields. Click the Fields tab next to ‘Product Definition’. A message will appear telling you your product class has been saved. You will see another message indicating that this product class doesn’t contain any fields and a message telling you that Quantity tracking is not enabled for this product class. This is normal. We will talk about quantity tracking in a moment, but for now lets get to adding a new field.
Because this product class is for bounce houses, we can add any field which may help us track bounce houses. For instance, the manufacturer , the height or width, whether it is a wet or dry bounce house.
To add a field click the ‘Add’ button. Once the form appears enter the field you wish to add. Lets start with Height. Click the Add Button. Once the page refreshes, you will see a new field called ‘Height’. Next we will add a 'Width' field. Again, click the Add button and enter ‘Width’ in this field and click Add. Once the screen refreshes you will see your ‘width’ field.
Notice the ‘Quantity Tracking’ message is still there. Lets talk about this message. Quantity tracking is a feature of Party Rental Planner which will allow the software to prevent you from overbooking your products. This feature is turned on only if you have a Quantity field for a product class. If you don’t have a quantity field, the software will assume you have an unlimited number of items to rent or sell. For a bounce house, you would definitely use a Quantity field because you only have so many of them. For something like popcorn for a popcorn machine, you would not use a quantity field because you will always have popcorn on hand. So lets go ahead and click ‘Yes’ to turn on Quantity tracking. The software will automatically add the field for you.
Now that we have added our fields, we are ready to add products to our product class. This is done by clicking the “Add Product” button. Once I click this button I will be taken to a new screen which will ask me for details about a new Bounce House.
Enter the Bounce House name and description and click the save button.
Once you click Save, more tabs will appear. Click the Pricing tab next. Enter the default price for this product. This is the price your customer will pay for this item. Don’t worry, this price can always be changed when you place it on the invoice. Click Save when you are done.
Next, click the Fields Tab. Here you can enter the Height, Width and Quantity for this bounce house. Once you are done click save. Once the page refreshes you are all set to add products to your invoices.
Repeat this process for every product you have in your inventory. Once you have successfully added product classes and products, you can view all of your equipment and services by clicking on the ‘Product’ button.
There are many more bells and whistles which you can manage within your product management screen. We’ve only talked about the basic ones to get you up and running.