Rental Inventory in QBPOS V2013

Is there a way in QuickBooks Point of Sale (QBPOS) to manage rental equipment? If so, what is the process? Let’s take a look.

1. Identify the equipment you will rent out.
2. In QBPOS, create a rental department and create inventory items for the equipment assigning them to the rental department. (You can tag the rental items if you want to speed the checkout process, but consider the abuse these tags will receive. We do sell a tag printer and tags that can stand up to the abuse, so contact our office for more details). If you are using QuickBooks Financial software connected to your POS, consider changing the accounts that POS is using for sales and Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) to something like “Rental Inventory Sales” and “Rental Inventory COGS”  In this way, if you see these accounts, you know that a mistake was made or you have sold off your rental inventory.
3. Set the selling price to zero and receive in the inventory using your normal receiving process, if this is existing inventory that you had previously received in, you can create a zero dollar voucher to transfer the inventory out of your existing for sale inventory. See our blog article on *zero dollar vouchers for more details.
4. Create a non-inventory item named Deposit on Equipment make the price zero.  If you have a standard deposit amount, you can use that as the selling price. Set all of the accounts in the QuickBooks section to point to customer deposits.
5. Copy the item above and change the name of the item to Rental Fee.
6. When a customer rents the item, create a receipt with the rental inventory item on the first line of the sales receipt.
7. On the same receipt, Deposit on Equipment item will be the next item you add. The inventory item (the rental) will be 0 dollars, while the Deposit on Equipment item will have the amount you are charging for the deposit.
8. Record the receipt, take the payment for the deposit using standard payment methods.

   

9. You can look at the item’s history to determine whether an item is rented or not.  While this works, some of our clients create a separate Excel worksheet to track what is on hand or not.
10. When the item is returned, locate the receipt, copy it and turn it into a return receipt to refund the deposit and put the rented item back into inventory.
11. Create a new receipt for the rental fee.  Alternatively, you could add the rental fee to the return receipt, and refund the net amount if the deposit is greater than the rental fee or collect the difference if the rental fee exceeds the deposit.
    
    
    
    *Our next blog post will be on Zero Dollar Vouchers.