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CLIENT:
“R Us Hire (Dunnys R Us)”
What used to take 10 days to complete is now down to at the most 15 minutes start to finish!
The Background
Core business for the client is the hiring of equipment used on building sites. These include, but are not limited to, such things as builder's toilets, temporary fencing, site sheds, crossovers, waste tanks and showers. All of these items are hired out on different hire periods, for example, toilets could be hired for 6, 10, 14 or 26 weeks, but fencing is only available for 26 week periods and showers are only available for 3 week periods.
The Problem
Keeping track of which customer has which items on hire, how many they have and how long they are hired for was a cumbersome for the client. This was being managed in an electronic diary application with some success, but there were limitations with networked users accessing the same data.
However, the real problem was invoicing their customers. Every time a new order was raised, an initial hire invoice was prepared in Quickbooks, and then the date that the hire period ceased was entered into the electronic diary. At the end of each hire period, for each item, the hire simply continues and the customer receives an "extension" invoice charged weekly for every week after their initial hire period that they retain the goods for.
To create these extension invoices for all products still on hire that were out of initial hire period was a mammoth task that took up to 10 days to complete. Everything was done manually including looking up each order, re-typing addresses, working out dates to bill from and to and then the appropriate charge for that customer. During this 10 process once a month to generate extension invoices, all other day-to-day work was put on hold, meaning a period of catch up and more stress directly after this.
It is important to note that this problem was not a problem at all when Dunnys R Us were a young, small company. The product range was not as big and the customer base was manageable. However, as the company grew, the process of invoicing the customers grew exponentially also.
The DataHouse Solution
DataHouse immediately saw what was possible with a customised software solution for Dunnys R Us. Keeping track of each order's hire dates (from and to), the amount to charge for each product (both initially and as an extension to the hire) as well as the product delivery address the customer details – this was all something that needed to be entered just once.
We built a complete order entry system for Dunnys R Us Hire. This caters for every type of product that they hire out and maintains their pricing structure and customer details. As orders are entered, hire periods are tracked and the final date of the hire period is crucial in future calculations for extension invoices. With the push of a button called "Export to Quickbooks", all orders that are entered and flagged for invoicing are exported to an IIF Transaction File. Quickbooks imports this file directly in only a few minutes and records all of these invoices ready to print from the accounting system.
As products are returned to the company (sometimes within the hire period, sometimes after) – the user finds the order in the system through a simple search screen and marks them as "Offhired". This then creates a new invoice in the system – the final invoice for the hire. These are exported to Quickbooks in the same way.
To deal with the enormous and time-consuming process of generating extension invoices, the DataHouse built system uses the aforementioned final date of the hire period. Once a month the company now simply pushes another button entitled "Generate Extensions" and the system queries the database to find all orders that are still on hire and require and extension. This generates new extension invoices in under 5 minutes – around 600 every month. These are then exported to a Quickbooks read-able IIF Transaction file and imported into Quickbooks for easy printing.
