Maintenance, reports, and fleet utilisation

A rental office does not profit from the number of vehicles but from the number of days each one spends out of the yard. Hence the weight of maintenance, which prevents downtime, and of the utilisation report, which measures the result.

Vehicle maintenance

Vehicle maintenance — Figure 1 — records every service performed on a vehicle: its type, date, odometer reading, cost, description, and who carried it out.

It earns its place three ways:

• You learn a vehicle’s true cost; one that earns well and swallows twice as much in the workshop is a hidden loss.
• It ties service to the odometer rather than the date alone, which is the right measure for a car covering a thousand kilometres a week.
• It pairs with blackout periods on the vehicle to block rentals on scheduled service days, so no booking lands on a car that will not be ready.

Reports

The Reports screen — Figure 2 — shows the office’s performance for a period you choose: number of contracts, their total value, collected, outstanding, and excess mileage, violations, and extra services shown separately.

The ageing report ranks what customers owe by how long it has been outstanding: under a month, two months, three or more. That ranking is what decides who you call first.

Fleet utilisation

This is the most important report in the module — Figure 3. For each vehicle it computes the share of the period’s days on which it was rented, alongside its revenue in that period.

That figure answers questions revenue alone cannot:

• High utilisation and a low rate — raise the price.
• Low utilisation and a high rate — review the price, or how it is presented on the storefront.
• A whole type with low utilisation — do not buy another one; buy more of the type in demand.

Office settings

Office settings — Figure 4 — govern what appears on every contract and on the storefront: the office name, its logo, contact details, the Arabic and English terms and conditions printed on the contract, and the tax rate.

Beside them sit the storefront screens: banners, pages, social accounts, payment methods, and optional add-ons — which together build the public booking site a customer reserves from directly.

Notes

• Always record maintenance with its cost; maintenance without a cost makes a vehicle’s profit imaginary.
• Read the utilisation report monthly, not yearly; seasons differ and a late decision does not help.
• Close service days with a blackout period before a customer books the vehicle into them.