Rental business lexicon

Some common expressions used in rentingforce and in the renting environment in general

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agency beings

agency environment
Environment of organisations and institutions working for another institution to represent their interests. Mostly found in the service sector.

article

item, product, goods (pl.)
Like a synonyme to "Object". It is something the lessor wants to rent to his customers.

authorization / user rights management

admin accounts, user permissions
Possibility to assign highly individual access rights to some employee accounts.

available stock

inventory, holding
Available goods or articles in one stock.

billing, invoicing

invoice processing
A process in the accounting in which an invoice is created and the correlated bookings between customer and lessor are executed. Trading and taxing laws apply some mimimum standards to an invoice.

blocking

halt, blockage, lock-out
Exclusion of single rental objects out of any rental processes. For example, an rentalobject may be blocked from any rental transactions during a service check.

booking

book entry, accounting, transaction
Part of the rental transaction where the rented object is reserved for the renting duration for money.

booking conflicts

Conflicts that can occur for instance when an object is reserved to be rented at a time where it is already occupied by another customer.

cash book

accounting book, cash account book, cash ledger
Digital or analogue document in which all cash movements in our out of the company are documented.

check in / check out

handling
In the rental business, check-in means to gather personal information of the customer before handing out the rental object, check-out means to state the end of the renting contract, maybe through handing back the car keys.

claims management

damage management
The claims or damage management covers all business actions related to the handling and processing of the damage case. from the admission of the damage notification to the clearification of the status as it is and the payout for one party.

clientele

client base, customer base
All registered and active customers.

controlling

Processing coordinational and scheduling tasks to gather relevant information for the company leadership, for example budgetary planning, object listing. rentingforce comes up with some nice features here.

cost center

burden center, cost unit
A place where costs were created and related services were delivered, usually your renting station. Can also be an abstract document which lists meaningfully ordered costs that can be administrated together.

cost type

type of cost, cost category
Upcoming costs are categorizised in types of usage and split up. Some cost types may be administrated by seperate cost centers.

currency

Currencies can or have to be converted to each other in international money transactions which occur permanently in some renting businesses like transporter renting or yacht renting. It has to be taken for granted that the price calculations don't differ depending on the country in which the bases are settled.

district / area

working zone, section
Sailing area or popular travelling area.

document management

Different types of documets like invoices, rental contracts, data sheets, booking confirmation can be created and generated according to the rental requirements.

domains

self-owned domain
A domain or domain name is an identification string that defines a realm of administrative autonomy, authority or control within the Internet. A domain usually belongs to a legal entity an can be chosen almost freely (some naming rules still apply).

e-mail, notifications

messaging, advices
Automatically generated and delivered e-mails to advise employees of business processes and of need for action.

employee accounts

employee authorization, employee accession
Access to the rentingforce software with different access rights for multiple employees of the lessor, which can be defined at will by the original rentingforce account owner.

establishment

commercial unit, place of business, place of operation
A permanent establishment serves as a tax unit.

evaluations

examinations, analysis
Sub part of the statistics: Sorting and structuring bigger amounts of data so knowlegde can be gained out of it.

extras

options
Additional extra that doesn't originally belong to the renting object, but can be booked on top for some money.

features

functional range, scope of operation
Summary of all possibilities rentingforce provides for the lessor.

file management

document management
User interface to upload and manage file attachments to objects, bookings, users or transactions.

interface

port, gateway
Interfaces in general allow the communication and set some communication standards between different (software) systems. In IT, this is realized through logical cut-sets which are defined in abstract ways so both systems can implement the interface and therefore control the commands and the data flow between the systems.

leasing station

renting station, base, facility, (business) location
Facility in which the renting objects can be rented, picked up and brought back afterwards. So spoken, the leasing station is the place where all your renting business takes place.

logbook

log file
(Mostly digital) document that automatically takes notes of all relevant processes going on inside of a software system like rentingforce. This is important for bugfixing, checking for software absuses or to create some useful user statistics.

multilingualism

multilingual capability
rentingforce is available in several languages like German, English, French and Spanish. Other languages are still in progress.

number generation

invoice numbers, customer number, customer ID
Numbers for some documents like invoices can be generated by a schema or sometimes randomly.

object category

compact cars, yachts, motorboats, penthouses
Broader and more universal aggregation of objects and object groups to a specified category like compact cars, penthouses and so on.

object group

All renting objects of the same precise type, eg. car model, type series with the same pricing.

online booking

Booking that was ordered through an online interface like a booking portal.

online payment

paypal, credit cards, direct debit
Payments through the internet. rentingforce offers the plugin to Braintree in that regard.

open item / open item management

outstanding items, unpaid items
Administration of non-paid invoices and therefore balancing accounts

plugin

interface
Additional extensions to the software that don't originally belong to the functional range of rentingforce, but can be developed or are already developed.

price calculation

price computation
Process of calculating the price out of the price catalogue.

price catalog (AE) / price catalogue (BE)

A set of all prices of all renting objects, including dependencies and special prices. The price catalogue is the basis for the price calculation of single objects.

rental agreement, leasing agreement

rental contract, leasing contract
General agreement between renter and lessor, in which the right of use of an object temporarily goes over from the owner (the lessor) to the contract partner (the renter) for money.

rental property

rental object
Objects for renting, like vehicles, yachts, machines, cars, boats, airplanes, motorbikes, quads, buildings, flats, holiday houses.

rental season

season, period
It's a lessor-defined period with special pricing conditions for some or for all objects. Sometimes the natural seasons are useful renting seasons as well, but depending on the business the seasons can be completly different

rental transactions

operations
The whole business process of the renting itself, from the first request until handing back the object and managing the payments

request

inquiry (AE) / enquiry (BE), query, question
The request of a customer to the lessor, for example if an object is available for rent at a specific time, or what he would need to pay for the leasing.

reservation

advance booking, arrangement, option
An object gets marked as "reserved". Its not necessary that an invoicing occurs for that, but often the reservation itself creates some costs as well.

schedule

accounting plan, accounting calendar
Deeply modified calendar in the rentingforce software, where all booking processes with all related information can be accessed (booking duration, customer, object, extra conditions and so on). It is the central booking administration tool in rentingforce and is usable through drag&drop.

sending newsletters, posting

forwarding newsletters
Automatic creation of an information document and its distribution to a list of e-mail adresses, for example the customers.

special offers

bargain, exceptional offer
Temporarily or otherwisely limited discount for single objects or object groups, rarely for the whole object stock.

standard price

Once defined and possibly mandatory and universally valid, the standard price provides the basis of all further price calculations. The single object price for one renting process can still differ due to seasonal changes, special pricings and so on.

statistics

Inquiry and evaluation of masses of user data, for example booking processes, software usage, financial analysis and much more. rentingforce supports some nice statistic features.

stock movement

goods movement
Movement of articles from the warehouse to the customer.

store

storage, stock, warehouse, inventory
Place (mostly a building) to store renting objects in an ordered fashion.

supplier

vendor (AE), supplier, distributor
Business partner of the lessor who provides him with objects/articles (eg. extras) for further renting or sale.

templates

document template
Eg. invoice templates, rental contract templates, damage protocol templates etc. that are automatically generated depending on the rental transaction.

transfer

Transfer of an object to another renting station.

transfer list

handover list
List in which the essential characteristics of the objects are documented. The list is used to check the status of an object after it is handed back to the lessor. If something is missing or not working, the customer can be called to account for the damage. Once a party confirmed the regular state of an object (like said in the transfers list), this party can no longer make claims on previously occured damage.

user assistance

user help, help center
A document that describes the typical use cases and the functions of a software. The user help usually provides solutions for common problems in usage and is at best searchable.

website, booking portal

homepage, rental portal, web page
Individually configurable web page that provides an online interface for customers to rent or reserve objects from the object stock of the lessor.