Yard Love: rental management for yard signs
Inquiries, quotes and orders for yard sign displays, with availability worked out day by day for every item.
The problem
Every yard sign rental starts with the same question: how many of this item are free on this date?
The answer is not just a look at the event date. A display goes out on the setup date and comes back on the pickup date, and nobody else can rent it in between. Add several jobs overlapping across a week and the count has to be right for each item on each day.
A customer who has only asked for a price should not stop someone else booking, either. Stock needs to be taken by confirmed orders, not by every conversation still in progress.
The approach
When an item goes on a job, the system writes one record for it per day, from setup to pickup, with the quantity. What is booked out on a date is the sum of that day's records, and what is free is the number owned minus that.
Only records belonging to an order count against stock. Inquiries and quotes are kept and visible, but they hold nothing.
An inquiry, a quote and an order are one job at different stages, not three kinds of record. Moving a job forward updates its daily records too, so stock is taken the moment it becomes an order. Archiving it gives the stock back the same way.
It was built for more than one rental business, so every record carries its organisation and the app's queries filter on it. The design later carried over into a version for event equipment rental.
What it does
Day-by-day availability
One record per item, per day, per job, added up to give each date's count.
Setup-to-pickup holds
Stock is out for the whole span, not only the event dates.
One job, three stages
Inquiry to quote to order on the same record.
Availability table and calendar
An item's week at a glance, and setups and pickups on a dashboard calendar.
Built with
- React
- Redux
- Material UI
- Firebase Auth
- Cloud Firestore
- Cloud Functions
- Stripe (test mode)
Recognise the problem?
First conversation is free, and ends with an honest answer about whether custom software is the right call.