Equipment Rental Solutions

The equipment rental industry runs on a deceptively simple premise: buy assets, rent them out, maintain them, repeat. The simplicity is an illusion. Behind every mini excavator sitting on a lot or scissor lift heading to a job site is a web of maintenance schedules, rental agreements, utilization calculations, insurance verifications, and logistics coordination that would make most operations managers reach for a drink.

I have worked with rental companies from five-unit operations running out of a yard to regional fleets managing 400+ assets across multiple branches. The pattern is always the same. Somewhere between 50 and 150 units, the spreadsheets stop working. Not because spreadsheets are bad tools — because the volume of data flowing between maintenance, contracts, dispatch, and accounting exceeds what any manual process can reliably handle.

The American Rental Association reports that U.S. equipment rental revenue reached $76.8 billion in 2024, with the industry growing at roughly 7% annually. The majority of that revenue flows through companies operating fewer than 10 locations — small and mid-size operators competing on availability, condition, and responsiveness against national chains like United Rentals and Sunbelt. These smaller operators cannot compete on fleet size. They compete on service. And service falls apart when the back office cannot keep up with the yard.

The numbers tell the story. Preventive maintenance compliance directly correlates with fleet availability, and fleet availability is the single largest driver of rental revenue. An asset sitting in the shop is an asset generating zero income while still depreciating and consuming overhead. Industry benchmarks put target utilization rates between 65-75% for most equipment categories. The gap between a well-managed fleet at 70% utilization and a poorly managed one at 50% represents hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue annually on even a modest fleet.

Yet walk into most rental yards and ask the fleet manager how many units are overdue for service. The answer is usually a shrug and a promise to check the binder. The maintenance schedule lives in a three-ring binder, a whiteboard, a spreadsheet that someone updates when they remember, or — most commonly — in the head of one person who has been there forever and knows every machine by the sound of its engine.

The contract side is equally manual. Rental agreements get typed from templates, rates get looked up in price books, insurance certificates get filed in folders that nobody checks until there is a claim. When a customer calls to extend a rental, someone writes it on a sticky note. When equipment comes back damaged, the inspection happens on a clipboard and the results may or may not make it into the system before the next customer picks the unit up. Every one of these gaps costs money — either directly through lost revenue and unbilled charges, or indirectly through equipment failures, customer disputes, and the slow erosion of fleet condition that comes from deferred maintenance.

The equipment rental business is fundamentally an asset management business. Every hour an asset sits idle, every service that gets delayed until something breaks, every contract that goes out with the wrong rate or comes back without a proper inspection — these are margin leaks. And in an industry where net margins typically run 8-12% for well-managed operations, the difference between tracking these details and hoping for the best is the difference between growing and stalling.

Point of Rental and Texada handle the core rental management functions well — rate management, reservations, invoicing. But the operational workflows that surround those transactions — triggering maintenance when a unit returns, verifying insurance before equipment leaves the yard, coordinating delivery logistics with the customer’s job site schedule, flagging underperforming assets for disposal — still require someone to manually connect the dots between systems. That connective layer is where rental companies lose time, miss revenue, and watch their maintenance programs fall behind.

The pages below address the two most expensive operational gaps in equipment rental: keeping your fleet maintained and generating contracts without the administrative overhead. Each workflow connects the tools you already use — your rental management software, email, spreadsheets, and calendar — into systems that run without someone having to remember every step.