I know. I know. It is a loaded question. Consider for a minute that if you and your employees are busy, you might feel like you aren’t wasting any time at all. You’re answering emails, on the phone, buying inventory, cleaning, storing, packing, and on and on and on. Even if you’re days are filled though, you might be wasting time.
Making more money in your rental business hinges on your ability to be efficient. If each step in your rental process takes 5 minutes of your staff’s time, you’ll be limited in the amount you can grow with your current staff. Shaving off time in your business processes can save you time and ultimately money.
Collecting payments in your rental business is one time-drain that you might be able to tighten up. Ask yourself a few questions about your payment process:
- Do you accept the forms of payment your customers want to use?
- Do you collect your entire payment upfront or are you chasing payments after the rental has occurred?
- Do you have trouble getting clients to complete all of the steps in your confirmation process (including getting the proper signatures)?
- Do you get your deposits and final payments in a timely manner or are you constantly reminding your customers when their next payment is due?
Each of these steps takes precious time. If you could streamline or eliminate part of the process, you and your staff will be freed up to develop more business. While shaving 5 minutes off the sales process might not seem like a big deal, once you multiply those minutes by the number of orders you want to fill this year, you can start to see a difference. For 100 orders, you’ve saved more than 8 hours. If you’re projecting 2000 orders, saving 5 minutes will give you back almost 167 hours. How many new customers could you find with that newly-freed-up month?
While, we think you should examine all of your processes and procedures within your rental business, here at R.W. Elephant, we’d like to help you become more efficient at collecting payments.
Here are a few suggestions we think will help you and your team save time:
- Start using Stripe within R.W. Elephant to process your credit card payments. This will eliminate the extra step of recording the payment within R.W. because enter the card info will process and record it in one step.
- Once you’re processing credit cards through R.W. Elephant, send your clients the online payment link. From there they can enter their own credit card info and agree to your terms & conditions online.
- Encourage your customers to use the auto-pay feature on the online payment page. They won’t have to worry about making their additional deposit. You won’t have to send them a bill. Their card will just be automatically charged on the due date.
Obviously we’re a little biased but we think these are some great time-saving solutions for your rental business. Don’t stop there. If you have more ideas for finding extra minutes in your day, please leave a comment. We’d love for our user community to help one another out with time-saving tips!
