You’ve made it!
- Account set-up: Check!
- Items entered: Check!
- Default Order Settings completed: Check!
Now we’re ready to rent out your fabulous collection.
Start by navigating to the “Orders” icon in the upper left corner of your browser window.
Before we dive in, I want to tell you a little story.
In RW Elephant land all Orders are born as Proposals.
You’ll add Event details including Who, When, and Where. Then you’ll add Items and send that Proposal off to your Client.
They’ll jump for joy and take out their wallets. When they are ready to reserve the Items on their Proposal, they’ll sign your Terms & Conditions and give you a deposit. Then, you’ll change that Rental Order from a Proposal to Confirmed.
Once the Event takes place, the Order will automatically become Completed. And everyone lives happily every after.
Nice, huh?
There are a few variations on this story.
If you send a Proposal to your Client and they decide not to book, the Rental Order should become Cancelled. This will happen automatically on the Proposal Expiration Date if you’ve chosen that setting. Or manually by you.
There are three other Order Types: Wishlist, Sale, and Damaged. They are pretty different so we won’t talk about them yet. For now, let’s remember that all of your Rental Orders will start as Proposals and then become either Confirmed or Cancelled.
So without further ado, your first Order.
Cue the band!
In the “Orders” section, click on the “+” button in the upper left corner of the left column. This will create your first order.
Click on the green “Edit Order” button.
Make sure you’re on the “Event & Contact Detail” tab.
First choose whether the Order will be for Delivery or Will-call.
Next, you’ll leave the Order Status as a Proposal.
Enter the Event Start Date (you can type the date or use the Calendar Date Picker) and the Event Start Time.
Quick note for our international users, if you prefer a DD-MM-YYYY format, you can set that up under Company Information.
The rest of the date and time fields will automatically fill based on the Event Start Date and Time.
If you’ve set up Default Order Times, RW will populate your times based on those selections (head back to the previous article for how to set those up!). If not, RW will copy your Event Start Date and Time into all the following fields.
From here, you can easily go through and adjust the dates and times as needed.
Once you fill-in the Start, End, Delivery and Pick-up Windows, you’ll get to the Off-the-Shelf and Restock Times. Before I tell you about them, I want to make sure I have your attention because these fields are the most important Anti-Double-Booking tools RW has. Once you enter these dates and times, RW Elephant will only show you Items that are available during that window. If all else fails, please always check and double-check your Off-the-Shelf and Restock times. They hold the keys to your RW universe.
Okay, now that you really understand that the Off-the-Shelf and Restock times are the most important part of any Order in RW, let’s talk about what to put here.
The Off-the-Shelf time is the time you take the Items off the shelf in your warehouse to use for this Rental Order. Hence the name. I know, we too think it is a brilliant naming technique.
So, if your order is on Saturday the 6th at 3 pm, your Delivery Window will be from 10am to 1 pm that day. You’ll likely be loading your truck starting at 8 am. We’ll use 8 am on the 6th for the Off-the-Shelf time.
Now, let’s talk about the Restock Time. The Event ends at 7 pm. You’ll pick up your Items by 8:30 pm and drive back to your warehouse. Unloading the truck, cleaning the pieces and getting them back on the shelves will take until a little time so let’s say you’ll have everything restocked by 11 pm. You’ll enter 11 pm for the Restock Time.
Any Items you rent on this Order will need to be available from 8 am until 11 pm on the 6th. Once they are on the Order, they will be reserved for that whole time period, not just the length of the Event or the beginning of the Delivery Window to the End of the Pick-up Window.
These Off-the-Shelf and Restock Times can also span multiple days. If the Event is Saturday the 6th but the Delivery is on Friday the 5th, you might need to use the morning of the 5th or maybe as early as the 4th for the Off-the-Shelf time. Likewise, if the Items aren’t being picked up until Sunday the 7th but will need to be cleaned before they can be rented again, the Restock Time won’t be until the afternoon of Monday the 8th.
Having accurate Off-the-Shelf and Restock Times for your Orders is the key to efficient and accurate Inventory management in RW Elephant.
Now that we’ve thoroughly covered the Off-the-Shelf and Restock Times, we’ll move on to Expiration Time*. This value will be auto-filled based on the Order Settings you’ve chosen in your Account but you can always manually change it on any particular Order.
*Please Note: The Proposal Expiration Date & Time is based on UTC, not the Time Zone set within Company Information.
We’ll save Multipliers for a later tutorial and move on to Contacts.
In the Client field, start typing the name of your Client. If you already have Contacts within RW Elephant, matching names will show up in the list below this field. If you don’t have a matching contact, click on the “Add Contact” option below the field.
In the Contact Window that appears, first choose the Contact Type: Person or Company.
Type the Client’s First Name, Last Name and Company if applicable. If you have integrated your RW Elephant account with Highrise, you’ll be able to chose to add the contact just to RW or to Highrise too.
Then double-click on the Phone Number and Email Addresses you’d like to add. You can include multiple phone numbers and email addresses for any particular Contact. This is helpful if you want to display a work phone number in the primary Client contact area but choose a mobile number for that same person later in the Onsite Contact area.
Click the “Save” button at the bottom of the window and you’ll see the Client appear.
Repeat this process with the Coordinator and Venue.
Add the Room if applicable. This is not a smart field like the Client, Coordinator and Venue.
Then add an Onsite Contact.
Once you’ve added each of these Contacts, click the green “Save Order” button.
Then click the “Edit Order” button.
You’ll see that the Phone and Email options for each contact will populate. You can use the arrows on the right of each of those pull-down menus to choose the phone number and email address you’d like to display in each area.
You can use the Note field to include any information you’d like stored with the Order. This Note field does display on your Invoice PDFs for your client to see as well as on the Delivery PDFs and Pull Tickets for your Crew to see.
The Internal Note field only displays here within RW Elephant and on your Pull Ticket PDFs. It does not display on any Client-facing communication like Invoice PDFs or Delivery Ticket PDFs.
Once you’ve completed your Note and Internal Note, click the green “Save Order” button.
You’re ready to pull the trigger now and put some Items on that Order. Yippee!