Booqable

A request arrives from a web form or a partner for four cameras and two tripods from Friday to Monday, collected from the city location. The agent's first call is Check Inventory Availability for those products across that exact period at that location, which is a different question from how many cameras exist. If everything is free it calls Create Order for the period with the customer, locations, deposit and any discount, then Book Product On Order for each product and quantity, which creates the planning and the line together and actually allocates the units. Serial numbered kit that the customer asked for specifically goes through Book Stock Items On Order instead. Only when the order reads back clean does the agent call Transition Order Status to move it to reserved, which is the moment the inventory is genuinely held and the order number is assigned, and the confirmation to the customer quotes that number rather than an internal ID. If availability comes back short on any line, the flow does not improvise: it reports what is available for that window and asks.

Fulfilment is where a rental business either keeps its margin or loses it. When kit leaves the counter the agent calls Start Order Product to mark the booked units picked up or delivered, and List Plannings gives the warehouse view of what is out, what is due, and what has been started but not stopped. On return, Stop Order Product marks units back in, and the difference between the planned return and the actual one is the number the desk cares about. From there the paperwork follows the order rather than the other way round: Create Document issues the quote, contract or invoice against the order, Get Document returns it including its signature URL once signed, and Finalize Invoice closes the current pro forma invoice. A realtime On Booqable Event subscription on invoices and started or stopped orders drives the notifications, so the warehouse channel in Slack hears about a reserved order for tomorrow morning and finance hears about a finalised invoice, without either team polling a screen.

Walk in customers, event enquiries and marketplace bookings all arrive somewhere other than Booqable. The agent reads them from a sheet in Google Sheets or a form and calls Create Customer with contact details, addresses and custom properties, or Update Customer where the person already exists, matching on email through the search filters on List Customers so the same customer does not accumulate three records. Lifetime revenue and balance metrics come back on the customer list, which makes it cheap to flag a booking from an account carrying an outstanding balance before the kit goes out rather than after. On the catalogue side, Create Product Group adds a rental item, sales item or service with its pricing model, Update Product Group adjusts pricing, SKU, store visibility or shortage rules, and Create Stock Item adds an individual unit including temporary or subrented stock, which is how a hire in for one busy weekend gets tracked like everything else. Archive Customer soft deletes without destroying order history, so a lapsed account can be tidied away without losing what it rented.