Scheduling Rentals & Record Keeping

Scheduling Your Rentals

When scheduling your bounce house deliveries its important to take several things into consideration.

1. The easiest way to do it is to limit the schedule for each bouncer to once a day. Once a bouncer is booked its off the available schedule for that day.
2. If you are offering shorter rental periods, you may find it possible to schedule a bouncer twice a day. This makes your delivery schedule more difficult, but you also make an additional rental. You also need to make sure that there is sufficient time between rentals for you to actually get that bouncer delivered as promised.
3. The person accepting your bookings needs to have a good handle on where bouncers are going, so that come the day for delivery you aren't expected to deliver on opposite ends of the city within 15 minutes of each other. A bouncer can take anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes to setup after you've arrived at the address. Time between deliveries needs to include setup time, driving time, and possible delays.
4. Where necessary request for early setup so that you can get all your bouncers delivered on time. Most people are fine with getting their bouncer an hour early.
5. Park deliveries - it's important that you schedule deliveries to parks so that you can be there as the party is finishing. Don't give a customer the opporutunity to leave your bouncer unattended in a park because you are late. You should also determine any regulations regarding the parks in your locale before accepting bookings for a park. Some parks have no electrical supply, so the bouncers require a generator. Since this is an additional charge, you need to make the customer aware of this. You'll also find that parks require you to be licensed and insured. You should be doing that already, but there may be additional requirements.
6. Make customers aware that they are required to cancel in advance or you will charge a delivery fee if you deliver and they cancel on site. Let them know the weather conditions which will cause cancellation. If you deliver to a large area of your state, you may not know that the weather is very windy in one location. Make customers aware that they must cancel due to weather. When it's obvious that the weather is bad throughout your locale, call all customers to see if they have an alternate indoor location or if they prefer to cancel. It's always a good idea to call all customers a day or so before their scheduled booking to confirm the booking. We've delivered bouncers only to find another company their already setting up their bouncer because the customer double booked to get a better price and didn't cancel one of the bookings.

Record Keeping

Keeping a record of your financial paperwork is of course a given. If you haven't considered hiring a part time bookkeeper, let me refresh the idea. A good bookkeeper can help you set up your bookkeeping records, allow you to maintain them on a daily basis and balance them for your on a monthly basis. The amount this service costs is well worth the price of easy filing of tax, legal and insurance paperwork. You can also track your financial records using a product like Quickbooks, PeachTree or one of the other commercially available small business accounting software packages. Even using this type of product it's a good idea to get a professional to look over your books regularly.

Customer records are an important assest for your business. These are the people that have already rented from you and, barring any bad impressions, should be return customers for you. Often parties will be in locations other than the customers own address. When taking bookings make sure that you have both the party address and the customer's address. You can use these addresses for mailing returning customer offers. You can also use the zipcodes as a way of determing where the majority of your deliveries take place and use that information for a direct mailing campaign.

Rental records for each of your bouncers are also important. You can determine which bouncers are generating the most income and which bouncers are not. You may have some preconceived notions about which type of bouncer will rent more often that actual statistics may not agree with. By keeping records, you'll have a better idea of what to buy in the future. You can also keep track of bouncers requested that you don't have available.