What is out, and what is late

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The board that is always right

A whiteboard is only as accurate as the last person who remembered to wipe it. Asset Giant keeps the same board, and most of it keeps itself. Locations follow the kit between yards, depots, vans and customer sites as it is scanned. The customer and the job are written onto the machine by the booking itself, the moment the hire goes live — and the change is logged against the asset in plain words, naming who booked it and when. Status is the one you drive, and deliberately so: only you know whether something that has just come back is ready to go straight out again or wants a service first.

You set the statuses yourself, in your own words — On hire, In yard, Off-hired, awaiting collection, Workshop, Written off. See Asset Status Tracking and Custom Statuses. Nothing here assumes your process looks like anybody else's.

Scan at the gate, not at the desk

Every item carries a QR label you design and print yourself, on ordinary label sheets, in whatever size suits a scaffold clip or a genset panel — see QR Code Asset Labels and the Custom Label Designer. Scan the yard, the container or the van, choose Check Out, then scan everything going on the lorry. Items stage on the screen as you go, so a mis-scan is pulled before anything is written, and one tap commits the lot — each item leaves that location and takes a dated, named entry in its own history with it. Booking it back in is the same motion in reverse. See Check Items In and Out.

Scanning is on the free plan. It is worth saying plainly, because in this market it is often not: one well-known rental platform bills barcode and QR scanning as a per-user add-on on top of its monthly platform fee.

Off-hire, without the argument

The dispute is never really about the kit. It is about which day it came back, and under the CPA model conditions that most UK plant hire runs on, the clock keeps running until the machine is actually received back — with the hirer liable for the cost of collecting it if it was not made available as agreed. Telling the driver is famously not the same as off-hiring; the notice has to be in writing.

Because a return is a scan, the record settles it: the item, the date, the time, and the person who scanned it. Activity History & Audit Trail keeps the whole life of every machine — every check-out, return, move, edit and status change — and it is two clicks from the asset itself. Keep your own off-hire reference on the record as a custom field and the number, the date and the machine all live in the same place.

That same history is what turns a damage conversation into a short one. Photograph the item on the way out and on the way back and both sets sit on the asset, dated: Asset Photos & Image Gallery.

The days you lose after it comes back

Utilisation is not only lost while a machine is broken. It is lost in the gap between a machine coming back and anybody knowing it is available — the days it sits behind the container while the hire desk is still telling customers it is out. On a whiteboard that gap is however long it takes for someone to walk over and rub something off.

Here, the return is the update. Scan it in and it is back in the yard on everyone's screen in the same second, including whoever is on the phone to the next customer, and the booking calendar releases the dates as the hire ends. Nothing about that requires a report to be run or a spreadsheet to be saved.

Kit that goes out as a set

A marquee is not one thing, and neither is a lighting rig or a 110V site set-up. Build the package once as a list and send it out as a unit, then check it back against the same list so the missing spigot is found at the gate rather than three hires later. See Lists & Kits and Stocktakes & Inventory Audits.

Every yard, every van, every customer site

Treat each depot, container, trailer and van as a location and the fleet stops being a single pile. Track Assets by Location and Vehicle & Van Tracking mean "where is the second 6kVA?" has an answer without a phone call, and a driver can see what is already aboard before loading anything else on.

Ask it, rather than filter it

The AI Inventory Assistant reads your live register, so "what have we got out with Kestrel Groundworks?" or "which generators are back in the yard?" is a question you type rather than a report you build.

Being straight with you

Asset Giant today is the fleet and the paperwork. There is no customer-facing storefront yet where the public books your kit and pays online — that is in build — so what you get right now is a live register, bookings, hire rates, quotes, invoices and card payments, at one price for the company rather than a fee per person.

Ready to know where your fleet actually is?

Start on the Free Forever plan — QR scanning included, no credit card, running this afternoon.