Long Term Rental: Tips and Notes

Rent Out Equipment | Rental Returns

These notes apply to the example of renting pianos by the month; adjust for your needs.

• If you prefer, you can set up a "Rental" department to which the rental equipment and service charge items can be assigned. This allows you to run sales reports on just your rental equipment by filtering the report for the "Rental" department.

• Rental charges are reflected on Point of Sale reports as sales and are posted to your QuickBooks financial software to the income account you specified in inventory.

• If you use a "Piano Rental Deposit" item for security deposit purposes, that deposit is not reflected in the sales order Deposit field. In Point of Sale, it is recorded as a sale when the rental commences and as a return when the piano is returned. How this item is posted in your financial software will depend on how you mapped the account in inventory. Deposits of this type generally should be mapped to a current liability account, such as "Customer Deposits," and not to an income account. Observe any local regulations governing how customer deposits are to be held when setting up an account in QuickBooks for this purpose.

• The rental piano item, while recorded on the receipt and on reports for record-keeping purposes, has no net effect on sales amounts or inventory value due to its $0 cost and $0 price. You can view the on-hand quantity of this item at any time to see how many pianos are available to rent.

• You can sell a rental piano by listing the regular piano item (the item with a cost and price recorded) on a sales receipt and, as appropriate, discounting the price to reflect the age/condition at the time of sale.