Booqable

Vantagens

We are a small AV events company that needed a streamlined rental tracking solution. I looked around and did several free trials and Booqable came out on top. The platform is very easy to use, and being cloud-based means we can use it in various locations with ease (we're based on the Gold Coast so we often like to take laptops to the beach to work!)

For us, a huge pro is how easily you can take payments within Booqable. Several other services we trialled required integration with 3rd party accounting software to do this. While most users will probably still use accounting packages come tax time, all the actual payments we take can be processed within Booqable, which for us was a big time saver.

As others have mentioned, the customer service is always speedy and helpful. team is always on hand to guide in the use of the software, or to suggest better workflows. They even wrote a piece of code for me to enable me to perform a simple function I required but which wasn't yet part of the platform.

I'd certainly recommend Booqable to any small to mid-sized rental operations.

Desvantagens

There are features I'd love to have, but of course no software caters to everyone's needs, and Booqable is very reasonably priced. So the following aren't really cons, but just our dream additions to an already fantastic platform.

At present there is no packages feature to bundle products together, but this is in the late stages of development so will hopefully be released soon.

I'd also love to see some way of managing labour within the system (such as deliveries or, for us, event technicians) that is reflected in the calendar.

Lastly a companion smartphone app would be amazing (Booqable is designed to work on desktops or tablets). You can certainly login on a smartphone but the site isn't really optimised for that screen size. Again, I believe that such an app may be released as part of a future update.

Vantagens

Booqable's rental software is intuitive, powerful and very fast. Being a browser based system running on the AWS cloud makes it secure and work smoothly, no matter from where we are using it.

Planning a rental, printing a rental agreement in front of a client or creating an invoice is just a matter of a few clicks. The modern UI of the program makes it really easy to understand and use. Our associates had a grip on the system in a matter of hours.

Barcode scanning to select a client and to start and stop rental items is a must for us, and Booqable supports it very well.

Our company manages over 1700 unique rental products within Booqable, and we have not had a single outage until now. The calendar function also offers a very easy method to check when products are available or rented out and by whom. This is also the only system we found with good online booking integration. Most of our clients use our website to choose the products online, so this feature is essential.

The Booqable support team around Arjen and Herman truly are masters of customer support. When ever we had a comment, question or needed help we received an answer in a matter of seconds. It's just great when you have a dedicated support agent with absolute knowledge, that knows your business and your story.

I would recommend this Service to anyone wanting a simple but powerful rental tracking solution.

Desvantagens

Specific to our unique business segment, we are still missing a few extra features. These include reports, warehousing locations and package building. We are confident that these features will follow as part of the ongoing development of the system and the Booqable team have assured us that they will be available shortly.

Vantagens

The idea of what this software can do is appealing.. it seems to include all the features needed for a clean integration with Shopify, for example. The online booking and payment capture is slick and simple.

Desvantagens

Unfortunately, this app is simply not fully functional, and the discovery of that came at a very high price. My application involved listing products for rent, setting up the pricing, time frames, images, descriptions, etc. Then it went live, and only then (3 months of work) did I learn that the client interface is incomplete, and does not work. Essentially, each online order would need to be manually edited and reworked, so the value of the automation is completely lost. Clients cannot create an account, and I cannot therefore define their deposit parameters, or any parameters. This means your best clients are subject to the same strict rules that your first-time clients are, and there is no way around it. I was told that updates are in the works, but I asked why these features would appear in the app if in reality they were not operational. The reply is that we are working on it... next year, it should be better. Next year? Show me a business that pays full rate, gets partial service, and is prepared to just hang on to "next year" as the time frame for completion...

Vantagens

Number 1 - Customer support. I've never dealt with a company who works with you on such a personal level and takes care of basically anything you ask for. These guys are true professionals.

After that, its all still so great. The fact that I can manage my inventory, while also populating my website and show what equipment is available to rent saves me an insane amount of time. On top of that, it's integrated with quoting and invoicing. You work out of one database and are able to use it over multiple uses.

It honestly couldn't be easier or time saving.

Desvantagens

There aren't many issues that I have with this software. One of things I brought up was to have the calendar subscription for iCal or Google Calendar show not only the Reserved items, but also what items are Concepts. The built in calendar works great when you're on a computer. But when I need to use my mobile, I generally look to my Google Calendar to get a quick glance of whats going on.

Going on all of that, a stand alone app would be great as well.

These aren't really cons, just things that would improve the experience.

Vantagens

Booqable was straightforward to set up and flexible enough to cover most of our needs - the trial period was generous enough for me to learn my way around the interface and get most of my inventory entered, so I effectively didn't even pay for Booqable until after I started making money with it. Plus, it's very affordable compared to other inventory management products, and those don't even have the online booking capabilities. Booqable is easy to use and improving all the time as the team adds new features.

My personal favorites are the reusable pricing structures that make it easy for me to implement the structure I've been using offline for 20 years, and the flexibility of integrating Booqable with my existing website to make it show up the way I want my customers to see it.

Booqable has also been very reliable. The only time I saw any system downtime, it was very short-lived and Booqable provided status updates so I knew what the problem was and that they were working on it. Love the transparency.

Desvantagens

Booqable doesn't handle everything I need it to yet, there's still a couple features missing to handle some of my oddball, fringe rental items. That being said, the team at Booqable is very easy to communicate with and have tipped me off that the last couple features I need are being worked on right now, so hopefully soon I can update this review to reflect that.