- Industry: Construction
- Area of Expertise: Custom Apps Development
Background
The client manages several warehouses, providing rental services for scanners and construction tools to diverse businesses. Before coming to us, this client used Zoho Inventory to manage their stock. However, Zoho Inventory does not have functionality for rented, or temporarily unavailable, stock. Our objective in this project was to develop these structures in Zoho Inventory, leveraging the Zoho Suite.
Solution
Analytics
We utilized a serial number table in Zoho Analytics to systematically organize items across the client’s warehouses. Each unique item has a serial number, which has its own row in a Serial Number table. This table connects to tables with Warehouses, Inventory Adjustments, Invoice Items, Invoices, and more.
Creator
The Zoho Creator application focused on the Rental Fleet homepage, facilitating the rental and return processes for the client. This homepage showed the number of available rentals and current rentals, as well as summary reports of different system components.
Another component of this app was a list of all serialized items, each considered a “Rental Fleet” serial item. Each item represents an individual component, with a link to an Active Kit, or group of components that are rented out together. This Active Kit served as the parent item in this app, operating on the Inventory Level. The inventory shown in the app was grouped by warehouse/region, counting the number that are available for renting out.
The app had buttons to click to Check Out items, which enabled the user to progress to the Check Out stage with a Check Out Form. In this form, the user could add any accessory items, and fill out customer information. On submit, the form took each serialized item and checked it out.
The app also had a Check In Form. One major section involved the creation of invoices for any issues/damages that may have arisen during rental. On submission of the check-in form, the serialized items are made available again.
Books
Zoho Books was integrated with the invoice creation for any issues or damages that may have occurred during rental. Customer information is taken from Zoho Books, and invoices are generated.
Outcomes
- Developed rental functionality within Zoho, addressing a critical gap in Inventory management
- Effectively managed items in different warehouses within the rental system
- Integrated with billing and invoicing to create a unified system
- Enabled processes for invoice creation from any damage occurring during the rental period.
This completely custom app built out a functionality that was lacking in Zoho Inventory. With it, our client was able to effectively manage their rentals in Creator, and leverage the rest of the Zoho One suite.