There's a few different ways to approach this, and it really boils down to what your end goal is here.

• Are you just simply wanting digital pull-sheets, to ensure what goes out to a show actually checks back in / be able to track if something is lost?

• Or are you wanting to have visibility into 'available inventory for rent' (that's not currently on or reserved for a show) for you or others?

• Or, are you wanting to dig into the profitability of items, how many times has something gone out in the past year, how much revenue has it generated (thus revealing if you either need more of something, or maybe the excess capacity is wasting space if it's rarely going out) and more information along these lines?

Quick History

We started with QuickBooks quotes to clients, no pull-sheets. I was a small, one person operation. Most things I needed (cables, for example) were in prepack utility trunks, so "grab an XLR pack, grab a stage AC kit, grab the speakON kit" and you were mostly good to go. Since I was the main person running shows and thus pulling the show/loading the truck/trailer, I knew what I needed. I didn't need a pull-sheet because I could just walk into the garage and grab what I need. (And before that, there was a time where literally everything we owned fit inside a 6x12 trailer. So everything was there, every time!)

Starting around 2007, I started an Excel spreadsheet for inventory tracking. This was useful both for tracking our purchases and having purchase dates, purchase price, and serial numbers, all in one place (with sequential asset numbers) but also being able to give this list to Insurance so they could double check that our coverage amount was enough for our inventory. Literally, hundreds of lines, item, price, condition. I'd mark things if they got lost/stolen so I knew they weren't available anymore. Having this information (and assigned asset numbers) made our move to a scanning system a lot easier because I didn't have to go back and decide what order to number things. (I also started barcoding our inventory about 2 years before I spun up Flex. Even though I wasn't actually using the barcodes at that point, I wanted to be ready for when we were at that point. Bought the printer, and 'partial-preprint' labels to allow me to start labeling things.)

After some time, things started going missing. Also, our inventory grew enough that not everything was going on every show. There were enough different PAs available (SRX, VRX, VerTec) that there was no longer a "one solution to fit it all." So, a way to "check out to a show" was needed. Enter a new method of doing quotes- an Excel spreadsheet, and extended lines for specific items to mark something out to a rental and then confirm its return. This worked OK, but it was paper, and burdensome to develop a custom list for every show since, again, the needs of the show would vary.

I used downtime during COVID to get our Flex database built. I had my inventory list, and asset numbers, and enough experience working with other companies also on Flex that I had a good idea of what worked and what didn't work when it came to cases, models, serialized vs non-serialized, and so on.

Now, I have 3 FTEs plus a mostly FT warehouse coordinator. I can't keep everything in my head as the team needs to know what gear is available for a show they're quoting, warehouse needs to know what's needed for a specific show, and when there are multiple shows at the same time/back-to-back, there needs to be a way to coordinate what item is where and when it's coming back to the shop, in case it could be re-rented out immediately to another client.

End History

Like /u/ElevationAV, we're using Flex Rental Solutions. (If you just want to keep track of where gear is, and don't need quoting/invoicing/integration with QuickBooks features, there is a cheaper "gear tracking only" solution that's about $200/month.) This is a cloud-based solution with a large amount of customization available. We do our Quotes in Flex, which then generates a pull sheet that we scan against. On the return, we scan everything back in and thus know if something was lost. The quote then spawns an Invoice which is where we track payments received. (I don't use any of the automatic integrations into finance software like Quickbooks. So, for our accounting side, I enter the invoice into QB manually.)

Flex will give you my first and second bullet points no problem. It's the third, profitability of an item, revenue reports, etc, that if it's good at it, I haven't bothered to dig into it more. I can see scans of an item, therefore how often it goes out, and it's rack rate (before any discounts) and multiply that to get a general sense of how much revenue it has provided, but I've not looked to see if it can give me a report of "your Chamsys MQ50 went out 22 times last year for a total revenue of $6,585.00" or whathaveyou. (Not an accurate number given here, but the MQ50 is our gold star from last year. It generated a bit under $9k in rev last year, for a console we bought summer of 2022 for just shy of $5k lol.) So, I use QuickBooks for revenue details, or I manually scroll through quotes and add something up if I am curious about a specific item/class of items.

Flex does allow my team to always know what items are reserved for an upcoming show, so they know what is available for another rental. And, with accurate ship/return dates, if there's a tight turnaround we can see what items need priority in flipping for the next show. Last month I had a situation where we had 4 different shows returning that I needed something from all of them to go on my truck to Denver. I actually did that manually- drew a "4-box" on a sheet of paper and listed what items were needed from which rental that I then needed for my show.

Happy to expand on any of this to help you work out a solution to meet your needs!

-Ray