Article types

Rentware has 6 different types of items, with different functionalities and behaviours.

When creating a new item (which you can do via the plus in the inventory list), you will be asked which type of item you want to create.

Those are:

Let's go through those and look at what they mean:

This is what you would typically chose for your actual physical items.

Rental simply means, that it is a normal item with some quantity.

Whenever you want to create an item representing an actual physical object (like a car, boat, bike, etc), you usually chose this option.

A bundle is not an item itself. Instead it's a collection of items, which gets its availability from the underlying items, but can have different rules, prices, etc.

This is especially useful if you want to offer the same rental item in multiple locations, or with different availability rules for special occasions.

Bundles are a very powerful tool and can enable many things, which may not be immediately intuitive.

To learn more about them, please refer to this article

-> Bundles

A rental with variations article, is for the most part the same as a normal "Rental" article, but when setting up the quantity, you can say that there is X amount of option A and Y amount of option B.

You customer will be able to select which option they want when booking.

A typical use case example would be helmets.

If you are a bike rental and also offer helmets, you can set up 3 normal "Rental" articles "Helmet size S", "Helmet size M", "Helmet size L", or you set up one Rental with variations article called "Helmet" and within that create the options S, M and L.

Important note:

Those variations can not have different prices, or availability rules. They are essentially the same object, just "named differently" and with the option to select.

When booking your customers will be able to select the desired variation via a dropdown:

The deposit item will not count towards the revenue of the booking in any reports and can be set to not be included in online payment methods.

To learn more, please refer to our article:

-> Deposit items

This will create an article with an infinite availability.

You would typically use this either for services, which don't need to be tracked, like cleaning fees, insurances, etc. or for physical items, of which you you have so many, that the availability doesn't matter, like cables or towels.

A percentage item will derive its price from other articles in the cart.

So you could tell a percentage item have a cost of 1% of all items in your cart, which have the tag / category "Porsche".

This is rather rarely used, but can reflect things like special costs, or insurances.