In order to handle costs which may arise during a rental period it is common to take a deposit.
To achieve this in Rentware you need to first create a deposit and then assign it to the items it should apply to.
The process is the same regardless of the actual rental items. So whether you rent out cars, motorcycles, machinery etc. the steps remain the same.
1. Create a deposit
Go to your inventory (https://app.rentware.io/inventory) and in the upper right corner click on the "+ Add" button.
A sidebar will appear asking you for the type of article you want to create.
Choose "Deposit":
You will see the article creation interface. Here all you are required to fill out is the name, price and VAT.
You can add a title and description to give the customer further information, but it is not necessary.
In this example we name our deposit "Deposit 500€", give it a price of 500€ per item (you can also give it a price per hour/day/etc., but usually it's per item) and set it to a VAT of 0%.
We set it to 0% because a deposit is not revenue. If for example during the rental period the customer damages the rental object, this damage will get a price with a VAT and the deposit payment can then be used to pay for this damage.
2. Assign a deposit
We have now created the deposit but so far it doesn't know which items it should apply to.
For that we need to go to the bottom of the "Base availability" and there we find a setting called "Add automatically for".
We can toggle this on and click on "Edit".
An input window will appear, into which we can either enter a pre-existing tag, or a specific item.
To confirm click on the option that appears in the window.
In this example we set the deposit to apply for all items with the tag "BMW".
With that done, we can save the item (upper right corner of your screen) and we are done.
This deposit can also be told to apply to other items, if the require the same deposit sum.
So you could set this deposit to also apply to "Ducatti", or "Mercedes".
If you now wanted to create a second deposit with a different amount, for example 300€ and have it apply to different items, then you can just follow the same steps again.
Functionality of deposits
Now that we have created and assigned our deposit, it will automatically add itself to the cart of every booking containing the items we defined in the previous step.
So in this example when I book an object with the tag "BMW", the deposit will be added.
As you can see it is not included in the cart Total, as that a sum of the rental amounts.
The deposit gets its own line to distinguish it as a payment, w±hich is expected to be returned.
To learn more about how deposits are paid, take a look at our article on