Container inventory management provides a complete solution for overseeing your physical assets. It allows you to track, visualize, and manage your entire stock of containers. Hauler Hero knows how important it is for you to have an accurate, centralized, and predictive view of your inventory at all times, enabling better resource planning and operational efficiency.
Let’s walk through how to get the most out of this feature, by setting up your inventory, managing and assigning containers, and navigating the Inventory tab itself.
This feature is currently in an open beta. If you run into any issues or have feedback, reach out to support with the blue chat bubble in your Hauler Hero account or support@haulerhero.com.
Want to learn more? Check out our Beta Inventory documentation.
Setting Up Your Inventory
Step 1: Create and configure your container types in Inventory settings
The first step is to define the different types of containers your business uses, such as roll-offs or front-load bins. This configuration acts as a template for all individual inventory items, allowing you to set default properties and enable serialization for accurate tracking. This ensures consistency and simplifies the process of adding new assets to your inventory.
Add or Edit a Container Type: define container names, physical types (e.g., Open Top Box), and service methods (e.g., Hook). You can specify the size, material, color, and whether it should be serialized.
Enable Serialization for container types that you need to track individually by location and customer: Enable Serialization for a Container Type
Add or Adjust a Container Type Color : Associate each type with a specific business line and assign a default color for easy visual identification in the system. Using the Color assignment for container types creates at-a-glance visual cues for your team. For example, you can differentiate between roll-offs that require specific truck types by assigning them different colors.
Step 2: Add your containers
You can add containers one at a time, or use our bulk import tool via CSV.
Managing your assets from the Inventory tab
Once your container types and actions are configured, it’s time to unleash the power of Container Inventory Management: the Inventory tab.
This central hub serves as the single source of truth for all your physical assets, whether they are in the yard or at a customer location. It provides a comprehensive list of all your containers, allowing you to view their status, location, and other key details at a glance. Understanding this interface is key to day-to-day inventory management.
Inventory Tracking and Visualization
The key is understanding what you have and where it is. The system provides multiple ways to view your container assets, giving you both a high-level geographical overview and a detailed, sortable list. The goal is to maintain a real-time, accurate picture of your entire inventory.
View your entire container inventory.
List View: See a detailed table of all containers.
Map View: Visualize the geographic location of all your containers across your service areas. This is ideal for quickly assessing asset distribution. (For more, see View and Filter Containers on the Inventory Map)
Filter and sort all containers by properties like Container Type, Serial number, Location Type, and Status.
Differentiate between serialized (unique) and non-serialized (pooled) containers.
Expand individual container rows to see a quick overview of their details and activity history without leaving the main list.
List View Example:
Map View Example:
Coming Soon Functionality for the Inventory Tab:
Forecasting future availability
Step 3: Assign containers to a location and associate containers with a service
Once containers are in the system, assign them to your yards (default storage locations) and then to customers and configured services as they go out into the field. See: Assign an Inventoried Container to a Customer’s Service and Location for specifics.
Assigning a Container to a Location
Once a container is in your inventory, you can manage its specific details and assign it to a location. You can update its information, and most importantly, change its Location type from Yard to Customer. This allows you to associate the container with a specific customer account and service location, updating its status and showing its position on a map.
Update basic container information, including type, serial number, and default yard.
Change the Location type to assign the container to a Customer.
Select the specific customer and service location from your records.
Manually adjust the container’s pinned location on the map for precise placement.
Associating Containers with a Service
After a container is assigned to a customer’s location, you can associate it directly with one of their services. This is a critical step for operational tracking and billing. From a customer’s service details page, you can add containers from your inventory. The system helps you find available containers that match the service requirements.
Add containers to a service directly from the Inventory.
The system automatically filters for available containers that match the service’s measure type (e.g., 8 Yard).
Handle scenarios with multiple containers at a single service location.
Create records for customer-owned containers that you service but do not own.