How to Manage Orders?

Orders are the heart of your rental business. Rentablez gives you a complete order workspace that takes a booking all the way from a first quote through pickup, the rental period, and returns — with pricing, invoices, contracts, and documents all reachable from a single screen.

Why the Order Editor Matters

Everything about a booking lives on one order. Instead of hunting across separate tabs, the order editor keeps the customer, the rented assets, pricing, and every downstream action (dispatch, return, invoicing) together, so you always know where a rental stands and what to do next.

One page, no tab-hopping — customer, dates, assets, and totals are inline sections you scroll through.
Actions open in drawers — invoices, contracts, and documents slide in over the order without losing your place.
A clear status trail — every order carries a status that reflects exactly where the rental is in its lifecycle.

The Order Lifecycle

Every order moves through a predictable set of statuses. Knowing the current status tells you what the order is waiting on.

Status	What it means
Draft	The order is being built and nothing is committed yet.
Reserved	Assets are held for the customer, but not yet handed over.
Rented Out	Assets have been dispatched or picked up by the customer.
Return / Partial	Some or all assets are being returned.
Completed	The rental is finished and the order is closed.
Cancelled	The order was cancelled (this can happen at almost any stage).

An order can be Cancelled from most stages. Some actions — like generating a contract — become available only once an order moves out of Draft.

The Single-Page Order Editor

When you open an order, the editor is laid out top to bottom as a series of inline sections. You work straight down the page and open a drawer whenever you need a focused task.

Inline sections

Customer — pick an existing customer or create one on the spot, and choose the billing and shipping addresses.
Rental dates — set the rental start and end dates that drive availability and pricing.
Assets — add rented assets with their quantities; the editor checks availability and works out each line’s rate.
Services — add non-asset line items (for example delivery, setup, or labour) with their own quantity, rate, tax %, and SAC code.
Pricing & totals — apply discounts, choose a security deposit style (percentage, fixed, or none), and review the running totals.

Drawers and linked pages

Heavier tasks open in a drawer over the order, or on a dedicated page, so the order stays in context:

Invoices drawer — create, edit, finalize, cancel, and download the invoices raised against the order.
Contracts drawer — auto-generate and manage the order’s contract.
Documents drawer — upload, describe, search, and view files attached to the order.

This replaced the old three-tab layout. Earlier versions split an order into Order Info, Billing & Financials, and Documents tabs. That layout is gone — everything is now inline sections plus drawers.

Pricing an Order

You have a few ways to get to the right price on a rental:

Discounts — apply a discount to bring down the line or order total.
Price List — pick a duration-slab price list from the selector to auto-discount eligible items based on how long the rental runs. See Apply a Price List to an Order.
Security deposit — collect a deposit as a percentage of the order, a fixed amount, or none at all.

Dispatch, Returns, and Invoicing

Once an order is confirmed, the same editor is where you run the rest of the rental:

Dispatch / pickup — hand over assets in full or in part, with a Dispatch Records history and gate-pass PDFs for eligible items. See Dispatch, Gate Passes & Delivery Agents.
Returns — take assets back in full, or use the Partial Return popup to return specific stock, with a Return Records history. See Full and Partial Returns.
Invoicing — raise one or more invoices, create proforma invoices, then design, finalize, and share them with the customer. See Invoices, Design & Share, and Payments.

Conditional Features

A few order tools appear only when the right setting or scenario applies:

Meter Reading Log — record daily meter readings between dispatch and return. This shows only for metered assets and when your organization has meter readings enabled. See Record Meter Readings on Rentals.
Gate Pass — the gate-pass option appears when an order has newly dispatched, eligible items. See Generate a Gate Pass.
Delivery agent assignment — assign a delivery or pickup agent when your fulfillment is handled by a delivery partner (3PL). See Assign a Delivery or Pickup Agent.
Order Contracts — generate a contract for an order once it is out of Draft, then send it for signature. See Generate and Sign Order Contracts.

Access to some of these actions also depends on your permissions. If you don’t see an option described here, check with an administrator about your role.

Working from the Orders List

The Orders list is your starting point for finding and acting on orders in bulk:

Filter the list with the filter panel to narrow by status, dates, and more.
Export rentals or leases to Excel over a date range. The button reads Export Rentals or Export Leases depending on the order type you’re viewing.
Peek quickly with the summary drawer, side panel, and the stock-info and custom-fields drawers without opening the full order.

See Filter and Export Orders for the full walkthrough.

Recurring Orders and Subscriptions

For rentals that bill on a repeating schedule, orders can run as subscriptions — set a billing period (weekly, monthly, quarterly, half-yearly, or yearly), a billing cycle start, and an invoice lead time, and Rentablez generates invoices automatically. See Recurring Orders and Subscriptions.

You’re All Set

You now know how the single-page order editor is organized, what each order status means, and where each downstream action lives. Head into the linked guides below for step-by-step help with any specific task.