You promised the same gear to two jobs on the same weekend

Where the money goes today

Your kit and your bookings already live somewhere, in a spreadsheet or in Airtable. Both of them hold a list of gear and a list of jobs perfectly well. Neither one answers the question you ask all day, which is whether this exact item is free from the 12th to the 15th.

When it goes wrong the calendar does not move. The event happens on Saturday whether or not the lighting rig turns up, so a clash costs you a last minute rental from a competitor at your own expense, or it costs you the job and the customer.

A spreadsheet cannot refuse the second booking. The best it can do is turn a cell red after somebody has already promised the same item twice, which is a report on the mistake rather than a way to stop it.

What it does

• The clash is refused, not reported

  Choose an item and a date range. If it overlaps a booking that already exists, the save is refused and you see the job that is in the way. You find that out while the customer is still on the phone, not on the morning of the job.

• One question across the whole inventory

  Give it two dates and see everything that is free between them. No filtering two tabs against each other, and no relying on somebody remembering a phone call from last week.

• A pull sheet for the truck

  Every job prints as a PDF list of what is going out. Scan the items with the camera on your phone as they leave, and scan them again when they come back.

Questions

How is this different from Booqable and the other rental platforms?

Most of them are built to run a rental shop. You get a storefront, online payments, deposits and contracts, and the availability check sits inside all of that. This is built only for the internal question, which is what is free and what clashes. It is one flat price with scanning included, where the bigger platforms usually charge per user for scanning and per location on top. If what you want is a customer facing shop, one of them is the better buy, and we would rather tell you that now.

Can Airtable not prevent a double booking on its own?

Not on its own. Airtable holds the gear list and the booking list well, but it has no way to refuse a record because it overlaps another one. The usual answer in its community is to build an error checking routine that flags the clash after it has been saved, which tells you about the double booking you have already made. Refusing the save is the part that is missing, and it is the part this does.

I already built something like this in Airtable. Why move?

You might not need to. If renting gear is one part of a bigger production process that already runs in Airtable, keeping it there can be the right call. This is for the case where the availability question is the part that keeps breaking, and where you want the overlap refused instead of found afterwards. Tell us which of the two you are when you join, because it decides what gets built first.

What about contracts, deposits and invoices?

Not in the first version. The first version answers availability, refuses overlapping bookings and prints a pull sheet. Contracts, deposits and taking payment from your customers come after that. If one of those is the reason you cannot switch, say so when you join.

How do I get my inventory in?

Upload a CSV. If your list is in a spreadsheet or in Airtable today, export it and we will map the columns for you. You do not need to tag or restructure anything first.

Does every item need a barcode?

No. Barcodes make checking a loaded truck faster, and you can add them later. Availability and overlap checking work on the names you already use.

When does it launch?

We are working out whether enough people want this before we build it. That is why the price is on this page and why nothing is charged yet. Everyone on the waitlist hears the launch date before anyone else.

Who is behind this?

Smallcraft Labs, a small software company. Company details are on the terms page.