Rentalot is a rental management system for smaller businesses in the holiday property rental market. Rentalot streamlines the administration of your business, helping you to provide a top quality professional service to your clients.

Rentalot generates an availability calendar like the one shown here on the right, with prices and availability automatically generated from the prices and bookings in the Rentalot database. The columns, date formats, and styles used in the availability table are all configurable.

Although we have now released a "Plus" version of Rentalot that handles online bookings and other advanced features, the original free version remains popular and we will continue to maintain it. If you are not yet ready for online booking, it's a good place to start, especially if your prices are per week. If you offer daily prices, or you need online booking, then Rentalot Plus is for you.

Rentalot works in all versions of Joomla (1.5 and above), and is multi-language with several language packs included. It comes with a comprehensive PDF user guide.

Site Features	Rentalot	Rentalot Plus
Show prices in one or more currencies
"Classic" price and availability table
Daily availability view
Check Availability view
Enquiry form
ONLINE BOOKING
Search by availability, occupancy, or feature
Multiple properties	Availability for each property can be shown in a separate availability table	Automatically displays a property selector for multiple properties
Multiple currencies
Daily, weekly or irregular pricing periods	But the availability table is cumbersome for daily pricing	The daily calendar view is normally used for daily pricing
Discounts for multi-period bookings
Bookable extras (linen, cleaning, etc)
Article Plugin (include availability tables anywhere in any article)	The availability plugin is available for a small charge	Included in the package
Languages (the user guide explains how to create your own)

Administration Features	Rentalot	Rentalot Plus
Automatic calculation of booking price and payment schedule (up to four payments per booking)
Automatic currency exchange rate updates, and payment, arrival and departure reminders	Runs as a cron job, which some people find difficult to setup	Handled automatically by a plugin with no configuration required
Detailed financial report
Schedule report for arrival preparation
Lead Source report and pie chart for monitoring your marketing
Booking trend graph
Extras utilisation report
CSV download of financial and schedule reports

Administration Interface

The free version of Rentalot does not allow clients to self-book online. You take bookings manually and enter them into the back-end administration interface. Rentalot helps you with the price and payment schedule calculation, updates the front-end availability table, and stores all of your booking information for reporting purposes

Price Calculation

Rentalot calculates prices using "Price Periods". You can setup as many price periods as you want, each with its own unique price. A price period can be any length of time from a single day to an entire year. For example, if you only accept booking for complete weeks starting on a Saturday, you would setup a price period for each week. Your price periods don't have to be of equal length, so if you only offer full week rentals in high season, but accept daily bookings out of season, Rentalot can handle that. If a client books a period of time that crosses multiple price periods, Rentalot adds up the prices of the individual periods to calculate the total price. If a client wants to book part of a price period, he is charged the full price of any price period overlapped by the booking.

It is convenient to have Rentalot calculate booking prices, but it is not mandatory. All the calculations can be manually overridden, so if you have a different way of calculating prices, or you negotiate a special rate or payment schedule with a client, you can just enter booking prices or payment schedules manually.

Payment Schedule

Rentalot offers a great deal of flexibility in the way it calculates the payment schedule associated with bookings. The initial payment can be a fixed amount, a percentage of the total, or the whole amount. You can configure up to three further payments at variable dates.

Multi-currency

You can configure as many different currencies as you wish. Customers can view prices in any of your offered currencies. If you configure the cron script, it will automatically update the exchange rates for you using exchange rates provided (for free) by Yahoo.

Reports

The Financial Report is generated from your bookings and shows money received, money due in, money due out, and gross profit in your base currency. The Schedule Report shows a selection of booking data that is relevant to preparing accommodation for arrivals. It is a huge help in avoiding mistakes and making sure the right information is to hand on changeover days. The Lead Source Report and Lead Source pie chart measure the effectiveness of your various advertising campaigns.

Documentation

Like all our products, Rentalot Plus is fully documented. The free User Guide explains every detail, from getting started to setting up the cron job that updates exchange rates and sends email reminders

More Information

Please use the small menu below to find out more about Rentalot, or download the user guide and the software here.