Daily operations: check-out and check-in

The heart of OnLot is the fleet board — every unit in your fleet, its status, and who has it.

Checking a unit out

Find the unit on the fleet board (search or filter by status).
Open its action panel and choose Check out.
Pick the customer (or add a new one right there), set the due-back date, and confirm.

The due-back date has one-tap quick buttons — today, 3 days, 2 weeks, whatever fits your rentals — and an admin can customize the set under Settings → General (multiples of 7 and 30 label themselves as weeks and months).

If your workspace uses waivers, OnLot warns or blocks at checkout when a signed waiver is missing. Straight from the check-out screen you can have the customer sign here on your device, email them a signing link, or copy a link to paste into a text message — the link works on their own phone and expires automatically. If condition photos are enabled, you can capture them straight from a phone camera during the checkout.

More than one person on the rental? Add the rest of the party right in the check-out — every co-customer is checked against do-not-rent flags, and if waivers block check-out, every rider needs a valid signature, not just the person paying.

More than one unit? Group check-out hands several units (and accessories) to one customer in a single flow — one party, one due-back date, one pass through the verification, separate rental records per unit.

Checking a unit back in

Open the unit, choose Check in, and it returns to the available pool. Condition photos at check-in give you a before/after record if a dispute ever comes up.

Swaps, extensions, and fixing the clock

Swap to a different unit mid-rental — an upgrade, a downgrade, or a breakdown out on the water. Open the rented unit's action panel, choose Swap, pick the replacement, and set what happens to the unit coming back: straight to the lot, or into maintenance with an issue opened in the same motion describing what went wrong. The paper trail links both rentals.
Adjust the dates — when the counter gets slammed and a check-out is recorded late, or a customer calls to extend, staff can edit a rental's check-out and due-back times after the fact. Every adjustment is audited with the before and after.

Shortcuts staff live in

A checked-out unit shows a direct link to its customer's profile — one tap from "who has Cart 12?" to their page.
Fleet-board cards carry quick actions: jump to the unit's details or its current customer, or start a new citation, issue, or work order with the unit already filled in.

Making steps mandatory

By default everything above is optional and fast. Under Settings → Rentals (the Check-out & Check-in Requirements card), an admin can make steps mandatory for the whole team:

Condition photos at check-out, at check-in, or both — the flow won't complete without at least one photo.
Customer phone or email — check-out is blocked until the customer has the required contact info on file (staff can add it right in the flow).
A recent inspection — block check-out unless the unit passed through an inspection in the last N days (requires the Inspections module).
A signed waiver — warn at check-out, or block it entirely until the customer signs (requires the Waivers module and an active template).
Customer insurance — block check-out until insurance is on file (policy details or a card photo) and not expired. Only applies while the Insurance customer field is enabled; the check-out screen shows the customer's insurance status either way.
A return note on every check-in, not just breakdowns.

Staff see requirements marked in the flow itself, and anything missing is explained in plain language when they try to confirm.

The customers board

Customers in the sidebar is a full board, like the fleet board — with a preview panel riding alongside the table on wide screens. Click any row and the person appears on the right: phone (with their texting opt-in, if any), email, waiver status, every unit they have out right now with its due time, lifetime rentals and spend, open tickets, and their last rental — plus one-click Open profile and Edit. The panel is always there; it starts on the first person in the list.

Stat tiles across the top — who's renting right now, open tickets, missing waivers, do-not-rent flags, and who's new this month. Click a tile to filter to it.
Filters — renting now, open tickets, no valid waiver, missing contact info, do-not-rent, new this month, and any of your tags. Filters combine, show as removable chips, and are remembered per person (the link is shareable too).
Columns — choose and drag-reorder the columns you care about; click a header to sort. Your layout is remembered. On phones the board opens as a compact card list instead.
Tags — label customers however you like (VIP, Local, Repeat…) with a color per tag. Define and recolor your tag set under Settings → Rentals (with a count of how many customers carry each one), or create tags on the fly right in the customer form; deleting a tag (admins) removes the label from everyone without touching the customers.

The customer's page

Open a profile and the whole relationship is on one screen. Up top: the essentials at a glance — lifetime rentals and spend, no-shows, open tickets, and how long they've been a customer — with + Reservation (opens the booking form with them already picked) and Edit beside them. Editing happens right on the page in the same form the board uses; you're never bounced back to the list.

Below, the page splits in two. The left side tells the story: Renting now (each unit out, its due time, and the rest of the party), Upcoming reservations, open tickets, the rental history with condition photos, and Notes. The right side holds the records: contact details, ID and insurance on file (private photos, staff-only), the full waiver book for that person, and — for admins — the do-not-rent flag and a merge shortcut.

Notes are a running log. Hit + Note for anything worth remembering — "prefers the shaded carts" — and each entry keeps its date and who wrote it. Staff add notes; admins can remove a mistaken one. (The free-text note on the edit form still exists as the profile note, shown at the bottom of the card.)

Scan the license, skip the typing

On plans that include it, the back of a US driver's license fills the profile for you. When adding an ID photo, photograph the barcode side — OnLot reads the license's own barcode right on your device (the photo never leaves the app for this) and offers what it found: name, date of birth, address, and license number.

Nothing is written until you say so. A review panel shows each value — empty fields come pre-ticked, and anything that would replace existing data is clearly marked and starts un-ticked. Pick what applies and hit Apply selected; every applied scan lands in the audit trail. Fields your workspace has hidden from the customer form are never offered.

The Waivers page

When waivers are enabled, the Customers menu becomes a dropdown: All Customers and Waivers. The Waivers page is the whole signature book in one place — every signed waiver with its status (valid, expired, voided, or used), search by customer or signer, status filters, one-click PDFs, and admin voiding with an audited reason. Outstanding signing links sent to customers appear at the bottom with a re-send button. The customers board also shows a Waiver Signed column with each customer's latest signature date, sortable for renewal outreach.

Waiver validity (Settings → Rentals) supports three modes: valid for a number of days (the expiration shows wherever the waiver appears), one per rental, or forever — signed once, never expires, until voided.

Do-not-rent

Admins can flag a customer Do not rent from their customer page, always with a reason. Flagged customers show a red badge everywhere — the board, their page, and the check-out search. Check-out is blocked for them; an admin can tick an explicit override in the warning to proceed, and every override lands in the audit trail. Removing the flag clears the reason so stale warnings don't linger.

Shaping the customer form

Under Settings → Rentals (the Customer Form card), an admin decides what the customer form collects. Each field can be Required, Optional, or Hidden:

The stock fields — phone, email, notes, and ID photos — start Optional.
Extra fields — second phone, company, address, date of birth, license number, insurance, and emergency contact — start Hidden; switch on the ones your business needs and they appear on the form, the customer page, and as board columns.
Insurance covers the provider, policy number, and expiration date, plus up to two photos of the insurance card on the customer's page — stored privately like ID photos, with an expired warning once the date passes.
Required fields can't be skipped when staff add or edit a customer, anywhere — including the quick-add inside check-out.
Hidden fields disappear from every form. Hiding a field also switches off any check-out requirement that depends on it, so you can't strand your team. Anything already stored is kept — hiding never erases.
ID photos are special: Required at check-out means a unit can't leave until the customer has an ID photo on file (added from their customer page) — useful if you always keep a license photo before renting.

Keeping an eye on the day

Dashboard — what's out now, due today, and overdue, with one click into the filtered board.
Dispatch — the next seven days of pickups and returns, with projected availability and overbooking flags.
Reservations — if enabled, book ahead by type and quantity, then fulfill from the reservation at pickup time. Availability shows as a weekly grid or a month calendar (click a day to zoom in). Confirming a reservation emails the customer, and a day-before reminder goes out automatically. Reservations that pass their start date with no pickup are flagged no-show each morning — freeing the held units — and can be reinstated with one click if the customer shows up late. The list is searchable and filterable, and clicking a reservation expands its full detail.

When something goes wrong

Mark a unit's status (maintenance, out of service) from its action panel so it drops out of the bookable pool. Notes travel with the unit, so the next shift knows why.