SSABI.COM / EVENT RENTAL SOFTWARE

Event rental software for gear that leaves the building.

Staging, AV, lighting, rigging, furniture — event inventory lives on trucks and show floors, and the calendar is unforgiving. Ssabi keeps availability, dispatch, and billing in one live system, so a show date is never promised on gear that is already committed.

How do you stop two shows on the same weekend claiming the same gear?

By counting quotes and holds against stock, not just confirmed jobs. Most double bookings in event work do not start with two confirmed orders colliding. They start with a quote or a verbal hold that was never subtracted from availability, and a calendar that looks clean because calendars only show confirmed work.

Ssabi nets availability per item and per date range: owned stock, minus confirmed bookings, minus active holds, minus outstanding quotes, recalculated the moment anything changes. The instant one rep saves a quote for twelve moving heads on a Saturday, the next rep sees zero of twelve free for those dates. The conflict surfaces at quote time, between two people who can talk about it, instead of on load-out morning between two trucks.

Quotes and holds carry expiration dates, so a dead quote releases its gear automatically. Nothing is blocked forever, and nothing is blocked by accident. There is a longer teardown of the failure mode in how rental operators eliminate double-booked gear.

Is one double booking really worth changing software over?

Run the arithmetic once. Take a $3,600 lighting job where the conflict is discovered on load-out morning and the show has to happen anyway. Cross-hiring replacement fixtures from a competitor at day-before weekend pricing, with no leverage, runs around $2,900. Expedited round-trip freight on the cross-hire adds roughly $480. Two techs idle for three hours waiting on that truck, at $45 an hour each, is another $270.

That is about $3,650 in hard costs against $3,600 in revenue. The job goes negative before anyone counts the office hours spent untangling it, and before anyone apologises to anyone. Those are illustrative numbers rather than a survey, but the shape holds: a single conflict in event work usually costs more than the job earns.

Then there is the cost that never reaches the profit and loss. A client who booked six weeks out and watched you scramble on load-out morning takes quotes from two other vendors next time. One incident quietly taxes every future booking from that account.

What happens when a show date moves?

You change the dates on the job and the availability math runs again for the new window. Anything that now collides is flagged before the change is confirmed, and anything the old dates were holding is released back into the pool for other quotes.

This is the part that spreadsheets cannot survive. Moving a show in a workbook means finding every row that referenced the old dates and hoping you caught them all. Here the dates are the input to the calculation, so there is nothing to remember to update.

What happens when the client adds gear after they have signed?

It becomes a recorded change on the same job rather than a torn-up quote. The original signed document stays exactly as the client signed it, the addition is priced and tracked separately, and availability for the new items is netted like any other commitment.

This matters more in event work than almost anywhere else. A client who signs six weeks out and adds two more fixtures on the Thursday before a Saturday show is not an edge case, it is Thursday. Software that forces a re-quote for every addition either slows you down or quietly loses the audit trail of what was actually agreed.

Does it schedule crew as well as gear?

Yes, against the same capacity. Crews, trucks, and gear are scheduled together on a deployment calendar, so a job that has the fixtures but not the techs is visible as a problem while there is still time to solve it.

Crew see their own schedule on their phones, along with the day's plan, the site address, the job's documents, and a channel to message about it. Status flows back as the team logs it: staged, on site, struck, returned. Nobody in the office has to phone a truck to find out where it is.

How do load-out and returns get back into availability?

Warehouse staff pick against a generated pull sheet rather than a printed list somebody annotated by hand, and gear is checked back in with its condition recorded. An item that came back damaged is not counted as rentable for the next show.

That is the difference between availability that is theoretically true and availability you can quote against. Owned quantity is a number in a database. What is actually on the shelf and fit to ship is what the next client is really buying.

Transport documents travel with the load, and certificates of insurance are tracked with their expiry dates, so the paperwork that stops a truck at a venue gate is not discovered at the gate.

Can I run more than one warehouse?

Yes, and you can move gear between them. Stock is held per location, availability is netted per location, and a shortage at one warehouse can be covered from another with the transfer recorded and both locations' numbers following the move.

When netting shows you are two fixtures short for a date three weeks out and no location can cover it, you cross-hire at ordinary rates with ordinary freight. The value is not that the software finds you a sub-rental. It is that you learn about the shortfall in week one instead of on the Friday, which is the difference between a planned cost and a panic one.

Can we quote packages instead of line by line?

Yes. Items, kits, and bundles all live in the same catalog, priced from rate cards with duration tiers, so a package quotes as a package while availability still nets on the individual items inside it.

Freight and labor are priced on the quote rather than added later, and replacement values live on the item. Accepted quotes become orders, completed shows become invoices, rental periods pro-rate, and tax applies by rule. Payments run on Stripe with deposits and net terms. The whole path is described in quote to cash without the spreadsheet.

What does the client see?

Their own branded portal, on your domain and in your colors. They review the quote, sign it, and pay the invoice online, without calling your dispatcher to ask what they agreed to. Nothing about the portal says Ssabi.

What does it cost?

A flat monthly platform fee, based on the modules you use and the size of your team. No per-booking fees, no percentage of your show revenue, and no long-term contract.

That structure is deliberate. A platform that takes a cut of every booking gets more expensive precisely as your season gets busier, which means the software bills most in the weeks it is helping least. A flat fee means a record August costs the same as a quiet February, and the upside of a good season stays with you.

Can we switch mid-season without stopping?

That is what the onboarding is built around. Inventory, customers, rate cards, and open jobs are mapped and imported for you, and you run Ssabi alongside your current system until the numbers agree. Your existing record numbers come with you, so an invoice that has been INV-4000-something for eleven years stays that way.

Your data stays exportable on request, any time. The migration path is designed around one rule: no standstill weeks and no cutover weekend. There is a fuller playbook in switching rental software without a cutover weekend, and an honest account of where a workbook is still the right tool in Ssabi vs spreadsheets.