Help & Documentation

Offline-first guidance for safe gear lists.

Own Gear ROI

Track investment return for personally owned equipment

Add the gear you own to the Owned Gear page, enter purchase prices, and the app tracks revenue when those items go out on jobs. The aggregated ROI dashboard (Top Performers, Underperformers, Idle) lives on the Production Dashboard.

Setting Up ROI Tracking

Add items to the Owned Gear page and enter purchase details. Once an owned item is rented to a project, the revenue feeds ROI automatically.

  • Items live on the Owned Gear page — there is no separate 'Owned' toggle in the Device Library.
  • Purchase price is required for ROI. Without it the Financials modal asks you to add one, and the dashboard cannot rank the item.
  • Multiple purchase dates per item are supported when you own more than one unit of the same device.
  • ROI numbers update live as new rental records arrive — no manual refresh needed.
  1. Open the Owned Gear page from the sidebar (under Rental Management).
  2. Click 'Add Gear' and pick the items you own from the Device Library picker.
  3. Open an item, go to the Value step and enter the purchase price and date under Purchase Information. Give the item a day rate under Rental Pricing (its own rates, or the list price it takes from the Device Library).
  4. Optional: enter Useful Life (Years) under Purchase Information to drive the depreciation estimate shown in the same step.
  5. When the item is assigned as the Owned provider on a project gear-list row, or goes out on a sub-rental, revenue is counted against it automatically — day rate × project days × quantity for projects, the billed amount for sub-rentals.
Tips
  • Enter purchase price when you buy new gear — easy to forget once invoices age out of view.
  • Include accessories that came with the kit (batteries, cables) in the purchase price.
  • Use the actual paid-out price, not the list / replacement price — otherwise breakeven stays out of reach.
Common Pitfalls
  • Adding an item but skipping the purchase price — it then never appears in any ROI bucket.
  • Entering the replacement / insured value instead of the original cost.
  • Forgetting to update the purchase price when you buy a second unit at a different price.

How the Metrics Are Calculated

The dashboard groups items into three buckets based on revenue and rental history.

Total Revenue
Sum of revenue from all rental records linked to this owned item.
ROI %
(Total revenue − cost) ÷ cost × 100. Negative until the item earns back its cost. The item's own Financials modal uses the purchase price alone as the cost.
Cost
On the dashboard: purchase price × units owned, plus the costs logged in the item's maintenance history.
Top Performers
Items with ROI > 0, sorted by ROI descending. The top 5 show on the dashboard.
Underperformers
Items with ROI < 0 that have been used — some revenue, rented days or committed days. They've had a chance and aren't earning back.
Idle
Items with no revenue, no rented days and no committed days, and a cost on file. Not underperforming — they simply haven't gone out yet. Gear linked as a component of another item is never counted as idle or underperforming.
Rented (days)
Days that actually EARNED — billed sub-rental days plus project rental days. It is not the number of days the item was tied up: own productions and maintenance are committed days, not earning days, and the two are counted separately. Hover the cell to see the committed total and utilization.
Break-Even
How many further RENTAL days are needed to pay the item off, projected at its list day rate (the realised rate is used when no list price is set). Hover the cell to see which rate it used.
Avg Utilization
Share of the days you have owned the item that it was committed — rented out, on your own productions, or in maintenance. This is the figure that counts non-earning days.
Tips
  • Underperformers are the strongest sell signal: negative ROI plus actual usage means the demand isn't there.
  • Idle items shouldn't be sold on the first quiet month — they may just need marketing or a different audience.
  • Top Performers are candidates for buying duplicates to take on more parallel jobs.
Common Pitfalls
  • Judging ROI in the first few weeks after purchase — every new item starts deep in the red.
  • Forgetting that the ROI formula counts purchase price plus logged maintenance/repair costs against rental revenue — insurance and other overhead are not included.
  • Comparing a niche specialist lens against an everyday workhorse — different utilization patterns make the ratio misleading.

Fixed-Price Sub-Rentals

When a sub-rental is agreed as one price for the whole package, that money is divided across the gear on the deal by what each piece is worth.

Why it is split at all
A package deal (one flat price, or one rate for the whole kit per day) has no per-item price to read. Line prices on those deals are recorded for the paperwork but never billed, so crediting them would report money that was never invoiced — and leaving them at zero, which is what most people do, showed earning kit as if it had never gone out.
Split by item value
Each line is weighted by what it is worth: replacement value if you have set one, otherwise purchase price, otherwise the value on the catalog entry it is linked to. A camera worth €4,000 alongside a lens worth €1,000 takes €2,000 of a €2,500 deal, and the lens takes €500.
Components count
A line carries the value of its components too, at every depth. A body that links a cage, where the cage links a top handle and rods, is weighted with all of it — so a fully kitted item is not undervalued against a bare one. Quantities multiply down the chain, and anything you excluded from the line is left out.
When values are missing
If any item on the deal has no value on file anywhere, the split falls back to the line prices you did enter; if there are none of those either, it divides evenly. The rental-history row always says which of the three was used.
What is not affected
Only the analytics. The invoice, the quote, the delivery note and the customer total are untouched — nothing is written back to the sub-rental.
Tips
  • Filling in a replacement value (or at least a purchase price) on your main items is what unlocks the value-based split — without it the deal divides on a cruder signal.
  • The share and its basis are shown on each rental-history row in the item and gear-set financials modals, so a figure can always be traced back to the deal it came from.
  • A daily-used deal whose day count you have not confirmed yet attributes nothing on purpose — no amount has been agreed, which is different from agreeing zero.
Common Pitfalls
  • Expecting a fixed-price deal to credit the line prices shown on the sub-rental — those are recorded for the paperwork, not billed.
  • Reading an evenly-divided split as an error: it means nothing on the deal had a value or a price on file, and the row says so.
  • Forgetting that a deal-wide discount reduces what is attributed — the shares always add up to what the deal actually earned, net of tax.

Items That Go Out As Part of Something Else

Gear you have linked as a component of another item — a cage on a camera, a top handle on the cage — is never offered as its own sub-rental line, because that would bill it twice. It still shows on the ROI table, but it is read differently.

It collects the days it was out
A component goes out whenever the item it hangs off goes out, so it earns those days. A cage that spent 200 days on a camera reads as 200 days used, not as gear that never left the shelf. Chains count at every depth: a top handle on a cage on a camera collects the camera's days too.
Its revenue stays at €0 on purpose
The money is booked on the line the component rode out on — the component's worth is already what made that line's share bigger. Paying it a second time here would count the same euro twice, so the row shows days used and no revenue of its own.
It is listed apart from Idle and Underperformers
Neither label is true of it. It is not idle — it has been working — and it cannot underperform against a revenue stream it was never given. The table marks it "Component of …" instead, so a €0 row is explained rather than mysterious.
Excluding it from a rental excludes it from the days
If you untick a component on a sub-rental line, it stayed on the shelf and collects nothing for that deal. The same is true of a finished delivery note: what was signed for is what counts.
Tips
  • To see a component earn on its own, unlink it and add it to sub-rentals as its own line instead.
  • Fleet Utilization counts component days too, so linking your accessories no longer drags the figure down.

Where to Find the Dashboard

The aggregated ROI dashboard lives on the Production Dashboard. The Owned Gear page shows per-item financials via the Financials modal.

  • Sidebar → Rental Management → 'Production Dashboard' opens the dashboard; its 'Gear Investment ROI' section shows Total Invested, Total Revenue and Avg Utilization, Top Performers, Underperformers, a Revenue by Item (Top 10) chart and the sortable Gear ROI table (Item, Cost, Total Revenue, Rented, Projects, ROI, Break-Even).
  • Owned Gear page (sidebar → 'Owned Gear') shows the full list of items and per-item Financials modals.
  • Click 'View Financials' on any owned item to open the per-item modal: total revenue, purchase price, ROI %, payback progress, the amount still to break even, rental days, average daily rate, and rental history.
  1. Open the Production Dashboard from the sidebar.
  2. The Gear Investment ROI section shows Top Performers and Underperformers, and an alert counting the items that have never been rented (Idle).
  3. Click a column header in the Gear ROI table to sort by it; hover a Rented or Break-Even cell for the committed days, utilization and the day rate used.
  4. On the Owned Gear page, use an item's 'View Financials' to drill into the full revenue history, payback progress, and break-even.
Tips
  • Review the Production Dashboard quarterly — that's the cadence where trends become visible, not weekly.
  • Use the dashboard to ground gear-purchase conversations with producers in actual numbers rather than gut feel.

Owned-gear financials (purchase price, rental revenue, depreciation inputs) sync between your devices via cloud sync. Add gear once on one device and the ROI picture stays consistent everywhere you sign in.

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