Shepherd’s planner board tailored to Rental

This blog focuses on the Rental planner board, which was the subject of Shepherd’s first newsletter mailout last September. To see why it is being revisited as a blog, let’s have a bit of context.

Around the end of Q3, last year, Shepherd made a general release that made a number of functionalities available to its existing users. This happens somewhat regularly, and if you read the article on customised features in August 2025, you’ll know what this means. This release mattered a lot to many users because it saw them have access to an expansion of Shepherd’s planner board concept.

Why are planner boards so valuable?

What is this concept? Perhaps the simplest analogy is to cast our minds back to 2007 and consider how the launch of the first smartphone in its modern iteration changed how we do things. Why this comparison? Because, like a smartphone, a Shepherd planner board is a hub of information and interface from which all manner of data can be accessed. 

Instead of seeking different tabs in different sections of Shepherd’s NetSuite-native EAM solution or, indeed, NetSuite itself, all the information presented in the planner board (which is configurable to your tastes and needs) acts as a link to the file or record that information depends on. Even a simple task like looking up an asset’s service schedule might have required remembering its code number. One mistake and back we go to the main screen to recheck: not anymore.

Rental’s specific challenges and their solution

In many respects, running a rental operation is harder than other business models: contracts, equipment locations, billing rates, service histories, technician schedules, assets coming back early or late, some needing maintenance, others replacement, yet others more expected elsewhere the next day. 

You get the idea. For businesses that have not made the EAM transition, that means a patchwork of spreadsheets, open browser tabs, and manual cross-referencing that eats hours or your day, quietly (and sometimes not-so-quietly) costs money, not to mention a touch of premature aging thrown in. Shepherd’s Rental Planner’s raison d’être is to end exactly that.

The best part is any business already running Shepherd’s Rental Module will already have it embedded after that release. Your administrator need only activate it. The Rental planner requires no migration, no integration project, and no learning curve from scratch.

Every contract, asset, service order or invoice, in one place

What follows is what that actually means for your business. As explained above, the clearest immediate benefit of the Rental Planner is “considered consolidation.” The records you want handy, rental contracts, equipment records, billing histories, maintenance schedules, and service orders all living in a single interface, and not across separate systems or manually maintained files.

Let’s first look at contract management. To do that, there needs to be a short intro to what an EAM is capable of. When a service order is raised, the system automatically pulls the billing rates from whichever contract governs that relationship. If a customer holds multiple contracts at different rates, the correct one is applied without manual input. Invoices populate from agreed contract terms, not from someone retyping figures. 

Repeat contracts can be configured to run automatically, removing the administrative overhead of recreating the same arrangement each cycle. New or renewed, you can access that contract from the planner board, through the service order chip sitting in the planner board’s calendar.

The same logic applies to equipment. Whether you operate two machines or two thousand, every asset has its record accessible from the Planner, giving you access to purchase cost, billing history, maintenance costs, current location, and associated service orders. Scheduling machines (as distinct from scheduling people) is handled directly from the same screen where you raise invoices and dispatch technicians. If your operation uses IoT monitoring, asset performance data feeds into the platform in real time, allowing remote diagnostics and proactive maintenance decisions before a breakdown becomes a customer problem.

Changes to contracts, such as adjustments to duration, equipment swaps, early returns or extensions, are handled through drag-and-drop operations that previously, again, required navigating multiple screens. What once meant six tabs and submenus is now a single action.

When operational visibility improves, decisions tend to as well

Beyond reducing administrative headaches, the Rental Planner expands what you can actually monitor about your business, and thereby act on. First there’s the asset level, where you can see what any given machine has earned in billings set against what it has cost in maintenance, or purchase. 

That direct comparison is ideal to assess whether an asset is pulling its weight or quietly eroding margin, especially when a cheap purchase price might have skewed bias in its favour. Many rental businesses may have that picture in theory, but having the cold, hard truth in numbers  accessible in a single click, for every asset, is a different thing entirely and significantly more reliable.

At the customer level, the reporting tools allow you to identify which clients and client types are your most profitable, and which cost more to service than they return. That intelligence has strategic implications: which sectors to target, which contract structures to prioritise, where volume isn’t the same thing as profitability. That might come in  rather handy when it’s time to, say, decide in which region to open up a subsidiary.

This also affects day-to-day planning in ways customers notice. Because the system shows what asset is tied to which contract, where it is, and when it returns, you can sequence the turnaround between contracts with far greater ease and fluidity. That might include scheduling servicing, booking delivery to the next client, and communicating that timeline accurately. 

Customers who can plan their own operations around reliable equipment availability become more loyal, and more likely to consolidate spend with a supplier they can depend on. In sectors with stiff competition, repositioning yourself from adequate service to genuinely valuable service often comes down to details like these: trust, in other words.

Native to NetSuite

One of the more practical advantages of the Rental planner (and indeed Shepherd in general) is that it doesn’t require your team to work across systems. It is NetSuite-native, which means the data integrity is already there, the permissions structure your business already uses applies, and field technicians updating job records from the mobile app are feeding into the same system your billing and management teams are working from. Records update in real time. There is no reconciliation step, no batch import, no version mismatch. NetSuite updates? So does Shepherd.

For businesses that have grown their rental operations incrementally by adding equipment, customers, and contract types as demand came their way, the more common challenge isn’t a lack of data. It’s that the data exists in too many places to be useful. 

Most company owners and administrators can relate to the slow creep of time where those makeshift solutions that worked in the start up phases, also stuck around in the scale up phase and now threaten smooth operations once the business has matured. The Rental Planner’s value is less about adding information to your business and more about making the information you already have accessible, connected, and actionable.

Rental operations run on assets, contracts, and relationships. The businesses that manage those three things with the most precision tend to be the ones that grow profitably, retain the right customers, and scale without a proportional increase in administrative stress. That’s the outcome the Rental planner is designed to support. So if you haven’t already, activate it and start reaping the benefits.