Three clocks in every hire: off-hired, collected, ready to hire

A site manager rings a hire depot at ten past two on a Thursday to say the scissor lift is finished with. The driver collects it on Monday morning. On Tuesday the workshop finds a bent guardrail, the part arrives the following Monday, and the lift goes back on the hire line the day after: twelve days after the phone call.

The person doing the invoicing now has to decide how many days to charge. The customer says the hire ended on Thursday. The system says the machine came back on Monday. Nobody wrote the phone call down. Everyone did their job, and the depot is about to either give away four days or start an argument it cannot win.

Three events that get one date

Most hire records have a single field called “returned”. A hire actually ends three times.

• Off-hired. The customer tells you they are done. This is the commercial event: your terms tie the end of the charge to it, usually with some notice.
• Collected. The machine physically leaves the customer’s custody. This is the responsibility event. Until it happens the machine stands on somebody else’s site, in the weather, with the key in a site hut.
• Ready to hire. Inspected, repaired, cleaned, charged and put back on the line. This is the capacity event, and the only one that lets you promise the machine to the next customer.

Put those three in one field and the depot will argue with customers about the first gap and lose money silently in the second.

Gap one: off-hired to collected

These are the days people argue over, and the argument is nearly always about evidence. Your terms say who pays for them. Your records have to show when they started and ended.

Three things are worth capturing at the off-hire call, every time: who called and when, a reference you give back to the customer, and where on site the machine is standing. The reference matters most. A customer who was given an off-hire number on Thursday at 14:10 does not dispute Thursday, and neither do you.

Collection needs the same care as delivery, and usually gets less. There is often nobody on site to sign. What stands in for a signature is a set of photographs with a time and a position, the hour-meter reading, and a note of visible damage made before the machine goes on the truck. Without those, damage found in the workshop on Tuesday could have happened on site, on the truck or in your own yard.

Gap two: collected to ready

Nobody invoices these days, so nobody measures them. For a hire fleet this is where utilisation goes.

Take a lift that hires at SEK 800 a day. If it spends four days longer than it needs to between collection and ready, fifteen times a year, that is SEK 48,000 of hire it could not earn. On one machine. The figures are invented; the arithmetic is the point.

The time goes in three places: waiting for someone to inspect it, waiting for a part, and waiting for somebody to mark it ready after the work is finished. The last is the cheapest to fix and the most common. A machine that is repaired but still shows as “in workshop” is invisible to the hire desk.

The opposite mistake costs more. A machine that shows as “returned” looks available. The hire desk sees it in the yard, promises it for tomorrow morning, and finds out at seven o’clock that it has a bent guardrail.

An extension is the same problem in reverse

When a customer asks to keep the machine two more days, the answer depends on the next hire, and the next hire was promised against clock three. Extending the first customer without looking at the second moves the problem to someone who has not rung yet. The person who says yes needs to see the next commitment on that machine before they say it.

What a record cannot settle

• Your terms. When the charge stops after an off-hire, minimum periods, weekends and part days are commercial decisions. A system applies them consistently. It does not choose them.
• Wear or damage. That stays a judgement. Photographs from delivery and collection turn it from a dispute into a comparison.
• Position is not status. A tracker shows where the machine is. It does not show that the hire has ended or that the machine has been handed back.

Measure the gaps separately

Track two numbers per product family: median days from off-hire to collection, and median days from collection to ready. The first is a transport planning number. The second is a workshop number. Reported together as “turnaround”, they hide which team can fix it.

Where navichain stands

In navichain a hire is a service priced per time unit, the hire order is a booking on a job, and the machine is allocated to that job as an asset. The charge follows the allocated and utilised time, and the invoice is raised from the same booking, so the period on the invoice is the period on the record.

Delivery and collection are runs in the same plan as the rest of your transport. The driver’s app captures photographs, signature, time and position at the handover, and the proof is sealed and timestamped, which makes a collection evidence instead of a recollection. An inspection that fails opens a defect against the machine. The work order that fixes it takes its parts off the same shelf figures the depot uses, and purchasing sees the missing guardrail as soon as the workshop does.

Hire desks, transport offices and workshops usually run on three systems that each hold a different date for the same machine. navichain holds all three clocks in one, which is what lets the hire desk promise against the right one. The platform page shows how the pieces fit.