Tracking hired kit

When to use this

Use the hire fields whenever a piece of kit on your job comes from a third party rather than your own yard — typically plant, scaffolding, welfare units, traffic management kit, or specialist tools.

Tracking hired equipment alongside owned equipment in the same register means:

• You see your full kit list in one place, no jumping between systems
• You can allocate hired plant to a Work Package the same way as your own kit
• You know exactly when each hire started and when it needs to come off
• Every active hire shows on the Calendar, so the bills stop the day you wanted them to

The most expensive mistake in hire management is forgetting to off-hire something. The hire fields in Assets are designed to stop that happening.

Marking an Asset as hired

You set the hire flag from the Create Asset form (or by editing an existing Asset).

1. 1

   Open the Create Asset form, or open an existing Asset and click Edit.

2. 2

   Tick the Is Hired? checkbox. The hire fields appear underneath.

3. 3

   Fill in the hire details (see below).

4. 4

   Click Create or Save and the hire details are pinned to the Asset.

The hire fields

When you tick Is Hired, the form expands with these fields:

• Hire Company Name — who you're hiring from (Speedy, GAP, A-Plant, Sunbelt, your local supplier)
• Hire Contract — upload the hire agreement as a PDF or image so the paperwork lives with the kit
• Hire Start Date — the day the hire began
• Hire End Date — the day the hire is due to end (your planned off-hire date)
• Hire Rate — what the hire costs per period
• Rate Period — Daily, Weekly, or Monthly

All of these get saved against the Asset and travel with it for the lifetime of the record.

The Hire Details card

Once an Asset is marked as hired, the detail page shows a dedicated Hire Details card right at the top. The card shows:

• Hire company name
• Hire rate with the period (for example "£50 / day")
• Hire start and end dates
• A clickable link to download the contract document

The card sits above everything else on a hired Asset, so it's the first thing you see when you open the page. That's deliberate — for hired kit, the dates and the company are usually the most important things to know.

Hired kit on the Calendar

Every active hire appears on the company-wide Calendar as a coloured bar running from the hire start date to the hire end date. This gives you a visual view of every hire on the books, all in one place.

In practice you'll use the Calendar to:

• See every active hire across the business at a glance
• Filter to show only hired equipment when you want a "what's still on hire?" view
• Spot hires that overlap or run longer than they should
• Drag the hire bar to extend or shorten a hire if the plan changes

Off-hiring an Asset

There's no single "off-hire" button — instead, you handle it in two short steps when the kit goes back.

1. 1

   Open the Asset and click Edit. Update the Hire End Date if the actual return date was different from the planned one.

2. 2

   Change the Asset's status to one that means "off-hired" or "returned" (your asset manager will have set up a label for this — common ones are "Off-Hired" or "Returned").

If you want to keep the record around for history, leave the Asset as it is — the Calendar will simply stop showing it as active once the end date has passed.

Owned kit and hired kit together

Hired and owned Assets sit side by side in the same register. There's no separate "hire list" page to learn — you just use the standard Assets list and either filter by status (for example to show only "Off-hired") or pop into the Calendar to see active hires.

For most teams this is a feature, not a limitation: you only have one register to maintain, and the hire details are an extra layer on top of the kit you already track.

Real-world examples

• A 5-tonne digger arrives from Speedy for a six-week dig — create the Asset, tick Is Hired, set the start and end dates, upload the hire docket, and the Calendar will remind you when off-hire is approaching
• Welfare cabin extension — your client decides the cabin needs to stay another two weeks, so you open the Asset, edit the Hire End Date, and the change is reflected on the Calendar straight away
• Off-hire chase — every Monday, filter the Calendar to hired Assets and ring the hire desk for anything ending this week, so nothing goes over by accident

Next steps

• Creating Assets — for the full create form including the hire fields.
• Detail page overview — to see where the Hire Details card sits.
• Statuses — to set up off-hire and returned status labels.