Introduction
Due to different situations such as:
- Customers not understanding the system.
- Returning the rented product to an employee at the site.
- Wrong weights in the slot.
- Different product weights on the same slot.
- Customers using a different method of returning compared to how they first rented their product. For example, using Lova to rent it, but trying to return it with a different payment card.
The result can be that the returns did not record which can result in a max charge of the products purchase price being charged. Even though the product may be returned already.
How many days before doing the max charge on a rental product that has not been returned can be configured by Instant Systems. The default time is 4 days.
It also possible to disable the max charge system all together.
Current Rental Report
This report provides an overview of all those rental products that has not been returned. It also shows those that have been max charged (sold) due to not being returned in time. The report can be found by navigating to:
- Network -> Inventory -> Current Rentals
How this report works is that it provides you an overview and possible actions you can do to minimize the risk of customers being max charged. From the due by date column, you can see how many days there is left before the max charge will occur. If the due by date is 2024-10-03, then the product will be charged on 2024-10-07 (with the default values) if not returned. So, if the current date is 2024-10-06 it is very likely in that scenario that the customer will not return the product. So, it’s up for the operator to decide if the customer should be charged full purchase price, or if it should be set as returned so that no extra charge is made.
Return
To prevent the max charge, you can click on the operations button. It is a small cog wheel next to the due by date:
This will open a popup menu where you can manually set the rental product as returned:
The transaction row id shown on the popup matches the Row ID column from the table (column 1). The return time saved will be 1 hour after the rental started ensuring it will not be charged anything extra.
When the return button is pressed you are prompted with a verification popup to make sure no mistakes are being made:
Refund
The report also shows rentals that have been sold due to the due by date passing in time (+ the additional default 4 days). Those will be marked as Sold and will look like this:
They will have a payment date, late paid price and tax, as well as an icon saying sold. This text is all displayed in blue.
To refund one of these you click on the operations icon and afterwards click on “Open Refund Menu”:
Customer Events
To investigate if a customer attempted to return the product and figure out of if a rental should be set as returned or refunded. You can utilize the customer events.
To view the customer event, click on the green icon at the beginning of the row:
What you see now when its clicked is the rental event. This is your point of reference to resolving the potential issue.
The customer event page can be found by navigating to:
- Customer Service -> Customer Actions -> Customer Events
Since you have the date and time, as well as the kiosk id of the rental row you want to investigate you can filter the customer events table as such to show less entries. From there you can check the events made after your event to see if there were any failed return attempts. Let’s say 2 products was rented at 2024-10-01 at 14:00 and you see an event at 2024-10-01 at 15:00 with 2 invalid products putback (for example into a different slot). Then that may very well mean that this row should be set as returned.