Current RMS is the software a lot of camera owners find when their operation starts feeling disorganized. It is well regarded, widely used by real rental houses, and considerably more capable than a spreadsheet.
It may also be solving a problem two sizes larger than yours. Here is how to tell.
What each tool is for
Current RMS is a cloud rental management system aimed at rental businesses. The workflow runs from opportunity to quote to order to invoice, with availability checking, serialized asset tracking, sub-rentals, service scheduling, and multi-user access underneath it. It is designed for an operation where multiple people handle multiple concurrent bookings out of a warehouse.
Rental IQ is rental analytics for equipment owners. It tracks what each individual item earns, how much of its purchase price it has recovered, how often it goes out, and what it is worth now. There is no quoting, no invoicing, and no warehouse.
The two overlap on exactly one thing: both know what equipment you own. Everything built on top of that differs.
Where Current RMS is clearly better
- Quoting and the commercial workflow. Opportunities become quotes become orders become invoices, in one system. If you send formal quotes, this matters a lot.
- Availability across concurrent bookings. When several orders overlap, knowing precisely what is free on which dates is essential, and Current RMS is built around it.
- Sub-rentals. Renting gear in to fill an order is modeled properly. Rental IQ assumes you own what you rent out.
- Serialized tracking and check-in and check-out. Individual serial numbers moving in and out at scale, with condition records.
- Multiple users and locations. Roles, permissions, and per-location stock. Rental IQ is single-operator today.
- Maintenance scheduling. Service intervals and repair tracking against assets.
- Accounting integration. It connects to the systems your bookkeeper already uses.
That is a serious list. If you need most of it, stop reading and use Current RMS.
Where Rental IQ is clearly better
- Per-item economics. Current RMS tells you an order was worth $1,200. Rental IQ tells you the body earned $500 of it, the two lenses $450, and the support gear $250, then compares each against what you paid. Over a year that reveals which items are carrying the business and which are dead weight.
- Payback and depreciation together. Each asset shows payback progress and current resale value, so you can see total position rather than just revenue. That is what makes a sell-versus-hold decision possible.
- Sharegrid history, net of fees. Import the CSV and the 15 percent service fee is applied automatically. Calculating from gross rates overstates every downstream number.
- Purchase modeling. Project payback on a prospective purchase before spending the money.
- Cost and time to value. Free for 5 items, $7 per month unlimited, no per-user fees. Setup is an afternoon, not an implementation project.
Who should pick what
Pick Current RMS if you are running a rental house: staff, a warehouse, concurrent orders, formal quotes, and sub-rentals. The operational complexity is real and needs real software.
Pick Rental IQ if you own gear and rent it out without that operational overhead. Your questions are about ownership, not coordination.
Use both if you run the operation on Current RMS but still want per-asset ownership economics its order-level reporting does not surface. The cost is duplicate record-keeping.
The size question, plainly
The honest dividing line is not gear count, it is how many things can go wrong at once.
If you rent to a handful of people you know, one booking at a time, and nothing is ever double-committed, you do not have an operations problem. Adding operations software will not make your gear more profitable; it will just be more software to maintain.
If you regularly have several bookings in flight, staff touching inventory, and gear moving in and out of a warehouse, you have a real coordination problem and a spreadsheet is actively costing you money.
Most individual camera owners are in the first group and searching as if they were in the second, because "rental management software" is the phrase that comes to mind. What they usually want is to know whether their gear is working for them.