What Rental IQ does for you
Factor rental offset into every purchase decision
When you buy a $40,000 camera package for production use, the real cost isn't $40,000. It's $40,000 minus the rental income the package will earn between your projects, minus the tax benefits, minus resale value. Rental IQ helps you estimate that offset up front: based on utilization and rates in comparable markets, how much of this purchase do we expect to recover in year one, year two, and at sale? That turns a $40K purchase into a much more defensible $25K net cost.
- ROI and payback calculator for proposed equipment purchases
- Estimate utilization based on comparable gear categories
- Factor in depreciation and expected resale value
- Share the analysis with partners or investors
Show partners and investors a real equipment P&L
If your production company has partners or outside capital, equipment is usually a big line on the balance sheet. Without tracking, "the camera package" shows up as an expense and depreciates quietly. With tracking, you can show your partners that the package generated $18K of offsetting revenue last year and is on pace to pay for itself in 36 months. That changes the conversation about future purchases.
- Equipment revenue dashboard by item and category
- Year-over-year comparisons for board-level discussions
- CSV export for accountant or investor review
- Utilization metrics that show the gear is actually working
Track rentals without disrupting production workflow
Your team's focus is production. They don't have time to fill out a 20-field rental entry form every time the camera goes out. Rental IQ is built for low-friction logging: import Sharegrid history in bulk, log off-platform rentals in 30 seconds, automatically pull details from confirmation emails. Your line producer doesn't need to become a rental operations manager.
Know when production use is cannibalizing rental revenue
If you pull the camera off the rental market for a three-week internal shoot, that's real opportunity cost. You can see it clearly: what was the camera earning per week before you pulled it, how does that compare to the internal shoot's budget, would it have been cheaper to rent from a third party? These are questions you can't answer without data.
What changes once you have the data
Before: You bought a Sony Venice 2 package two years ago for $55K. You know it rents "sometimes" and has earned "probably around $20K" in that time. Your partner asks if you should buy an Alexa 35. You have no framework to answer.
After: You can show the Venice 2 has earned $31,400 in 22 months, at 38% utilization, on pace to recover cost in 36 months. You can run the same math on an Alexa 35, adjusted for demand in your market. The answer stops being "buy because we want it" and becomes "buy because the rental offset and production use together pay for it in 28 months."
That's the shift production companies make: equipment purchases become investment decisions with a real IRR.
Frequently asked questions
We're not primarily a rental business. Is this overkill?
It's actually the opposite. Production companies that rent occasionally benefit more from tracking than full-time rental houses, because you have less natural feedback on what the gear is earning. Rental IQ is low-effort to maintain and gives you a rental P&L without a rental operations team.
Can we use this for internal gear usage too?
Yes. You can log internal production use the same way you log rentals, with a different tag. This gives you utilization data (is the gear actually being used?) even when no cash changes hands. For companies tracking billable gear usage to projects, this is often the most valuable data in the system.
How does this interact with our accounting software?
Rental IQ doesn't replace accounting. It tracks equipment performance. You can export CSV to import rental income into QuickBooks or any accounting platform at month/quarter end. For partners and investors, our exports are cleaner than most accounting reports because they're asset-level, not account-level.
What about the tax side?
Rental income is reportable. Depreciation and Section 179 can offset most of it. Rental IQ surfaces depreciation per item automatically, which makes tax time (or your accountant's job) significantly easier. We're not a CPA replacement, but we hand our data over clean.
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