Fleet Acquisition

Buy rental fleet straight through Business Central purchasing. Put a rental item type on a purchase order, and receiving it creates the rental units for you, each with its own fixed asset, ready to hire.

How it fits in

There are two ways a machine joins your fleet. Stock-to-Fleet takes an item you already hold in inventory and converts it into a rental unit. Fleet Acquisition is for kit you are buying in for the purpose: instead of receiving it into stock and converting it afterwards, you buy it as a rental item type on an ordinary purchase order, and the units and their fixed assets are created for you at the moment you receive the goods.

The flow follows the familiar purchasing rhythm: purchase, then receipt, then invoice. Receiving is what brings the fleet into being; invoicing is what gives each unit's fixed asset its cost.

Setup

Essential Rental Setup
FA Journal Template
The fixed asset journal used to book each new unit's acquisition cost when the purchase is invoiced. It is set alongside the other Stock-to-Fleet journal settings and the Setup Wizard can pre-fill it.

Each rental item type you intend to buy this way needs the posting setup any purchased item needs, so that its receipt and invoice post cleanly. If a rental type is missing the posting setup it needs, the purchase tells you rather than failing part-way through posting.

Buying fleet: purchase, receipt, invoice

1
Purchase

On a purchase order, add a line and set its Type to Rental Item Type, then choose the type and enter the quantity you are buying and the cost. You are ordering, say, three excavators of a given type, not three units of stock.

2
Receipt

Post the receipt and Essential Rental creates the rental units for you, one per quantity received, each with its own fixed asset linked and ready to hire. The units come in Available, booked against this receipt so their provenance is clear. Receive part of the order and only that many units are created; the rest follow on the next receipt.

3
Invoice

Invoice the purchase and what you paid is posted as each unit's fixed asset acquisition cost, so the asset carries a real value from the start. Where one invoice line covers several units, the cost is spread across them.

Illustration. The real screen can differ in detail. Step 1: two lines with Type set to Rental Item Type. No. takes a rental item type, and the line takes its description from the type. Location Code is the location the new units will have. Qty. to Receive is the number of units the receipt will create, and it has to be a whole number. The rest of the header and the other columns are left out.
Illustration. The real screen can differ in detail. Step 2: the three units that receiving the order above creates, in the Rental Items list. Each takes its No. from the Rental Items number series in Essential Rental Setup, and its description and Item Group No. from the type. Status is Available and Current Location is the Location Code of the purchase line. The unit's fixed asset is on its card, in Linked to Fixed Asset. The units you already had and the other columns are left out.

The two purchase line types

Purchase line Type
Rental Item Type
Buys new units of a type. Receiving creates one rental unit per quantity received and provisions a fixed asset for each. This is the usual way to bring a batch of new machines into the fleet.
Rental Item
Buys against a specific rental unit you have already set up, for when the unit record exists and you are recording its purchase and acquisition cost against it.

Corrections and guards

Keeping it clean
Undo a receipt
Undoing a posted purchase receipt reverses the fleet it created: the units and their provisioned fixed assets are rolled back, so a mistaken receipt does not leave orphaned machines behind.
Receive before you invoice
A rental type has to be received before it can be invoiced, because the receipt is what creates the units the invoice then costs. Trying to invoice one without a receipt fails loudly rather than posting a cost against nothing.

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