Tracking rental items

Jenny Smith

As part of a grant we are receiving STEM kits that are to be checked out by members to take home for 2 weeks, like library books. We are looking for ideas on how to track/manage this in Altru. Has anyone found or build a report utilizing the Membership Activity data?

Rosita Bradham

Hello @Jenny Smith Have you reached out to your Customer Success Manager? They may have ideas but it depends on your specific needs. Altru doesn't have a way to ‘checkout’ items but again there could be other ideas depending on needs.

Kelly Olson

@Jenny Smith I did this in the past and managed it through group sales in Altru. We made a reservation for each rental. We charged for each rental, so we needed a way to take payment and could do that through group sales as well.

Jenny Smith

@Kelly Olson what did you do when for tracking the rental being returned?

Kelly Olson

@Jenny Smith Here is a screenshot of what a kit reservation looked like in group sales. We set the kits up as resources and could put a start and end date on the rental. At that point, Altru had a max limit of 5 days I think - I don't know if that is still a constraint but most of our rentals were less than 5 days so it wasn't too much of an issue for us. I will mention that people felt very strongly that they should not have to pay for day 1 (pick up day) or the last day that they returned the kits. So you will see in this example, that the name is “IP blocks 1 day” even though it covers 3 days from May 10 - 12.

In addition to the reservation in Altru, we also had a paper log at front desk on a clipboard so that it was easy for front desk staff to see what was going to be picked up or returned that day and they didn't have to log into Altru to figure it out. When something was returned, front desk would mark it on the clipboard and then I would complete the reservation in Altru by checking it in.

Kelly Olson

@Jenny Smith
Sorry the previous image is blurry - can't seem to get it to stay high resolution. But I think you can see enough. Feel free to reach out by email if you want to chat more about it. kelly@cmosc.org