Due to the Good Friday holiday, many of our employees are taking time off to be with their friends and family.
Please allow for a slower than normal response time. If you have a site issue that needs immediate attention, please submit a site down ticket as these always get priority.

Set up Rental Contracts in AIM

Modified on Fri, 30 Oct 2020 at 03:25 PM

The Online Contract process allows for a lot of flexibility. It’s important to understand the options available to you so that you can design an Online Contract Process that suits your needs as well as your aesthetic tastes. Almost all of the Contract Setup windows have options to enter a Topic. It's important that you understand Topics before using this field. Please read more about AIM utility topics here.


***Before attempting to setup your rental contracts in AIM, be sure you have completed training with Tri-Tech. This article is intended to serve as a reminder of the AIM process and should not be used as a standalone guide. For further questions about setting up AIM, please contact Tri-Tech support.***


The first thing you want to do is set up your Inventory, Schools and Accessories. In AIM, go to Maintenance > Active-e > Contract Setup Launcher.  


The contract setup launcher looks like the right side image above. We'll cover this in sections:


Inventory Grade

Used to set up the quality grades of your inventory. Examples of grades can be: New, Like New, Premium, Economy, Band Director Preferred, etc. The Description field on this site is how you name each of your rental grades.


District, School, Teacher

Setting up schools is optional. However you must have one school record setup. If only one school record is setup the school teacher page will be bypassed. Use the "Add" button to add new records, or you can edit existing records and save. Please fill out your data in this order:


  • District - Use multiple districts if you support so many schools that they will be more easily found if divided into districts.
    • District - Set up a record for the name of the district you rent for.
    • *Topic - You can add a topic name here. Please read more about AIM utility topics here.
  • School - Name of Schools you will be renting for. If you rent to customers not in school, you can set up a school called "Not for School" or something like that.
    • School - Set up records for each School you rent for
    • *Topic - You can add a topic name here. Please read more about AIM utility topics here.
    • District - Use this to select the district for your school. District options will be pulled from your district setup above.
    • AIM School - This will auto-fill the school field with this value when pulling a contract into AIM.
    • AIM Location - This can be blank. When using multiple locations in AIM, this will tell which location the rental is fulfilled. 

  • Teacher - This can be left blank. Use this window to enter your teachers if you want to have a different selection of instruments for each teacher under a particular school.
    • School - Enter the name of the school.
    • Teacher - Enter the name of the teacher.
    • *Topic - You can add a topic name here. Please read more about AIM utility topics here.
    • AIM School (Override) - If you have large school networks that need District as “State/ Region”, School as “District/School” and Teacher as “School/Program”.  This override will allow this setup.


*Topics - When you see a field for Topic in AIM, this almost always means you can add more information to the website pages using a topic. Please read more about AIM utility topics here. All topic setup is optional. The website will work fine without it. 


Delivery

Charging for delivery is optional. If you do charge for delivery, you can set up your delivery options and pricing here. 

  • Topic - Please read more about AIM utility topics here.
  • Desc - The name of the delivery option.
  • Cat - (Optional) Link to a Non-Inventory Category.
  • Price - The price of the delivery option.
  • Default to Selected - Check this if you want this item to be automatically checked for the customer.
  • Display on Report - See Tri-Tech for this option function (not used in AIMStorefront).
  • Requires Location - Check this box to require the customer to select a Location from a drop down selection for this Delivery method in the AeRntFinalize page.

     

    NOTE: To complete the setup of requiring a location selection, set the Configuration > Settings > Edition.Rentals.Shipping.LocationPickup.Allow to TRUE in your AIMStorefront

     


 

Maintenance

  • Topic - This topic will appear on the maintenance module during a rental checkout. Please read more about AIM utility topics here.
  • Desc - The description of the maintenance option.
  • Required - If required is selected this item will list and the option to uncheck is not available.
  • Default to Selected - Check this if you want this maintenance item to be automatically checked for the customer.


Accessory

This is where you will add your list of accessories that appear with each rental checkout. This list will appear at the top of the rental checkout finalize page and your options for setting up accessories are as follows:

  • Topic - This topic will appear on the accessory module during a rental checkout. Please read more about AIM utility topics here. 
  • Sku – Optional. This can be the sku of the accessory. You leave sku blank and decide the sku when billing if you'd like if you plan on fulfilling this accessory purchase with various skus.
  • NIC - You can use this to select a "Non Inventory Category" as an accessory. Those can be set up in AIM: Maintenance > Ledger > Non Inventory Categories
  • Desc – The name of the accessory.
  • Price – The price of the accessory.
  • Required – If required is selected this item will list and the option to uncheck is not available.
  • Default to Selected – Check this if you want this item to be automatically checked for the customer.


Inventory

This is where you will add your actual rental instruments now that you have everything else in place. Your Inventory window will look like this. You can see all of your instrument rentals in the left column. If you highlight one of them, you can see its information in the right column. The top right is your rental product information. The middle right is all about setting Accessory, Delivery, and Maintenance options for the 'rental finalize' page. The lower right is where you set up your full pricing for each instrument grade in rent to own contracts - not to be confused with rental pricing. If you are not doing 'rent to own', you do not need to set up the contract grade pricing.



  • Sku – This is optional. If a value is entered the process of pulling the contracts into AIM will default to this sku and show available serial numbers for this sku. If left blank you can choose a sku when processing rental orders.
  • Desc – The name of the rental item
  • Topic – Once a customer selects this instrument on the "rental selection" page, they will be taken to the "rental finalize" page and this topic will appear above the final checkout form. Please read more about AIM utility topics here.
  • Image Path – This is optional. You can include a path to an image on your website. That image will displayed within the aforementioned topic. You could use code like <img src="(!C2B_NRINSTIMAGEPATH!)" width="500" />  from within the topic and it would be replaced with the image entered here.
  • Level – You will associate each instrument to a “Contract Rate” Level. Multiple Instruments will likely belong to the same “Level”. For example, you may have 5 different instruments that are "level 1". When you assign pricing later, you will assign it to a level, not a specific instrument. This allows you to easily update pricing per level, which will in turn change the pricing on multiple instruments.
  • Token – This is optional. You can use this to describe the length of the contract or contract terms for this inventory item.
  • Accessories/Delivery/Maintenance – Select the ‘Default’ items that should show for this inventory item. Mark the ones ‘optional’ that you would like to select/deselect by a specific teacher.
  • Contract Price/Cash Price – This is optional. You would only need to set this up if you want to display these amounts to the end user on the final contract screen. These are your pricing for rent-to-own instruments


Use this screen to define which instruments are available for each school. First you will need to select a School and teacher in the "Schools/Teachers" tab.


Then move over to the "Inventory/Accessories" tab and you can select which instruments are available to rent for that School/Teacher. 



Plan and Rate

Rate Plans are incredibly useful. You must create at least one Plan/Rate record. This will be the default plan code when a customer navigates to your /aerntschoolselect page to begin the rental process. You can add as many Rate Plans as you'd like, but let's start with just one. 


To start, set up a default plan code so that you can set your instrument pricing. You should leave the "code" blank in your default rates table. Building additional plan codes should make more sense, once you set up the default rate table.

 


Notice in the image that we've selected the "Default Rental Plan" and created pricing structure for two grades. We've set the level to 1, so that all instruments in level 1 (remember assigning levels to instruments in your inventory table?) get these prices during the rental process. 


This is the most basic setup for creating rates for your Rate Plans and levels. Note that I can add pricing for level 2-5 products on this same plan code, by adding more rates. This way, when you assign different instruments to different levels, they'll get different pricing when using the default Rate Plans. You can see how that looks below. 



Now that you've got your default rate set up, let's add a new Rate Plan Code. I want to set up a rate specifically for a single school, the Vortx Support School. Notice in the image below, I've added a Rate Plan Code of "VTXSSCH". 



The above Rate Plan has different rates. These "Vortx School Rates" can be accessed on the website by linking to /aerntschoolselect?PlanCode=VTXSSCH. We'll give you an example of this on our page for setting up Rental Pages in AIMstorefront.


Below is a brief description of each field on the Plan and Rate table window: 

  • Name - The name of your rate plan.
  • Code - The promo code that the customer enters.
  • Default - (Optional) If this is entered this contract default will automatically be selected when creating the contract in AIM.
  • Months - (Optional) This is the number of months to advance the first payment due date when the contract is entered into AIM.
  • Topic Name - The topic that is displayed on the School/Teacher web page. Please read more about AIM utility topics here.
  • Terms URL - This is a link to your terms and conditions that the customer can click on. This can be a topic or a separate html page.
  • Final Topic - Please read more about AIM utility topics here.

  • Rates - This is the collection of rates offered for the plan code. When a rate is selected, you can view and edit the details in the fields below the rate table.

  • Level - Remember when you set up your instruments in your Inventory table of the contract setup launcher? Here is where that pays off. You will be assigning a price to instrument levels, not instruments... You associate each instrument to a “Contract Rate” Level. Multiple Instruments will likely belong to the same “Level”. For example you may have 5 different contract rates, 25, 30, 35, 40 and 45.   (Now when your rates change, you only need to change the rates in one place, rather than for every single instrument).
  • Grade - The instrument grade that is associated to this rate structure.
  • Contract Default
  • OoS - "Out of Stock" - check this when an instrument is out of stock. It will show on the website, but will say "out of stock" and won't be selectable.
  • Down Payment - The amount you are collecting for the down payment.
  • Down Pay Maintenance - The amount you are collecting for the maintenance down payment.
  • Monthly Payment - The amount that you are collection monthly.
  • Monthly Maintenance - The amount that you are collecting for maintenance monthly.


Status

You can View and edit Status here. Statuses appear in when processing rental orders. You can use them when you need to leave the order processing screen and have only partially processed the order. The status of the order will be used as a reminder of where your order is at in the processing procedure.  


Utilities

The utility option can be used to update accessory pricing in bulk. 


Was this article helpful?

That’s Great!

Thank you for your feedback

Sorry! We couldn't be helpful

Thank you for your feedback

Let us know how can we improve this article!

Select atleast one of the reasons
CAPTCHA verification is required.

Feedback sent

We appreciate your effort and will try to fix the article