Rental software · Plant hire

Plant hire software

Plant hire software manages the full hire cycle for owned plant — availability, quotes, contracts, transport, off-hire, damage recharge and invoicing — in one system. It differs from generic booking tools in the plant-specific layer: CPA-style hire conditions, CESAR-marked asset records, service and thorough-examination dates per machine, haulage on every movement, and utilisation reporting that shows which machines actually earn their keep.

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Last updated 10 Jun 2026

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See it in action

9 minutes. The whole hire flow.

The same platform walkthrough we give plant hire firms on a demo — booking to invoice, in English:

Contractors see live availability and book themselves — no phone tag
Contract generated and e-signed before the machine moves
Condition reports with time-stamped photos at handover and return
Invoices raised from the hire and synced to your accounting platform
One live fleet overview across every depot

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The problem

What makes plant hire hard to run?

The reasons generic rental tools — and Excel — give up on plant hire. If you searched for plant hire rental software, this is the part that matters.

The hire desk is three phone calls deep

Availability lives in two heads and a whiteboard. A contractor rings for a 13-tonne excavator for Monday; the answer needs a call to the yard, a call to the fitter and a call back. Meanwhile the same machine gets promised twice.

Off-hire dates drift, and the invoice pays for it

The machine came back Friday afternoon. The off-hire gets logged Tuesday. You bill what the paperwork says, not what happened — and the gap repeats on every hire, all year.

Transport runs on memory

Every hire needs a low loader twice. When haulage is a whiteboard column, machines sit ready with no wagon booked — or a wagon turns up for a machine still on hire across town.

Damage found Monday is goodwill by Wednesday

A cracked screen, a bent door, half a tank of red — sorry, white — diesel missing. Without time-stamped handover photos, the recharge conversation starts from zero and usually ends there.

Cross-hire eats the margin you can't see

You hire in at a day rate to cover a gap and bill out at your week rate — fine, if anyone tracks the spread. When cross-hire lives in an inbox, nobody does.

We get the hesitation

Your fitter knows every machine in the yard. The system in your head doesn't scale past 20 of them.

What’s true

We know — at 15 machines, the diary and the whiteboard genuinely work. You can hold the fleet in your head, and you do.

Where it stops

At 30 machines and a second depot, every booking needs a phone call to check, every off-hire needs someone to remember, and the head that holds it all can't take a holiday. The fleet outgrew the method; the method won't admit it.

Compliance

The paperwork plant hire actually carries

CPA model conditions CESAR PUWER LOLER

Most UK plant hire runs on CPA model conditions — they set who carries the risk from delivery to collection, and your contract needs to say so before the machine moves. CESAR marking is the anti-theft baseline insurers expect on excavators and other high-risk plant, and the registration details belong on the asset record, not in a drawer.

PUWER puts maintenance and daily checks on you while the machine is yours to provide; LOLER adds thorough examinations for plant that lifts. The operational answer is the same for all of it: dates and documents live on the machine's record, so the hire desk can see at booking time that the machine going out Friday is legal to be out Friday.

How it works

How MovoGo handles plant hire

The same flow your hire desk runs today — minus the paper, the phone tag and the things that never make it onto the invoice.

1
Contractors see availability and book directly
Live fleet status by machine class — what's in the yard, what's on hire, what's due back when. Contractors book against it themselves instead of ringing to ask.
2
Contract and e-signature, automatically
The hire contract generates on your terms — CPA-style conditions, rates, insurance requirements — and goes out for legally binding e-signature before the machine does.
3
Handover condition report in 5 minutes
Time-stamped photos, hour reading and fuel level at the gate. The same again at return. Damage recharge becomes evidence, not negotiation.
4
Off-hire on the day it happens
Off-hire logged at the moment of return — excess hire days, fuel and damage priced from the contract, on the invoice the same day.
5
Invoices flow to accounts on their own
Generated from the hire data and synced to your accounting platform via API. No retyping, no Friday invoice pile, no missed billable days.

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Frequently asked questions

Plant hire software, answered

The questions plant hire firms actually ask before they look at a system.

Mostly vocabulary, partly workflow. "Plant hire" is the UK term for renting out construction machinery, and plant-specific systems assume CPA-style conditions, transport on every hire, damage recharge and utilisation reporting. Generic "equipment rental" tools are often built for party kit or AV gear and miss exactly that layer.

Yes. Buckets, breakers, trench boxes and consumables go on the hire as separate billable lines with their own rates, so the invoice reflects everything that left the yard — not just the machine.

Yes — machines hired in to cover gaps are tracked alongside your own fleet, so you can see the in-rate, the out-rate and the spread on every cross-hire instead of discovering the margin in your accountant's year-end questions.

The honest answer: don't move for features you already use happily. Firms move to MovoGo for the things legacy desktop systems struggle with — a modern interface the whole team actually uses, cloud access from anywhere, native accounting API instead of .csv exports, and onboarding measured in days. We've written a straight comparison in the knowledge centre.

Per machine and per class: how many available days were on hire (physical utilisation) and what those days earned against the machine's cost. It's the difference between knowing the 13-tonners feel busy and knowing two of them shouldn't be replaced when they age out.

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