Purplepass

PurplePass is a San Diego based event ticketing company. They sell tickets online and rent out equipment to scan an sell tickets at events. Gabriel Afana has been the company’s CEO for over 10 years.

A growing business with a growing inventory

“In the last few years, we have seen dramatic growth in the popularity of Purplepass. As an event ticketing company, hardware plays a major part in the overall success of an event. It’s one thing to sell 10k tickets for an event but you have to make sure all of those tickets are quickly scanned and are valid the day of the event. Plus, if an event does not sell out online and tickets need to be sold at the door, having access to mobile iPad-based POS terminals is indispensable.”

Our Excel spreadsheets were a mess

“Originally we managed hundreds of rental devices using the tried and true method of Excel spreadsheets. It was a mess, to say the least. Our equipment is distributed across two warehouses which makes matters more complicated. We needed to know what we had on hand, which location it was at, what was available for new bookings and what was already reserved but not shipped.

How did we do this with Excel? I’m not even sure we did – We did something but whatever it was, it wasn’t right and didn’t work.

Cheqroom fulfilled the exact need we had for a multi-location equipment management service that was cloud-based and accessible from anywhere.

There were a few key reasons PurplePass decided to work with Cheqroom for managing their equipment. “One was its ability to keep track of our equipment across two warehouses. It is important to not just know what we have available – We need to know where it’s at as well so we know where to ship it out from.”

Making sure we didn’t rent out another client’s allocated equipment

“Plus, when the equipment is returned, we need to check it in on the location it was returned to. Sometimes clients didn’t use the prepaid return labels we provided and ended up shipping it on their own. They would ship it to the wrong warehouse and our inventory would get all mixed up. So solving this problem was a major part for us.”

“The other major issue we needed to resolve was being able to know days, weeks, or months in advance what equipment we would have available. We needed to confirm what equipment was available in each location on a given date and then be able to put in a reservation. Being able to create a future equipment reservation was important because if it turned out to be a busy weekend, we needed to be sure we didn’t rent out another client’s allocated equipment.”

Hello smart equipment planning, goodbye exorbitant shipping costs

“Our original plan was “Just buy more with overnight shipping” if we ended up running short. It wasn’t the best plan but we always were able to fulfil orders and it was sort of a forced-growth plan for us. Now that we have a lot of equipment available, we do not run into that issue so often. However, now if we happen to have an extremely busy weekend of events, we will know weeks in advance. This has allowed us to plan and purchase accordingly without the need of exorbitant shipping costs getting new (and heavy) equipment rush shipped across the country.”

No more hunting down late returns

One unexpected feature that has turned out to be very useful is the ability to create and customize the check-out PDFn. Originally we would create our own rental document in MS Word, fill it out by hand, and then include a few other pre-printed documents like instructions, warnings/notices, etc. By customizing our check-out PDF, it looks great, it’s automatic, and all of the various documents are printed on-demand.Another great feature that we weren’t specifically looking for but really benefit from is the email notifications. In the past, we would manually email our clients trying to hunt down late returns. Now CHEQROOM does the dirty work.