As the event calendar fills up, quick equipment updates become critical - there's no time to edit items one by one. Whether you're correcting prices before a quote goes out or updating categories across your full inventory, bulk import is the fastest way to make changes at scale.
Take AV Nerds, a fictional mid-sized production company. Ahead of a major festival, they realised several hundred equipment items had outdated pricing. They needed to update everything fast, without touching each item manually in Rentman.
Their solution: export, edit in Excel, re-import. But to make sure Rentman updates the right items, there's one column that makes the whole workflow reliable: the ID column.
When updating equipment data in Rentman, we recommend exporting the current data and including the ID column. When exporting from Rentman, whether equipment, contacts, or other modules — you can select which columns to include in the export file, for example: Name, Code, Price, Category, and ID.
An ID is a unique identifier that the system uses to recognize a specific item. Two equipment items could have the same name, but they can never share the same ID. Think of it like a person's name versus a citizen service number or your passport number: your name might be similar to someone else's, but your ID number belongs only to you.
The same applies in Rentman: equipment names or codes can be edited or duplicated, but the ID always uniquely identifies that exact item. This is how Rentman knows which item to update during an import.
Recommended workflow for updating existing equipment
- Export the equipment from Rentman:
- Export all columns
Select all available columns when exporting. This gives you a complete overview of every field stored in Rentman for your equipment. You can then delete the columns you don't need in Excel. This approach is especially helpful if you're new to the system and want to see exactly what data is available before deciding what to change.
Note: exporting all columns will often exceed 64 columns limit. Make sure to delete the ones you don't need before re-importing - Rentman's import supports a maximum of 64 columns.
- Select columns manually
If you already know which fields you want to update, you can select only those columns during export. This keeps your spreadsheet focused and easier to work with. We recommend always including key identification columns like Name and Code so you can easily find the right items. Keep in mind that you'll need to navigate through multiple pages to find the right columns, which can be less intuitive if you're new to the system. - Open the exported file in Excel or another spreadsheet program.
- Edit the data you want to change.
- Remove any columns you don't need.
- Import the file back into Rentman:
As long as the ID column is present in the file, Rentman will automatically recognize and match the existing equipment - so you generally don't need to manually configure matching rules during the import.
The ID is the link between each row in your spreadsheet and the corresponding item in Rentman. Changing an ID can cause data to update the wrong item, create incorrect links between records, or produce import errors.
You can safely edit columns like Name, Price, Code, or Description — but always leave the ID column unchanged.
Column limit during import
Rentman supports a maximum of 64 columns during import. If you export all columns, your file will likely exceed this limit. Before importing, make sure to delete any columns you don't need so you stay within the limit.