Rentman Organize

In any business that delivers events, a large part of the work never happens on location. Stage designs get drawn, venues get visited, graphics get produced, footage gets edited, and someone spends hours on the planning that makes the event day run smoothly. This work takes real time and costs real money, but it is rarely scheduled anywhere, and the hours spent on it rarely reach the project budget.

Rentman Organize brings that work into Rentman. Pre- and post-production work becomes a task with an owner, a deadline, and a planned time. Tasks appear on visual boards so you can see what your team is working on. Your crew register their hours against those tasks, so you can compare what you planned with what the work actually took, and quote your next project more accurately.

In this article, you will learn what Organize includes, what changes for accounts without this product, and how to set up your workspace so your team can start using it.

Real-life scenarios

Here are some examples of how this functionality can be used:

What Organize adds, and what changes if you do not have it

The way tasks look and work has changed for every Rentman account. Some of those changes are available to everyone. The rest require the Organize product.

Try Organize for free

Organize is available at no cost to all existing customers for a limited time. You can opt in to use Organize for free until December 1st.

1. Click on Start free trial on the Organize banner in Rentman.
2. Read the pop-up and click on Start trial.

From November 1st , customers who have opted in to use the Organize free trial can activate or disable it.

1. Navigate to all Organize-related pages (the Tasks module, the project's Tasks and Services tabs, Task statuses and Teams pages in the Configuration module).
2. On the banner that appears on the top of the page, choose Cancel or Activate.

Once you activate Organize, it will be added to your plan. See Explore Our Plans for what each plan includes.

Getting started with Rentman Organize

Before your team can start working with Organize, a few initial setup steps are required:

• Configure user role permissions.
• Set up your task statuses.
• Create teams and link your crew members to them.
• Add the task fields you want to filter and group by.
• Add standard tasks to your project templates.
• Configure your default services (if necessary).

User role permissions

Users should have appropriate permissions relevant to their roles. Two things changed with Organize, so it is worth reviewing your roles before you invite people to boards:

• Sharing a project task board is a power user action. Regular users can work on a board, but cannot share it.
• Creating tasks in a project now depends on whether someone can see that project's task board, rather than on full project edit rights. Crew members are invited to the project's task board. Crew members can only be added to see project task boards or teams if they have the permission to see the Tasks module. However, they do not need permission to see, edit or delete tasks of other crew members. Learn more about user role permissions.

Set up your task statuses

A status tells your team where a task stands. Instead of a task being either finished or unfinished, it moves through the steps your company actually uses.

Two statuses always exist: To do and Completed. You can add your own statuses in between, rename the two defaults, and change their colors. Statuses apply to your whole workspace, and setting them up is an administrator action. Learn more about setting up task statuses.

Add a status

1. Navigate to the Configuration module > Settings > Task statuses.
2. Click on + Add task status.
3. Choose a name and a color.
4. Confirm.
5. Save.

Reorder a status

The order you set here is the order the columns appear in on a task board, so it is worth arranging your statuses to match how work really moves through your company.

1. Navigate to the Configuration module > Settings > Task statuses.
2. Simply drag and drop a status in the preferred order.
3. Save.

Delete a status

You can also delete a status. If tasks still have that status, you can select another status to move them to.

1. Navigate to the Configuration module > Settings > Task statuses.
2. Select the task you want to delete.
3. Click on more options and select Delete.
4. Choose the alternative status from the drop-down menu.
5. Click on Delete task status and move tasks.

How statuses appear in your calendar

If you sync your tasks to an external calendar, that calendar recognizes only two states. Every status other than Completed syncs as not completed. Only tasks assigned to you, or assigned to all crew, are synced at all. See Calendar sync.

Create teams and link your crew members

Teams group the people who work together, for example Design, Workshop, Office, or Warehouse. Everyone in a team automatically sees all tasks and task boards belonging to that team, which makes a team the quickest way to give a group of colleagues access to the right work.

Learn more about teams.

Add standard tasks to your project templates

If the same work comes back on every project, put those tasks in a project template. Tasks in a template can carry a status, a planned time, subtasks, and a deadline that moves with the project schedule, so a task can be set to fall due a fixed number of days before load-in on every project you create from that template.

Learn more about project templates.

Open your first project task board

Every project has a task board, available on the project's Tasks tab. Open a project, add a few tasks, and switch between board and list view to see which one suits your team.

You can also reach every board from the Tasks module. Learn more about task boards.

Configure your default services

If you want to quote and invoice this work, set up the services you sell most often. A default service can create its tasks for you each time you add it to a project. Learn more about services.

FAQs