Multi-Rate Pricing

Banded rental rates: a different price per day for different parts of the same rental period. Use when long rentals attract a lower per-day rate, or when promotional rates apply to specific date windows within an open-ended hire.

How it fits in

The default pricing model is one Unit Price per Price Term (e.g. £100 per Day, applied uniformly across the rental). Multi-Rate Pricing extends that: the same rental can carry multiple rate windows, each with its own Unit Price, applied to specific date ranges within the overall rental period. The system splits the rental period into segments matching those windows and bills each segment at its window's rate.

The dimension you band on is up to you. Common use cases include:

Location-based rates: Categories like OFFSHORE and ONSHORE, with windows assigned to the dates the equipment was at each location. Offshore work attracts a higher rate; switch the window when the equipment moves.

Peak vs off-peak: Categories like PEAK and OFFPEAK, with windows for high-season weeks at one rate and low-season weeks at another.

Promotional periods: Categories like PROMO-Q1 for a discounted rate during a specific promotional window, with the standard rate applying outside the promo dates.

Long-term tenure discounts: Categories like 1-6 DAYS and LONG-TERM, with windows aligned to the rental day-count to give a lower per-day rate as the rental extends.

The Category code is just a label; the system doesn't interpret what it means. The Date From / Date To on each window is what controls when the rate applies.

!
Multi-Rate Pricing is currently daily-only for MVP. The Price Term on a multi-rate line must be Day; non-daily Price Terms with multi-rate windows produce an error. Multi-rate support for Week / Month / Quarter / Year is parked future work.

Two layers

Multi-Rate Pricing involves two objects, each on its own page:

MultiRate Categories (master list): reusable category codes used to label what a rate window represents. A Category is just a Code and a Description; it doesn't carry dates or prices itself.

Multi-Rate windows on a Rental Line: the time-bound rates on a specific rental line. Each window is a (Category, Date From, Date To, Unit Price) entry covering a part of the rental period, and the system uses the windows to compute segment-by-segment billing amounts. Windows are entered per rental line on the quote or order; they are not configured on the price list.

MultiRate Categories

The master list of category codes. Open from Rental Setup or via a Search → "MultiRate Categories".

MultiRate Categories
Rate Category Coderequired
Short identifier for the rate context. Up to 20 characters. Examples: OFFSHORE, ONSHORE, PEAK, OFFPEAK, PROMO-Q1, LONG-TERM, WEEKEND. The Code is what shows on rental-line windows and on the customer's invoice line for any segment that matched.
Description
A longer human-readable name for the Category, useful in lookups and reports.

Categories are reusable across price lists. Maintain a small consistent set tailored to how your business prices rentals (location, season, promotion, tenure) so reporting on "what was billed at the Offshore rate last month" or "how much PROMO-Q1 revenue we drove" is straightforward.

Multi-Rate windows on a Rental Line

Multi-rate windows are set up per rental line, directly on the quote or order; there is no price-list-level setup. Each rental line carries its own list of windows: the date-bound rates for that line. Open the list from the Multi-Rates action on the rental line menu (on the quote or order line subpage), and add one window per date range.

Rental Line Multi-Rate Lines
MultiRate Category Code
Which Category this window represents. Picked from the MultiRate Categories master list.
Date From, Date To
The date range this window covers. Windows must not overlap (the table enforces this). Together, the windows on a rental line define which rate applies to which part of the rental period.
Days
Read-only count of days in the window (Date To minus Date From, inclusive). Useful for verifying the window covers what you intended.
Unit Price
The price per day for this window's Category. (Multi-rate is daily-only for the current release.)

How segmentation works at billing time

When a rental line is invoiced for a billing period, the system walks the line's Multi-Rate windows in date order and splits the billing period into segments:

1
Find windows overlapping the billing period

The system identifies every Multi-Rate window on the rental line whose Date From / Date To overlaps the billing period being invoiced.

2
Walk the period in date order

Starting from the period's start date, the system advances day by day. When it enters a window, it starts a segment with the window's Unit Price and Category. When it leaves the window, the segment closes.

3
Gaps fall back to the line's default Unit Price

Days inside the billing period that aren't covered by any window are billed at the rental line's default Unit Price (the non-multi-rate fallback). These segments have no Category code attached.

4
Each segment becomes its own invoice line

The segments produced by the walk are emitted as separate lines on the generated Sales Invoice (covered below).

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Multi-rate windows apply to kit component lines and to lines billed through project (job) planning, not just standalone rental lines. A multi-rate window on a kit or a job-linked line splits the charge across its rate windows the same way, with non-working days excluded as usual. (Earlier releases ignored the windows on these paths and billed at the base rate.)

How multi-rate appears on the generated invoice

A non-multi-rate rental line normally produces a single invoice line per billing period. A multi-rate rental line produces one invoice line per segment within the billing period: each segment becomes its own row, with its own date window, its own Category tag, and its own Unit Price.

Example 1: location-based rates (offshore vs onshore)

Setup: 30-day rental of one piece of equipment that moves between an offshore platform and an onshore yard during the rental. Two Categories: OFFSHORE at £150/day, ONSHORE at £100/day. Windows on the rental line: days 1-12 with Category OFFSHORE, days 13-30 with Category ONSHORE (the equipment was offshore for the first 12 days and onshore for the rest).

Invoiced: in one go covering the whole 30 days. Two invoice lines:

Line 1: Rental From Date = day 1, Rental To Date = day 12, MultiRate Category = OFFSHORE, Rental Quantity = 12, Unit Price = £150, Line Amount = £1,800.

Line 2: Rental From Date = day 13, Rental To Date = day 30, MultiRate Category = ONSHORE, Rental Quantity = 18, Unit Price = £100, Line Amount = £1,800.

Total billed: £3,600. The customer can see exactly which dates attracted the offshore premium.

Example 2: long-term tenure discount (3 bands)

Setup: 60-day rental. Three Categories: 1-6 DAYS at £100/day, 7-30 DAYS at £80/day, LONG-TERM at £60/day. Windows on the rental line aligned to the day count: days 1-6, 7-30, 31-60.

Invoiced: in one go covering the full 60 days. Three invoice lines:

Line 1: days 1-6, Category 1-6 DAYS, 6 × £100 = £600.

Line 2: days 7-30, Category 7-30 DAYS, 24 × £80 = £1,920.

Line 3: days 31-60, Category LONG-TERM, 30 × £60 = £1,800.

Total billed: £4,320. Without multi-rate this rental at the standard rate of £100/day would have billed £6,000; the customer's saving from the tenure-banding is visible on the breakdown.

Example 3: monthly billing with mid-period band transition

Setup: 45-day rental starting 1 January, monthly Billing Cycle. Two Categories: STANDARD at £100/day for normal weeks, WEEKEND at £130/day for Saturdays and Sundays (set up with one window per weekend pair across the rental).

January invoice (covers days 1-31): one line per segment within the period. With four weekends in January, that's nine invoice lines for the one rental line: alternating STANDARD midweek windows and WEEKEND two-day windows.

February invoice (covers days 32-45): two more weekends in that range plus midweek segments, so several lines covering the closing portion of the rental at the same alternating rates.

For monthly billing, mid-period band transitions multiply the line count on the invoice. Customers used to seeing one line per rental will see several; the rental fields on each line (From / To, Category) make it clear what each line represents.

Example 4: window gap fallback

Setup: 30-day rental. Two windows configured on the rental line: days 1-10 with Category PROMO-Q1 at £75/day, days 21-30 with Category PROMO-Q2 at £75/day. Days 11-20 are deliberately not assigned to any window. The rental line's default Unit Price is £100.

Invoiced: in one go for the full 30 days. Three lines:

Line 1: days 1-10, Category PROMO-Q1, 10 × £75 = £750.

Line 2: days 11-20, MultiRate Category empty (gap fell back to default), 10 × £100 = £1,000.

Line 3: days 21-30, Category PROMO-Q2, 10 × £75 = £750.

The empty MultiRate Category on Line 2 is the visual signal that those days weren't covered by a multi-rate window and were billed at the default rate. Useful for spotting unintended gaps in the windows.

See the Rental Invoice doc for the full rental-fields reference (Rental From Date, Rental To Date, MultiRate Category, Rental Quantity, Non-Working Days, Price Term Code) on each Sales Invoice line.

Archive: Rental Archive Multi-Rates

When a rental document is archived, its Multi-Rate windows are copied into the archive's own table (Archived Rental Line Multi-Rates). This preserves the exact bands and date windows that applied at the time of the archive snapshot, so an archived document remains a faithful record of the pricing situation rather than reflecting later changes to the source bands.

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