Rental

Hiring out sheet music is a logistics business.

An orchestra needs the score and the parts on a date, at a place, for a particular performance – and afterwards the material has to come back, complete and on time. Add prices by region and performance duration, reports to the collecting society, commissions for agents. This is the largest area of the application, and it has a clear core.

That core is the rental case: one customer hiring particular material for a particular period. Around it sit the stages that come before (inquiry costing and quotation), the management of the material, shipping, the performances and the commercial handling. The case itself has tabs of its own for master data, line items, deliveries, uses, invoices, correspondence, links and documents.

The material is held as a bundle with sets. A bundle is the material available for hire; a set is one physical copy of it, with a number, a condition, a storage location and a parts list of part types with target and actual counts. If a part is permanently missing, that is recorded there, with the reason. The current availability per item takes into account what is out of the house, what has just come back and which outbound shipments are still open. Sets can be blocked, reserved and booked into the warehouse, and each one has a history of every case it appeared in.

The instrumentation behind it is structured, not free text, with part types per work or title and the markers obbligato, ad libitum and divisi, insertable from your own templates, from work sets or from the mirrored instrument catalog. Works, sheet music metadata and song rights come from title data and work; the hirers, agents and venues come from the CRM.

Prices are calculated by a rate engine: regions each in their own currency, categories within them, and duration-based scales within those, plus surcharges and discounts for special uses as well as separate rates for sync licenses by duration and for archive copies by page count. The preview shows the price before anything is saved; a price entered by hand requires a reason. And VAT is a result, not an entry: it follows from the type of line item, the country of delivery and the type of hirer – end customer, domestic B2B, B2B within the EU with a VAT identification number, or non-EU.

Shipping runs in steps: release, book out, book in. On booking out, the set switches to on loan and is taken out of the warehouse; on booking in, back again. The delivery note can bundle several consignments of one shipment and carries the actual delivery address (concert hall, orchestra office, library) together with performance dates, work details per line and the consignment number. For material with no title assigned there is the blank delivery note. On return, the inspection grades the material as complete, incomplete, damaged or lost, and sets the status of the set from that.

What holds it all together is the bundle cockpit: an availability view per set of material, as a calendar or a timeline, showing sets, cases, costings, deliveries, performances and blocks in one picture. It detects conflicts where cases overlap, but leaves them out when demonstrably different sets are involved. Because two concerts on the same evening are no problem, as long as there are two sets of parts.

At the end comes the billing. Invoice allocations carry a type, a due-date rule and an amount, and become real orders in Orders & invoices, individually or as a combined order, with a check for mixed currencies. Agent commissions run along as internal line items on the case and are carried through cancellation and reactivation. And the performances, recorded anyway, become the GEMA report – with preview, export including a log, a status change to reported, and a duplicate check, with works out of copyright left aside.