Charging a late return fee

A late return fee is a charge your shop adds when a rental comes back after it was due. Once you turn it on, Renta works out the fee for you and drops it into the return flow, where your staff can check it before it bills.

Where to find it

In the sidebar, hover Pricing and click Late fees. That takes you to Pricing rules, Universal Rules tab, Late return fee card. Only an owner or a manager with settings access can change it. Everyone else can see the card but not edit it.

To give one vehicle its own rule, open the item (Fleet, then the item), go to its Pricing step, and find the Late return fee card.

How it works

The settings on the card

• Charge late fees — the on/off switch.
• Fee basis — Flat, once per rental, or Per hour late.
• Fee amount ($) — the flat amount, or the amount charged for each hour late.
• Maximum total ($) — appears only for per-hour fees. Leave it empty for no maximum.
• Grace period (minutes) — how long after the deadline a customer can still return without a fee.
• Taxable — whether sales tax is added to the fee.
• When several vehicles come back late — Charge each late vehicle its own fee (the default), or Charge one fee per rental (the largest).

Click Save late fee settings to save.

When a rental counts as late

A rental is late once it passes the later of two times, plus the grace period: its scheduled return time, and the store's closing time that day. The closing time only counts for vehicles that follow store hours. Vehicles with their own time slots are judged on the scheduled return alone.

For a per-hour fee, any part of an hour counts as a full hour, counted from the deadline.

Per-vehicle override

On an item's Late return fee card, the Late fee rule list offers Use the business default, Custom for this vehicle (its own basis, amount, maximum, grace period and taxable setting), or No late fee for this vehicle. The item must be saved first.

When the fee is added

The fee is worked out when staff open the return flow (the Finish rental screen), measured against that moment. If one is owed, it appears as a line named like "Late return fee (2 hr)" in the Additional Charges step of the return flow, where staff can change the amount or remove it. It bills the customer when the return is finished.

• If the return flow was opened before the customer became late, the fee is added when staff press Finish rental, and the finish pauses with the message "A late fee was added — review it in Additional Charges" so nothing is charged unseen.
• If staff remove the fee, it does not come back for that return.
• A booking that has dates but no times of day (a date-only booking) never gets a late fee, because there is no return time to be late for.

Example

Your rule is $25 per hour late, a $100 maximum, and a 15-minute grace period. A jet ski is due back at 4:00 PM and the store closes at 6:00 PM; the ski item follows store hours. The deadline is 6:15 PM. The customer returns it at 8:10 PM, which is two hours after the deadline (1 hour 55 minutes rounds up to 2 hours). The fee is 2 x $25 = $50.

Good to know

• This is different from the overdue alert, which only notifies your team (and optionally the customer) that a rental is past due. The alert does not charge anything.
• The fee is added to the return, not to the original booking price, so it does not appear in the price a customer sees at checkout.