A colleague worked in the truck leasing business for a well known company that had a big lease contract with a freight company. He told me lots of stories about rental trucks being returned with damages.

Once he was in his office when he heard one of the rental reps on the front counter yelling, so he went to see what was going on. The customer’s driver had walked in, flipped the keys at the rental rep, and walked out. Didn’t say a word.

As they chased the driver to the parking lot they discovered the truck’s entire passenger side was missing! The driver must have sideswiped something. The side skirts and the front were damaged. The molding and plastics were gone from the passenger side. The door was a mess and the mirror was missing.

It was more than $15,000 of damage.

My colleague marched back inside to send a strongly worded email to the company, attaching a damage claim. But when he started searching for the inspection document, he went cold. Come to find out, nobody ever filled one out on this rental.

No one completed a walk around at time of rental. Or if they did, the paperwork didn’t make it to the file cabinet.

He went ahead and sent the damage claim email with pictures of the damage anyway, but he knew what would happen…and it did.

Almost immediately, the freight company requested the original inspection sheet. He told him that he couldn’t find it.

“Well, then it sounds like you guys have a problem, don’t you?” the freight company contact said. And that was the last of the damage claim.

Unfortunately, he was right, and they had to eat the entire cost of repairs.

Sadly, this was not a rare occurrence. They had situations like this several days a month, all year long.

When I talk to others in the industry, they tell me the same things happened at their companies all the time, too. Blame it on $10/hour clerks or paper records instead of digital documentation or just being too busy to be thorough. It doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, that’s a lot of profit going out the window in an industry with already low margins.

Today this would never happen because there’s Photector. You are able to document the condition, location and timestamp before and after each rental. Stored in the Blockchain. Quick. Easy. There’s no way the inspection would get lost.

Photector’s patent pending technology gives you irrefutable evidence should damage occur without a doubt in anyone’s mind–yours, your customer’s or a court of law.

Schedule an appointment to see how Photector innovates the rental industry.