What you told us
Everything in the core system comes from something you described.
"Can't track vehicle when hire dates finished."
→A screen showing every car that's late back
"Damage disputes — always, that's a major issue."
→Photos at pickup and return, side by side
Tickets found by hand through old books.
→Type in the plate and date to find the hirer
"Diary and manual record."
→A live calendar the whole team can see
What we looked at
Before proposing anything, we went through your business, the rules you operate under, and what other rental software actually does.
17
questions answered
How you price, how you take bonds, how tickets reach you, what your staff use, where enquiries come from.
2
of your own forms
Your rental agreement and conditions, read line by line. Every field on them is accounted for in what's proposed.
4
payment routes compared
BSP, Windcave through Westpac, M-PAiSA and card gateways — including which ones can hold a bond and which can't.
9
rental systems reviewed
What the well-known systems include as standard, so nothing important is missing and nothing unnecessary is being built.
Three things that changed the plan
- Fiji's tax rules are moving. FRCS is shifting toward every invoice being reported electronically, with software needing approval first. Nothing has reached you yet, so there's no deadline — but invoicing is being built ready for it rather than needing rebuilding later.
- Your bonds are cash and bank transfer. That turned out to make things simpler, not harder. It removes the most awkward part of card payments entirely, and it's why online payments could be set aside for now.
- Nine in ten of your customers are local. So the counter matters more than the website. That single answer moved online booking out of the core and put your day-to-day first.
What changes day to day
The same work, without the parts that lose you money.
How it works today
With the system
What the screens look like
Rough sketches, not the finished design — but this is the shape of what your staff would use. Click through them.
Shown on a computer, which is where most of the counter work happens. The same system works on a phone and tablet too — the photo taking at pickup and return is designed for a phone in particular, since that happens out at the car rather than at the desk.
Overdue
Back today
Hire date
Return date
Available — 4 days
JT 204Suzuki Swift · smallFJ$450
HG 771Honda Shuttle · wagonFJ$540
LR 482Toyota Vitz · smallFJ$563How this price is made up
Holiday rate applies 14–15 May. Rates locked at today’s prices.
Photos — 4 of 8 taken
Condition
Existing marks
Pickup · 12 May 9:04 am
Return · 16 May 9:12 am
Marked by S. Naidu
Plate
Date & time
Match found
Ravi Prasad
Honda Shuttle · 2016 wagon · on hirePlate
Year & class
Odometer
Paperwork
Previous plates
Hires
Since
Outstanding
Rental history
How often each car is out
Screen 1 of 5
The day at a glance
The first thing your staff see each morning. Cars going out, cars due back, and anything overdue sitting at the top where nobody can miss it. This is what replaces flicking through the diary.
Build your system
The seven core parts are what we believe solves your problems fastest. Tick anything else you want and watch the timeline change. Click any row to see what it covers.
Every vehicle in one place, replacing whatever list you keep now.
- Registration number, VIN, engine number, make, model, year, type
- Where each car is right now — available, on hire, in for service, off the road
- Old plate numbers are kept, so a ticket from six months ago still finds the right car
- Find a car by its plate, model, or whether it is free
Development & testing
FJ$4,080
51 hrs
Product & delivery
FJ$1,350
18 hrs · contributed free
This is what replaces the diary. The biggest single piece of the system.
- Take a booking at the counter in under a minute
- Set different prices for holidays, peak season and quiet periods
- The price is fixed when the booking is made — entering next year's rates never changes an old booking
- The same car can never be booked twice by accident
- A day and week calendar the whole team can see at once
- Extras handled: insurance, second driver, delivery, drop-off fees
Development & testing
FJ$8,000
100 hrs
Product & delivery
FJ$2,625
35 hrs · contributed free
You told us this is what frustrates you most. It stops depending on someone remembering to check.
- One screen: every car that should be back and isn't, and how late it is
- The hirer's phone number and licence right there, ready to call
- Alerts as a rental goes overdue, so nobody has to notice
- Late charges calculated automatically from your hourly rate
Development & testing
FJ$3,840
48 hrs
Product & delivery
FJ$1,200
16 hrs · contributed free
The part that settles damage arguments. Your staff already take photos on their phones — this puts them where they can be found and used.
- The phone tells your staff which photos to take, so none get missed
- Works with no internet — photos wait on the phone and upload back at the office
- Every photo saved with the date, time and place it was taken
- Pickup and return shown side by side — the screen you put in front of a customer
- The same checks as your paper form: windscreen, cleanliness, fuel, spare, jack, tools
- Customer signs on the phone, agreement produced as a PDF and emailed
Development & testing
FJ$11,040
138 hrs
Product & delivery
FJ$3,525
47 hrs · contributed free
Everyone who has ever hired from you, and the paperwork that goes with it.
- Full customer record — the same fields as your current form, including second driver
- Licence number, expiry and country, with a photo of the licence
- Every past rental for that customer in one view
- Your own do-not-rent list
- VAT invoices with your TIN, carrying on from your existing receipt numbers
Development & testing
FJ$6,000
75 hrs
Product & delivery
FJ$1,950
26 hrs · contributed free
Getting it running properly, not just built.
- Testing everything before your business depends on it
- Moving your current cars, customers and forward bookings across
- Training your staff, with written guides they can keep
- Backups, security, and someone keeping an eye on it
Development & testing
FJ$4,960
62 hrs
Product & delivery
FJ$1,575
21 hrs · contributed free
Recovering money after the hire is finished.
- Charges after return — fuel, cleaning at your set rates, damage, late return
- Bond tracking: what was taken, what's owed back, whether it's been returned
- Ticket lookup — type the plate and the date, get the hirer instantly
- Prints what LTA needs to transfer the ticket onto the hirer's licence
- Warns you if the ticket time falls near a changeover, so you never bill the wrong person
Development & testing
FJ$4,400
55 hrs
Product & delivery
FJ$1,425
19 hrs · contributed free
You currently track these by hand. The system can watch them for you.
- Expiry dates for registration, insurance and LTA fitness on every car
- Warnings well before anything runs out
- A car with expired paperwork can be blocked from being hired out
Development & testing
FJ$1,600
20 hrs
Product & delivery
FJ$525
7 hrs · contributed free
The car outline on your paper form, on screen. Photos alone already prove condition, so this is a convenience rather than a necessity.
- Tap the diagram to mark a scratch, dent or crack
- Note how bad it is and add a comment
- Appears on the printed agreement exactly like your current form
Development & testing
FJ$1,840
23 hrs
Product & delivery
FJ$600
8 hrs · contributed free
Customers book themselves, day or night, without phoning or messaging.
- A booking page with your name and logo, showing what is free and the price
- Drops into your existing website, or works on its own
- Confirmation emails go out on their own
- Bookings go straight into the same calendar your staff already use
Worth adding once the day-to-day system is running well — it brings in new customers, but the counter is where most of your business is today.
Development & testing
FJ$7,600
95 hrs
Product & delivery
FJ$2,400
32 hrs · contributed free
Take a deposit or full payment at the moment of booking, through your own bank.
- Works with your Westpac or BSP merchant account
- Deposit at booking, balance on collection — or full payment upfront
- Card details never touch the system, so there's nothing sensitive to protect
- Cash and EFTPOS still recorded exactly as now
Only useful alongside online booking — at the counter your EFTPOS machine already does this.
Development & testing
FJ$6,240
78 hrs
Product & delivery
FJ$1,950
26 hrs · contributed free
A pretend version of your business, with made-up cars and customers, that resets itself every night.
- New staff learn by doing, without any risk of breaking real records
- Practise a full pickup and return before doing it in front of a customer
- Also useful for showing the system to anyone else
Development & testing
FJ$2,000
25 hrs
Product & delivery
FJ$675
9 hrs · contributed free
Turns the system into something other rental businesses can subscribe to.
- Several companies use the same system, each seeing only their own cars and customers
- Their own name, logo, prices, terms and tax number
- Monthly payments collected automatically
- Sign up a new company in minutes, with no extra work needed
Best added once your own business has been running on it for a while — a working system with a real track record is far easier to sell.
Development & testing
FJ$5,600
70 hrs
Product & delivery
FJ$1,725
23 hrs · contributed free
Core system
FJ$42,320
529 hrs · Fiji market rate
Extras chosen
—
—
Product & delivery
FJ$16,950
226 hrs · contributed free
Timeline
20
weeks · 5 months
What this would cost elsewhere
The same 529 hours of development, priced at what different developers charge.
This proposal
FJ$42,320
At FJ$42,320 this sits in the middle of what a Fiji freelance developer charges — the lowest of the four, and well under a Fiji agency.
Product & delivery
Building software takes more than writing code. On a normal project these are separate people. Here they are all covered, at no charge.
The hours quoted for each part of the system cover development and the developer's own testing. Everything below is the work that sits around that — the jobs a company would normally hire separate people to do.
Working out how it should work Business analysis
Taking a booking sounds simple until you ask what happens when a customer extends halfway through. Or brings the car back two days early. Or the car breaks down mid-hire. Or arrives wanting a different vehicle than the one they paid for.
Every one of those is a decision someone has to make before anything is built. If it isn't, the developer guesses — and you find out at the demo that the guess was wrong. Fixing it then costs several times what deciding it upfront would have.
It also means getting the rules out of your head and written down: minimum hire days, who can authorise a discount, what happens when the second driver isn't there at pickup, when a bond gets held back. None of that is on your current form, but the system has to know all of it.
Deciding what gets built first Product ownership
Someone has to hold the whole picture and make the calls: what goes in the core, what waits, what to do when you ask for something mid-build that would push everything back.
That means saying no sometimes, and being able to explain why. It also means keeping the system pointed at the problems you actually named — late vehicles, damage arguments, ticket chasing — rather than drifting toward whatever is interesting to build.
Keeping it on track Project management
Planning each two-week block, running the demo with you, writing down what you asked for and turning it into the next round of work.
Also chasing everything that isn't code: getting answers from your accountant, confirming what the bank's card system can do, checking what LTA needs to move a ticket onto a hirer's licence. Any one of those, guessed wrong, means rebuilding something.
Checking it properly before you rely on it Quality assurance
The developer tests their own work as they go — that's inside the quoted hours. This is the separate pass that comes after: trying to break it, testing the awkward cases, checking it still behaves when two people use it at once or the internet drops halfway through a handover.
It also means testing on the actual phones your staff carry, not just one device, because a photo flow that works on one Android and fails on an iPhone is worse than no photo flow at all.
Making it easy to use Design
Your counter staff will use this dozens of times a day, often with a customer waiting. If taking a booking is slower on screen than in the diary, they will quietly keep using the diary — and then you have two sets of records and can trust neither.
So the screens get designed around how the job is actually done, then checked with the people doing it.
Moving your records across Data migration
Your cars, customers and forward bookings have to come over from the diary and the books — accurately, because from that day the business runs on them.
That means sitting down together, entering the fleet properly, checking every forward booking against the diary so nothing is lost, and working through whatever doesn't match. Done alongside you, not handed to your staff as a job.
Training your team Rollout & support
Showing your staff how to use it, with written guides they can keep and hand to whoever joins next. Being around in the first weeks when questions come up.
Also making sure the switch happens properly — backups running, everything checked, and a date agreed with you for when the diary gets put away rather than letting the two run side by side forever.
That is 226 hours — nearly a third of the whole project — at no charge. On a normal build you would be paying several people for this, or going without it and finding out later what was missed. It is not being charged for because the aim here is a system that actually works in your business, not a set of hours delivered.
How it gets built
Two-week cycles. Every cycle ends with something you can actually use — not a progress report. The timings below assume the developer working longer days than normal to get you running sooner.
Week 1Week 13
The diary goes away
Your cars, your prices, and bookings taken on the system. By the end of this stage you can see every late vehicle on one screen, and the paper diary can be put in a drawer.
The arguments stop
Photos at pickup and return, working even with no signal, with the side-by-side comparison that settles a damage dispute in seconds.
Live
Invoices, your records moved across, your staff trained, and the business running on it properly.
The extras you chose
Why this order. The first two stages fix what's costing you money right now — cars going missing, damage you can't prove, tickets you end up paying. Online booking brings in new business, but it's worth far more once the day-to-day runs properly.
Nothing is wasted by waiting. Everything is built so the extras can be added later without redoing what came before.
You decide when your staff start using it
Every two weeks you see the system working and try it yourself. Nothing is switched on behind your back, and nothing is forced on your team before you're satisfied with it.
Some businesses start entering real bookings early, alongside the diary, so staff learn gradually and the system fills with real information. Others prefer to watch the demos until the diary can be put away in one go. Both work, and it is entirely your call — you know your team and how busy the season is.
What we'd suggest either way: when you are ready to switch the diary off, do it on an agreed date with your counter staff in the room, rather than letting it drift. Running two systems indefinitely is the one thing that causes trouble.
What it saves you
You mentioned damage arguments happen "always", and that tickets sometimes get paid out of your own pocket. Put your own rough figures in below — you know these better than we do.
Over three years
FJ$39,600
if nothing changes
System pays for itself
38 mo
then it is profit
Every month after that is money you keep.
These are your figures, not ours — move the sliders until they look right. The system does not stop every loss, but a photo taken at pickup ends most damage arguments before they start, and a ticket that takes seconds to trace is a ticket you can pass on.
How you stay in control
The honest risk with any software project is paying for something that turns out wrong. Here is how that is handled.
Every two weeks
You see it working
Not a progress report — the actual system, on your screen, for you to click. If it is going wrong you find out in week two, not week twelve.
You decide
When your staff start using it
Nothing is switched on behind your back. You choose when the diary gets put away, and it is not before you are satisfied.
Built in order
The urgent things come first
Late vehicles and damage proof are done before online booking. If anything ever stopped, you would already have the parts that were costing you money.
Your data
Stays yours
Your customers, bookings and photos are yours. They can be exported at any time, in a form you can use elsewhere.
Where this could go
Once the system is running in your business, it can be offered to other rental companies in Fiji as a monthly subscription. Move the sliders to see what that could look like.
Your share
per month
Over a year
FJ$17,616
your share
At this rate your FJ$42,320 comes back in about 29 months.
Assumes a 50/50 split of what's left after running costs, and that you take the lead on signing up other companies since you know the market here. Nothing here is fixed — it's a way of seeing the shape of it. There are dozens of rental operators in Fiji, and the ones who have seen a system working in a real business are far easier to convince than the ones who haven't.
What it costs
Two separate things: building it once, and running it every month.
Once
FJ$42,320
fixed price for the core system — 529 hours of development and testing
Priced at Fiji market rates for this scope of work. Anything you add from the optional list is charged at FJ$80/hr on top.
Plus, at no charge
FJ$16,950
226 hours of product & delivery work
Every month
FJ$190–800
Running the system and storing your photos
| Running the system | FJ$120–420 |
| Photo storage | FJ$40–260 |
| Text message alerts | optional |
| Domain name | ~FJ$50/yr |
Starts at the lower end and grows with the number of cars, bookings and photos stored. Card processing, if online payments are added, is 2.5–3.5% per transaction.
Considered, and set aside
Things that came up and were deliberately left out. Each can be added later if it earns its place.
Listing on Expedia and similar
These sites require supplier contracts and booking volumes that a single operator generally can't reach — it isn't something you can simply switch on. The booking system is built so it can connect later if that changes.
Automatic damage detection
Some large companies use software that spots damage in photos automatically. It needs thousands of inspections before it becomes reliable, and the before-and-after comparison already settles the argument today.
GPS tracking in vehicles
Needs hardware in every car and a monthly fee per vehicle. Worth revisiting once the basics are running, but it solves a different problem than the one costing you money now.
Service and maintenance scheduling
A genuine feature, but not one that's losing you money today. Better added once the system holds a year of real mileage and history to schedule from.
If this looks right
Nothing here is committed. These are the next steps whenever you are ready.
- Tell us what to include Go back through the list above and say which of the extras you want, if any. The core is the recommendation either way.
- One short session on your rates and rules An hour or two together going through your prices, your seasons, and the rules you apply. This is the one thing that has to come from you before anything can be built.
- A quick word with your accountant Your form shows Environment Levy, Services Turnover Tax and Stamp Duty alongside VAT. We need to know which of those actually apply so the invoices are right from day one.
- First demo, two weeks after starting Your cars in the system, on your screen, for you to try.
Any question about any of this is worth asking now. If something on this page does not sit right, or you want a part of it explained differently, say so — that is easier to sort out before anything is built than after.