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Vanbase
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Why Vanbase

Vanbase is built for campervan rental businesses in New Zealand running roughly five to fifty vans. Here is what it does, what it does not do yet, what it costs, and how you would get started.

It knows the paperwork a New Zealand van runs on

COF, EWOF, gas certificate, RUC and self-containment are tracked for every van, each against the thing it actually turns on: an expiry date, or the odometer reading. You set how many days ahead each warning starts. The dashboard lists every van with something coming up, overdue first, so a certificate gets booked in a quiet week rather than on the morning a customer is waiting, and a booking warns you when the hire could run past the RUC you have paid.

The vehicle list, with every van's compliance across five certificates.

Insurance set up the way you sell it

As many tiers as you offer, each with its own daily charge, excess and bond. A tier can stop charging after a number of days or at a fixed amount. Excess, bond and daily charge can differ by vehicle class and by the driver's age band, worked out from their date of birth, so the quote carries the figures you would have worked out by hand.

The customer picks their cover, and you confirm it

A quote lays every tier side by side with its excess, bond and cap, and says what a cap is worth on that hire. The customer chooses one when they accept, which saves the email asking them to. You confirm it when you turn the quote into a booking, and you can override the choice with a note if you agreed something else.

Your name on everything the customer reads

Quotes and booking confirmations carry your logo, your colour and your business details. Emails go out under your business name with replies coming back to you, and the browser tab on a quote or a confirmation says your business name as well. The one place Vanbase appears is the web address, because customer links sit on vanbase.co.nz. A custom domain of your own is not built yet.

One record from quote to returned keys

A quote becomes a booking without retyping anything. The same booking carries its handovers, photos, odometer readings, payments and notes, so there is one place to look rather than three. Change the dates or the van and the price is worked out again against what has already been paid, with a note on the record saying what changed.

A completed booking. Everything about the hire sits on this one page.

How bookings get in

You or your staff enter a hire once, and a quote goes out by email for the customer to accept from a page with your branding on it. The booking is then created with nothing retyped. An agent booking goes in the same way, with the agent and their commission recorded against it. There is no booking widget for your own website or connection to agent systems yet. A website booking embed is in development.

What a hire is worth and what has landed are different questions

Vanbase keeps them apart. Deposits, balances and bonds are recorded as they arrive, a booking shows what is still owed, and a bond you are holding is never counted as revenue, so the month's figure is money you actually earned. A mistake is fixed by an owner voiding the row, never by deleting it, so the history of the money stays intact.

The whole fleet on one calendar

Every van a row, every day a column, across as many months as you need. Class colours, depot markers at each end of a bar, a separate treatment for maintenance, and compliance warnings against the van's name. Filter to one class and you can answer an availability question on the phone, without opening a single booking.

Utilisation you can actually use

Van-days booked against van-days available, by vehicle class, over any range, with the months behind the average. It is the figure that tells you which class to buy next and which one to stop replacing. Forward bookings, outstanding balances, bond held and where your bookings came from each have their own report.

Maintenance that protects your calendar

Put a van in the workshop and nobody can book it over those dates, so the job does not get undone by somebody taking a booking. Mark a COF, EWOF, gas certificate or self-containment job complete and the van's new expiry date is saved at the same time.

Built for more than one depot

Pick-up and drop-off locations on every hire, one-way hires between them, and a one-way fee you set as a default and change per hire.

Two roles, and a boundary that holds

Owners and staff. Staff run the day. Owners also see payments, reports and settings. That boundary is enforced by the database itself, so a staff member cannot reach an owner's figures by typing a URL.

The price is on the website

$199 a month for one to ten vans, $349 for eleven to twenty-five, $549 for twenty-six to fifty, and a conversation above that. All plus GST. Pay for the year and two months are free. No setup fee, no commission, no per-van charge and no contract, and every feature is included as it ships.

What we are working on

Payments are entered by hand today. We are working on card payments through Stripe, sending a booking through to Xero, a booking embed for your own website, and online check-in. None of these are finished, and there are no completion dates yet. We would rather list it here than let you find it in your third week.

Set up with you

Onboarding is not self-serve. It starts with a conversation about your fleet and how your season runs. You send us what you have, whether that is spreadsheets, a list of vans or your rate card, and we load your vans, classes, rates, insurance tiers, depots, extras and branding. You check all of it with us, in person where we can get to you, otherwise over video, and then you take your first booking. There is no import for bookings you already have.

Screenshots use a made-up business and bookings.

See whether it fits your fleet

Tell us how many vans you run and how your season works, and we'll take it from there.

Book a demo