Help · Equipment requests

Equipment requests

A crew needs a machine — an excavator, a dozer, a loader, a truck — and the office has to source it. Equipment requests collect the rental ask, send a single multi-vendor RFQ, and turn the winning quote into a PO without anyone leaving the platform.

#Why this exists

When a Ticket from the field surfaces an equipment need — say a Cat 982M loader is down and the crew needs a replacement on site by Friday — the office has two choices: mobilize a unit Gearflow already owns, or rent one. This article is about the renting half.

Without Gearflow, that renting half is phone calls and a spreadsheet — the coordination gap, lived one rental at a time. Someone in the office calls three rental yards, jots prices on a notepad, calls the project manager to compare, and emails a PO once the boss says yes. Nothing about that workflow is captured anywhere — no audit trail, no spend reporting, no record of what the losing vendors quoted.

An equipment request replaces that with one structured ask. The buyer enters the machine they need once, picks the vendors to send it to, and the vendors quote back from their inbox. The buyer compares the quotes side by side, accepts one, and Gearflow turns it into a PO.

#What you're looking at

Equipment requests live under the Equipment tab in the left navigation. Each row is one request, with its current status, the asset category, the job, and who's on it.

The Equipment tab showing rows of equipment requests with their status pills, jobs, units, and owners. — The Equipment list. Each row is one request — the asset category, the job, the requester, the dates, and a status pill on the right. The buyer's tabs along the top (Open / Scheduled / On Rent / History) split the lifecycle into the four stages they actually triage from.

Open a request from the list and a detail panel slides in.

A Quoted equipment request detail panel showing the asset category, owner, job, type, timeline, and the first vendor sourcing row. — Request detail. The top section has the request facts — asset category, owner, job, and quote type. Timeline and Sourcing follow. The first vendor row collapses to vendor, contact, and total — enough to triage at a glance.

#Lifecycle

Inbound → Quote Requested → Quoted → PO Requested → Scheduled → On Rent → Checked In → Called Off

Inbound is the moment after a buyer creates the request — the office knows what's needed but hasn't reached out to anyone yet. Quote Requested means the request has been sent to one or more vendors and the office is waiting for prices to come back. Quoted means at least one vendor has responded with a quote — this is the comparison moment. PO Requested is the moment the buyer accepts a quote and sends a PO number to the winning vendor; the request is committed but the unit hasn't shown up yet. Scheduled covers the period between PO and the unit hitting the job. On Rent through Called Off is the rental itself — check-in when it arrives, call-off when the crew is done with it.

#Walkthrough

#Step 1: Buyer creates the request

The buyer either accepts an AI-suggested request from a Ticket, or starts one from scratch with the + menu. Either way, the form collects the same fields:

The job the equipment is for, the company and department that owns the spend, and the requester and job contact for the unit.
The delivery location — usually the job's default, but overridable.
An asset category (e.g. "HYDR SML EXCAVATOR: 24 - 26TN"), quantity, and the rental window — start date and end date.
Optional preferred make/model, attachments, specifications, and cost code.
Free-text notes for anything else the vendors should know.

The Create Request form with the Asset Category picker open, showing scrollable categories like 2 Ton Truck and Articulated Water Wagon. — The create form. Fields cluster top to bottom: who and where (job, requester, location), what (asset category, quantity, dates), and optional context (preferred make/model, attachments, notes). The asset category picker is the field that takes the most thought — every M5 category the company owns is searchable here.

Submit and the request lands in Inbound.

#Step 2: Pick vendors and send the RFQ

From the request detail, the buyer hits Browse sourcing options. Two paths show up: Fleet options (use an owned unit) and Rental options (send to vendors). The rental path opens a vendor list filtered to vendors who provide equipment.

The Browse sourcing options panel with Herc Rentals Chicago and Sunbelt Rentals Chicago checked, contacts auto-selected, Rental quote type chosen, and a Send Request button. — Pick the vendors. Each row exposes a contact selector — the rental yard's actual quoting contact — so the request reaches the right inbox. The radio at the bottom sets **Rental** vs. **RPO (Rental Purchase Option)**; the email template changes accordingly.

Hit Send Request and the request advances to Quote Requested. Each selected vendor contact gets an email with the request details — asset category, attachments, delivery address, dates, the requester's name and phone — and a thread ID stitched into the headers.

#Step 3: Compare quotes side by side

As replies come in, each vendor's quote shows up as a row in the request's Vendors section. The row collapses to vendor name, contact, and total — enough to compare three or four offers at a glance.

The Sourcing section of a Quoted request with three vendor rows — United Rentals $1,200, Sunbelt $1,450, Herc $1,350 — each with a View Quote button. — The comparison moment. Three rental yards, three totals, one screen. The "post once, get competing offers" promise pays off here. Click any row's **View Quote** to drill into pricing.

Click View Quote on any row to see the full quote: line items with daily / weekly / monthly rates, pickup & delivery, taxes, and the total. If the vendor sent a PDF, the document viewer shows it inline.

The Review Equipment Quote sheet showing United Rentals Chicago vendor, Rental type, pricing line item with subtotal, tax, and total, and an Accept button. — One quote in detail. Vendor, type, pricing line items, subtotal, tax, total, and an Accept button. Hit Accept and the request moves to **PO Requested**.

#Step 4: Send the PO

Accepting a quote prompts the buyer for a PO number. They paste it in and hit Send to Vendor; Gearflow emails the PO to the vendor and the request advances to Scheduled.

The Enter PO number sheet with PO-2026-04829 in the field and a Send to Vendor button. — The PO step. One field, one click. The PO number lives on the order record and shows up on the vendor's email so they can reference it on delivery and invoicing.

#Step 5: Check in, run, call off

Once the unit arrives on site, the person on site checks it in from the same request — verification photos, hour meter, condition. The request moves to Checked In. When the crew is done, they call it off: more photos, end meter, return arrangements. The vendor sends an invoice; Gearflow attaches it to the same request.

The whole arc — from the original Ticket through to the invoice — hangs off one record. Spend, vendor, dates, photos, messages, and PDFs all roll up to one row in the Equipment list.

#The Log Vendor escape hatch

#Tips

Don't conflate this with parts. Equipment requests are for rental units (excavators, dozers, attachments, trucks). Parts requests live in Parts Hub Pro and have their own multi-vendor RFQ flow. Both share the "post once, get competing offers" idea, but the surfaces are different.