A six‑seat golf cart is booked online with a $25 deposit, and everything else happens at the counter: the renter scans a QR code, pays the balance, signs the rental agreement, and both sides sign the condition sheet before a key changes hands. Every screen below is the live system, in the order the shop actually touched it.
A golf cart shop on a barrier island has a specific problem. The money is easy — people book online weeks ahead. The risk is the ninety seconds at the counter: has this person paid the balance, have they signed the liability release, is anyone recording what the cart looked like before it drove away, and can you prove any of it six weeks later when a bumper turns up scratched.
Reservety puts that whole ninety seconds behind a QR code on the counter. The renter does their half on their own phone; staff do their half on the prepare screen; the condition sheet is signed by both, in that order, and the order will not move to Sent with a gap in it.
This page follows exactly one hire — order #29099 — through all of it. The cart is real inventory in the demo, the order is a real order paid through a real gateway, and every figure is a screenshot taken while the run was happening.
Done once, before any renter sees the counter. Three settings carry the whole flow: the check‑in page itself, which documents are staff‑first, and when a physical cart gets attached to the booking.
Store check‑in is a shortcode on an ordinary page. Point the setting at that page and the system prints the link and a QR code ready to laminate. The window is the part worth thinking about: twenty‑four hours either side of the rental start, so somebody arriving the evening before is recognised, and somebody arriving a week early is told when to come back rather than being told their booking cannot be found.
Worth knowing. Leaving Check‑in Page empty is quietly expensive. The QR panel stays blank, and a renter who pays the balance from the kiosk is returned to the ordinary thank‑you page instead of back to their checklist — so they have to find the counter code and look themselves up a second time. One field.
Three documents are attached to golf cart hires: the rental agreement, a condition checklist at check out, and a condition checklist at return. The agreement is the renter’s alone. The two checklists are marked Staff fills first, then renter signs — an inspection nobody has carried out is not something to ask a customer to sign.
The setup trap. The return checklist is mapped to Sent and Returned for the same reason. Nothing blocks Mark as sent or Mark returned if you get this wrong — the paperwork simply goes quiet, which is worse than an error.
Twenty carts sit behind one bookable listing. Renters book “a 6‑seater”, never a specific one. The question is when a physical unit gets attached, and for a shop whose contract names the vehicle there is only one right answer: at check‑in, before the agreement is rendered.
Three days over a long weekend, taken on the shop’s own site. The shop asks for a small non‑refundable deposit now and the rest at the counter.
The calendar is availability, not decoration — green is a day with a free cart on it, red is a day already gone or in the past. Twenty units behind one listing means the shop is only sold out when all twenty are out.
Three days comes to $390 plus $39 tax. At checkout the shop offers a choice, and the default is the deposit: $25 now, $404 at the counter. That is the number the kiosk will chase later, and it is why the order does not sit in plain Processing after checkout.
Low‑speed vehicles on public roads carry obligations an ordinary rental does not. Three tick boxes sit above the pay button, and every answer is stored on the order where staff can read it back.
The confirmation does not pretend the job is done. The rental agreement is unsigned, and the page says so with a link to sign it there and then. Marcus does not — which is the interesting case, because it is what most renters do.
Tuesday morning. The cart is due out today, so the check‑in window is open. There is no app to install and nothing to log into.
The code below is the live one for this shop. Scanning it opens the check‑in page on the renter’s own phone.
Two fields, and deliberately no others. The e‑mail or phone is the part that matters: an order number on its own is guessable, and the system will not confirm that a booking exists until the contact matches too.
This is the moment the booking stops being generic. Cart 01 — 6‑seater is picked from the free units and added to the order, before anything is shown to the renter, so every document from here on can name the vehicle.
Why it happens here. Assignment fires on the lookup, not on the final button. It has to: the last button is gated behind a signed contract, so assigning the cart there would attach it after the renter had already signed for it.
Two things stand between Marcus and the counter: $404 and a signature. Both are done from the phone in his hand, without leaving the page.
Pay now opens the real payment page inside the check‑in screen, so the renter never loses their place. The card saved at checkout is offered — and because reusing a stored card on nothing more than an order number would be too easy, the screen offers to send a one‑time code to the address on the booking before it will use it. Typing a fresh card needs no code, because a new card only ever adds money.
The rental agreement opens in the same frame with everything the shop already knows merged into it — name, address, hotel and room, dates, date of birth, emergency contact, the lot. The renter reads and signs; they do not re‑type their own booking.
With both items ticked the button comes alive. It is worth being precise about what it does and does not do: it records an arrival and nothing else. It moves no status, touches no stock, and hands over no keys. A customer cannot promote their own order.
Nobody has to be watching a screen for this to work, but if somebody is, it lands in front of them within seconds.
The Logistics dashboard keeps a self‑refreshing panel of local‑pickup orders due out, with an optional chime on anything new. Marcus’s row now carries a green Checked in 10:23 AM badge next to his name, and a Prepare button straight into the picking screen.
One screen for the person actually fetching the cart. It answers the two questions that matter at a counter before anything else: are they paid, and which vehicle is theirs.
Arrival is a pill in the header bar, beside the status — not buried in a sidebar card that staff have to scroll to. Underneath it, two badges: Paid in full, and a warning‑coloured 1 document to sign.
The documents card carries the state of each piece of paperwork separately. The agreement is signed. The check‑out checklist reads awaiting inspection — it is the shop’s turn, not the renter’s.
Nothing above is a special case that only the picking screen knows about. The ordinary order view has the same story in its notes, in order, with the card on file and the checkout consents alongside.
The part most rental software leaves to a clipboard. Staff record the cart’s condition, the renter agrees to that record, and the two signatures live on the same document.
The checklist is the shop’s own: tyre pressure, lights, indicators, plate, brake pads, parking brake, gauges, bodywork, seatbelts. What goes in the notes is the thing worth having — existing damage, recorded before the cart moves.
Back on the prepare screen the same row has changed state: inspected — awaiting renter, and the button now reads Renter signs.
Nothing is pushed to the renter, so the kiosk has a Check again button for exactly this moment: staff finish the inspection while the customer is standing there with the page open, and one tap pulls it through.
This is the point of the whole mechanism. The renter’s copy opens with the inspection notes already in it — they can read exactly what the shop recorded about the cart’s condition. Only the name, signature and date are blank.
Only now does the order move. Every gate is green, and the staff member is the one who moves it.
Collecting is the physical act — this cart, off this rack, by this person, at this time. It is recorded separately from the status change so the shop can tell the difference between “fetched” and “gone”.
Friday. The same mechanism runs in reverse, and it starts on its own.
Nobody switched anything on. The return checklist is mapped to the Sent status, so the moment the cart went out it became the next thing waiting for the shop.
The return inspection is the check‑out inspection’s twin, and the useful thing is that the earlier notes are on the same order, a click away. The question is never “is there a scratch” — it is “is this scratch new”.
Same flow as the hand‑over: the renter looks the booking up on the counter code, and the return sheet is waiting with the shop’s findings already written into it.
The last action of the hire, and again it belongs to staff.
One hire, one afternoon, no special cases.
Built on the Island Fun Rentals demo. Order #29099 is a real order taken through the payment gateway in test mode; the renter, e-mail address and phone number are fictional. Every screenshot is the running system, unretouched.
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