Price Book

A price book is the set of rental rates a supplier has settled on for each equipment type: what a wheelchair costs per day, per week, and per month, and the same for every other category in the fleet. Most operations rent longer stays at a discount to the day rate, so a week rarely costs seven times the daily price, and a month rarely costs four times the weekly price.

In practice, a lot of DME price books live in someone's head or an old spreadsheet, built up over years of quoting deals by feel. That works until the person who set the rates leaves, or a new front-desk hire has to quote a rental and has no reference for what the shop actually charges for a given item.

A written price book, kept current, does two things: it keeps pricing consistent across whoever answers the phone, and it becomes the input for real margin analysis, since you cannot tell what an equipment type earns you if the rate it rents at is not recorded anywhere.

Some tracking systems can suggest a starting price book directly from a supplier's own invoice history, since the rates a business has actually been charging are usually already sitting in its accounting system, just never pulled together into one place. Our guide to [pricing DME rental equipment](/blog/pricing-dme-rental-equipment) walks through building one from scratch.