When you're short on gear for an event, LASSO gives you three ways to cover it: rent it from a vendor, buy it, or move it in from another one of your warehouses. This article covers all three, where each one starts, and how the gear lands in your inventory once it arrives.
Which Order Type Do You Need?
What you need | Order type | Where to start |
Rent gear from a vendor for one event | Subrental Purchase Order | Event › Gear Order › Subrent |
Rent gear from a vendor across a date range and several events | Long-Term Subrental | Inventory › Warehouse Operations |
Buy gear you'll own | Equipment Purchase Order | Inventory › Warehouse Operations |
Move gear between your own warehouses for an event | Transfer Order | Event › Gear Order › Transfer Orders |
Move gear between warehouses with no event attached | Independent Transfer Order | Inventory › Warehouse Operations |
Note: Transfer Orders and Independent Transfer Orders are available to accounts running more than one warehouse.
Before You Start
Add your vendor first. Every subrental and purchase order needs a vendor from your vendor directory, so add the vendor before you build the order.
Check your permissions. Equipment purchasing is controlled by Can Edit Equipment Purchase Orders under User Permissions › Inventory › Warehouse Operations. Team members with full Inventory access already have it.
Creating a Subrental From a Gear Order
This is the fastest way to cover a shortage on a specific event, and it's the path most warehouse teams use day to day. Because you start from the gear order, LASSO already knows the event, the dates, and the quantity you're short.
Open the event and go to the Gear Order.
Select the item or items you're short on.
Click the Subrent menu, then Create Purchase Order.
Give the PO a name and choose your vendor.
Adjust the quantities and total costs as needed.
Add any additional costs — shipping, for example — by clicking the plus sign and choosing the charge type.
Choose a delivery option: delivered to your warehouse, delivered to the venue, or picked up by a team member.
Add notes if you need them. Public Notes are vendor-facing and can be printed on the PO PDF; Internal Notes stay with your team and never appear on the PDF.
Click Submit.
The shortage is now covered, and the PO shows up in your Purchase Order list.
Adding to an Existing Purchase Order
If you're already renting from a vendor and another shortage comes up, don't start a second PO. Select the items, click Subrent, then Add to Existing Purchase Order and pick the PO you want.
Keeping one vendor on one PO means one order to approve and one invoice to reconcile — worth doing whenever the same vendor is covering more than one gap.
Creating a Transfer Order From a Gear Order
If the gear you need is sitting in another one of your warehouses, transfer it in instead of renting it.
From the Gear Order, select the items you need.
Click the Transfer Orders menu, then Create Transfer Order.
Name the transfer order and choose the source and destination warehouses.
Indicate whether the transfer is temporary or permanent.
Click Submit.
The same menu also lets you Add to Existing Transfer Order, or create and add to an Independent Transfer Order when you'd rather keep the movement separate from the event.
Long-Term Subrentals
Use a Long-Term Subrental when you're bringing in vendor gear for a stretch of time rather than a single event — a month of extra fixtures that several shows will draw from, for example.
Go to Inventory › Warehouse Operations and click Create Long Term Subrental.
Choose your vendor and set the start and end dates for the rental period.
If you run multiple warehouses, select the warehouse receiving the gear.
Choose whether the vendor delivers or you pick up.
Add the equipment and quantities, then the price and any additional costs like shipping.
Save. The subrental appears in your Purchase Order list, where you can edit it and open its pack sheet.
Once the gear is checked in, your availability goes up for the rental period — and LASSO drops it back down automatically when the period ends, so your availability stays honest without anyone remembering to adjust it.
For the full walkthrough, see Long Term Subrentals.
Equipment Purchase Orders
Use an Equipment Purchase Order for gear you're buying and adding to your own inventory.
Go to Inventory › Warehouse Operations and click Create Equipment Purchase.
Fill in the Purchase Order Name and choose the Vendor.
Set the Delivery Date — when you expect the shipment.
Set the In-Service Date — when the gear goes into active use.
Add your products, the purchase price for each, and the stock type.
Add additional costs such as shipping, then save.
The In-Service Date drives availability. Availability increases the day after the in-service date, and any order placed after that date counts this purchase in its availability math. You'll see the purchase on the product schedule under Inventory Changes, along with the anticipated in-service date.
Stock type follows the product's transaction type:
Products set to rental can only go into rental stock.
Products set to sale can only go into sale stock.
Products set to both let you choose rental or sale stock.
For the full walkthrough, see Creating Equipment Purchase Orders.
Independent Transfer Orders
An Independent Transfer Order moves assets between warehouses without being tied to a gear order — useful for rebalancing stock or prepositioning gear ahead of a busy season.
Go to Inventory › Warehouse Operations and click Create Independent Transfer Order.
Choose the source and destination warehouses.
Set the date you'll start pulling the assets, the date the shipment leaves, and the expected arrival date.
Add your products. Packages and containers come along with their contents, so parent-child relationships stay intact.
Add internal notes if you want them on the pack sheet.
Click Submit. Items are auto-saved as you add them, so you can submit whenever you're ready.
The transfer shows up on the product's item schedule at the destination warehouse, and you can reserve against it before it arrives — even if that warehouse has none of the item in stock today.
For the full walkthrough, see Independent Transfer Orders.
Receiving Gear Into Inventory
Subrentals and equipment purchases both come into inventory through a pack sheet.
Open the order and select the Pack Status icon to load the pack sheet.
Move the status from Initial to Receiving.
Choose whether to receive the assets as serialized or unserialized.
For serialized assets, auto-generate barcodes or enter them manually. Scanning the vendor's own barcodes into the input fields works too.
For unserialized assets, enter the quantity you're checking in.
Click Save, then set the status to Checked In once everything has arrived.
Setting the sheet to Checked In locks it, makes the return process available, and adds the gear to your available inventory.
Printing labels: when you receive serialized assets and check Print on Add, use the Labels Per Asset field to print anywhere from 1 to 10 labels per asset. Leave it at 1 and nothing changes from what you're used to.
Receiving a Transfer Order
Transfer orders move through the pack sheet too. Once the sending warehouse sets its pack sheet to Shipped, the assets are assigned to the destination warehouse and sit in an Out status until they're received.
At the destination, open the pack sheet and scan, manually unpack, or bulk unpack the assets, then finalize the sheet.
To keep your containers packed: don't use Empty All Containers, and turn off the Empty Container on Scan user preference before you start. Otherwise you'll be rebuilding cases that arrived perfectly fine.
Returning Subrented Gear
When the rental period ends, move the pack sheet status to Filling.
Scan or manually enter the barcodes of the assets you're sending back.
Finalize the sheet.
Returned assets move to a Retired status and leave your available inventory, but their history sticks around. If you subrent the same gear from that vendor again, you can re-circulate the same assets.
Tracking Your Orders
From Inventory › Warehouse Operations, use the Purchase Orders and Transfer Orders buttons to open each list.
Purchase Order list: click a PO # to open it for viewing or editing. Track vendor approval and whether the gear has been received or returned.
Transfer Order list: track whether equipment has been transferred and provided to the destination warehouse.
From a gear order line: click the PO/TO Qty cell or the Total Cost cell to open the related orders slideout. The Transfer Orders section shows Transfer Name, Number, Fulfilling Warehouse, and Quantity for each related transfer.
PO detail shows both the Event name and the Event ID, which makes cross-referencing with outside systems quicker.
PO PDFs download as PO-[Number]-[Vendor Name].pdf, so downloaded files are easy to identify.
Change history tracks edits to the order, including Public and Internal Notes.
Tips From the Warehouse
Consolidate by vendor. Add to an existing PO rather than creating a new one when the same vendor covers several shortages.
Get the In-Service Date right. It's what makes purchased gear show up in availability, so a wrong date reads as gear you don't have.
Check availability before you rent. The Warehouse Operations dashboard shows shortages in red, resolved items in green, and blue when a purchase order is already covering the gap — worth a look before you call a vendor.
Use Internal Notes for the details your crew needs and Public Notes for anything the vendor should see.
Need a hand with any of this? Reach out to your Customer Success Manager or our support team — we're happy to help. 🌟