Gear and equipment
Gear in activities answers one question: what does the shop need to lay out tomorrow morning? It is an operational list, not a reservation and not a charge.
Gear on a guest's row
Each participant's Gear cell on the roster is a dropdown of the rental products that guest needs, headed Rental gear · pre-filled from type — the list comes from the activity type's Default gear. Tick what they need, or tick Guest brings own gear.
Choosing gear for a guest
A row has three distinct states, and the difference matters on a printed roster:
| State | Shows | Means |
|---|---|---|
| Nothing picked | Nothing chosen yet | Nobody has asked this guest. |
| Guest brings own gear ticked | Own gear | Asked, and they bring their own. |
| Products ticked | The product chips | Rental kit to lay out. |
Note: "Ticking gear never creates a charge." Confirming the picker says so again — "Gear saved. Nothing was charged." If you charge for rentals, sell the product; see Selling an activity.
If the activity type has no gear configured, the dropdown says "No rental gear is configured on this activity type." Add it under Staffing & gear on the type — see Activity types.
Gear on a course
On a course, enrolling copies the previous session's gear list forward, so staff pick once and it carries through the run. The first session prefills from the type's defaults. A pool session that needs different kit can simply diverge — each row keeps its own list.
The day's gear demand
Gear demand for this day on the day board sums every rental product named on every roster of that day, and compares it against stock.
Gear demand for the day
| Column | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Product | The rental item. |
| Needed | Total across all of the day's rosters, including extra heads. |
| In stock | From the equipment module. |
Each row ends in 3 spare or 2 short, or Not stock-tracked where no stock figure exists for that product. Summary lines at the top count both — "1 product is short", "2 products are not stock-tracked".
Open equipment module jumps straight to the stock screen; see Equipment items.
Warning: The figures are counted per day, not per hour. A wetsuit used at 09:00 and again at 15:00 is counted twice, so on busy days the list over-reports. Treat it as "what to lay out today", not as a hard availability check.
When nothing on the day needs kit: "No rental gear is needed on this day — nothing on the day's rosters names a rental product; guests bring their own gear, or nobody has picked yet."
Gear warns, seats block
This is the rule worth remembering. Seats are hard: a session cannot be oversold, and the counter will refuse a sale. Gear is soft: being short of wetsuits never stops you adding a guest, and never stops a sale.
The reason is that gear moves in ways the data cannot see — it is borrowed, shared between sessions, swapped, and brought from home. A hard block would fire on perfectly legitimate cases far more often than on real shortages.
Who can access this: the gear picker requires Activities (update); the gear demand panel requires Activities (read). Stock figures come from the Equipment module — without it the demand list still works, but every row reads Not stock-tracked.