leihs is a web-based piece of software that makes it easy to manage equipment booking or rental.

At the Zürich University of the Arts, this is used for handling many different types of equipment:

• Video cameras
• Tripods
• Lighting equipment
• Recording devices
• Expensive cables
• Computers
• etc.

Typical workflow

Students place a reservation for some items in Leihs’ web-based equipment booking screen and wait for confirmation from the inventory pool(s) in question. A manager then approves or denies these reservations, and of course they can also make changes to the equipment booked by the student. When the student picks up their items, the manager marks the reservation as handed over and prints a contract. Students that are late returning their equipment are warned by the system and can be blocked from future reservations.

Features

Multiple inventory pools. Leihs can handle multiple inventory pools transparently, allowing you to split responsibilities throughout your organization in a way that makes most sense. Do you need to manage multiple buildings with multiple reservation desks? Are several people sharing responsibility over one reservation desk? Both can be handled.

Equipment booking and inventory system. Manage your organization’s inventory using Leihs and it becomes easy to make select items available for booking and reservation. Enough information is stored to fulfill the requirements of Swiss tax authorities and government offices. In case this doesn’t work for your country, it is easy to extend the system to conform to any laws governing inventory bookkeeping.

User levels and booking permissions. Users can only reserve the items they have the right privilege level for. You can also separate users by inventory pool, allowing e.g. only film students to place reservations in the filming equipment pool.

“Models” that serve as templates for items. Enter the details about an item (e.g. name, description, picture, weight, size, wattage, power…) once, then all items of that particular model share these properties. This makes inventory entry and management easier and more consistent throughout your equipment pools.

Barcode reader support. Barcode entry fields in the backend make it easy to use inventory barcodes when assembling new reservations for customers or when handing over and taking back equipment. Rudimentary barcode generation is also possible inside the system.

Web-based. No need to install anything on users’ computers. Works in any modern, standards-based browser.  The keyword here are modern and standards-based. Don’t expect it to work on Internet Explorer 9.0 😉

LDAP/Active Directory logins. You can use your existing authentication system with Leihs through the LDAP authentication module, or fall back to Leihs’ own database-based authentication system.

Free Software. Leihs is Free Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3. This means you are free to not only use the software, but also make any modifications and publish them. For best results, we recommend that you discuss your changes with us first, as it may be that the feature you’re looking for is already planned for a future version of Leihs. Development is coordinated on our developer platform. If you wish to contribute code, please read our contribution guidelines.

Downloading and installing

Please see the download page for information on how to get leihs.