Every hire company hits the same wall. The spreadsheet that coped with twenty jobs a year falls over at two hundred: two people quote the same speakers for the same Saturday, a casual turns up at the wrong venue, and an invoice sits unsent for a month because nobody marked the job as done. That's when the search for rental management software starts. In New Zealand AV and event hire, three names come up again and again: Rentman, Current RMS (renamed OnRent Events by its owner Klipboard in May 2026) and Cue-RMS.
Full disclosure: Cue-RMS is made by The Cue Group, the same team behind Cue-Go, so yes, we have a favourite. We've tried to be straight about where the other two are strong, and every price and feature below comes from each company's own website, checked on 21 October 2026.
What actually matters in hire software
Feature lists all blur together after a while. These five things decide whether a system pays for itself in a busy season:
- Availability you can trust. When you say yes to a job, the gear has to be on the shelf on the day. A confirmed job should hold stock, a repair should block it, and a shortage should show up before the truck is loaded.
- Quotes that show margin, not just price. Knowing a quote is $9,000 is easy. Knowing it makes 18% once the crew and the sub-hire are paid is what keeps the lights on.
- Crew without a licence each. Hire companies run on casuals. If every LX op and stagehand needs a paid login to see their call time, the bill grows every time you get busier.
- Getting paid. Invoices should land in Xero without anyone retyping them.
- Local fit. NZ dollars, GST on the documents, NZ time on the call sheets, and support that's awake when you are.
The three at a glance
| Rentman | Current RMS (OnRent Events) | Cue-RMS | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Made in | Netherlands | United Kingdom | New Zealand |
| How it's priced | €39 platform fee, plus modules per "Power User" | Per user, one plan with every feature | One flat price per plan, by office seats |
| Four office staff pay* | €131 a month plus tax (about NZ$259), before the Crew module | US$242 a month (about NZ$426) | NZ$80 a month, GST included |
| Eight office staff pay* | €223 a month plus tax (about NZ$440), before the Crew module | US$452 a month (about NZ$796) | NZ$279 a month, GST included |
| Crew and freelancers | Free basic users, with Rentman's mobile app | Booked as resources, invited online | Free, unlimited crew links that open on any phone |
| Clients accept quotes online | Yes, with e-signature (Quoting & Invoicing add-on) | Yes, but its help centre says the signature isn't legally binding (Adobe Sign is the paid route) | Yes, signed on screen against a fixed, versioned quote |
| Xero | Yes, invoice export | Yes (or QuickBooks, Sage, MYOB) | Yes, invoices out and payments back |
| Support | Office hours in Europe and North America | 7am to 4am UK time, weekdays | From New Zealand, on NZ time |
| AI assistants (MCP) | Official connector, in public beta | None documented | MCP endpoint, on request |
| Free trial | 30 days, no card | 30 days, no card | 30 days, card at sign-up, nothing charged until it ends |
*Our maths from each company's published prices on 21 October 2026, converted at the European Central Bank's rates of 20 October (€1 = NZ$1.97, US$1 = NZ$1.76). Rentman: the €39 platform fee plus €23 per Power User for its Rental Standard bundle (inventory plus quoting and invoicing); its Crew module is extra, from €14 per Power User. Current RMS: US$84.50 for the first user and US$52.50 for each one after. Overseas prices are before any tax; Cue-RMS prices include GST.
Rentman
Rentman is a polished, mature platform from the Netherlands, with offices in Utrecht and Toronto, and it's genuinely good at crew. Freelancers, technicians and warehouse staff are free basic users with a proper mobile app for schedules, invitations and scanning. It has the longest integration list of the three (Xero, QuickBooks, Stripe, Zapier and WooCommerce among them) and an official MCP connector for AI assistants, currently in public beta.
The catch is the pricing model. Almost everything is a module: a €39 platform fee, then inventory, crew, quoting and invoicing, and equipment tracking, each charged per Power User, in euros, plus tax. Barcode scanning sits in the paid Equipment Tracking add-on, and crew time registration, leave and overtime rates are only in Crew Pro, the top published tier. Support works European and North American office hours, which leaves very little overlap with a New Zealand working day.
Current RMS (now OnRent Events)
Current RMS has been a dependable choice for hire companies since 2014. Its owner, Klipboard, renamed it OnRent Events in May 2026 and says the product itself hasn't changed. There's one plan with every feature, which is refreshingly simple. It handles serialised and bulk stock, sub-hire, multiple stores and test-and-tag, it talks to Xero, QuickBooks, Sage or MYOB, and its support desk runs from 7am to 4am UK time, which covers most of a New Zealand week.
The trade-offs: every staff login pays, starting at US$84.50 a month for the first user and US$52.50 for each one after, and there's no NZ dollar price (it lists US, Australian, British, euro and South African prices). Crew are booked as resources and accept or decline invitations online rather than in a crew portal of their own. And the signature a client draws when accepting a quote is, in Current RMS's own words, "not legally binding"; for that you'd add a paid Adobe Sign account.
Cue-RMS: our pick
Cue-RMS was built inside an AV hire and production company, for companies that hire out AV, lighting, staging and event gear and send crew to site. One quote holds the gear, the crew, the transport and the extras, and the stock, the roster, the run sheets and the invoices all follow from it. Here's why it comes out on top for most New Zealand hire companies.
The lowest price of the three, in NZ dollars. A seat is a staff login. Starter is NZ$80 a month for 1 to 4 seats and Standard is NZ$279 a month for 5 to 20, GST included, and paying yearly gets you a month free. Quoting, inventory with availability, invoicing, CRM, crew rostering, timesheets and the crew and client portals are all in Starter, not sold as add-ons.
Crew and clients are always free. Crew and client links don't use a seat and there's no limit on them, so taking on ten more casuals for ball season doesn't move the bill.
Margin while you quote. Every gear line, crew role and cost carries what it costs you as well as what you charge, so the quote shows its gross margin before it goes out. Multi-day hire follows a factor curve (a five-day week bills about 2.8 days, not five), and you can set your own. Every discount needs a reason, every staff member has a discount ceiling, and anything over it waits for an owner or admin to approve.
Stock you can say yes to. Quotes don't hold gear; a confirmed job does. Repairs and blackouts are hard blocks nobody can book past, and every item shows a strip of days with how many are free. On Standard, the shortages screen turns a short line into a sub-hire, a supplier quote request or a transfer from another branch.
Crew on their phones, with nothing to install. Each person gets a link that shows their shifts, call times, venue, run sheets and site access details. They accept or decline invitations and submit timesheets there, and they never see prices or anyone else's shifts. Approved timesheets go to payroll in fixed batches, so the file your payroll received can always be reproduced.
Clients sign on screen. The quote goes out as a fixed, versioned document. The client opens a link, signs with a finger or a mouse or asks for changes, and the job moves to confirmed against exactly the prices they saw.
Xero both ways. Issue an invoice and it's created in Xero with the same number, coded to the right account for the event type. Reconcile the payment in Xero and Cue-RMS marks the invoice paid.
Ready for AI. Cue-RMS has an MCP endpoint, the standard way assistants like Claude connect to business software. Ask "is there a free LED wall on the 14th?" or "who's still unfilled for Saturday?" and get the answer from your own data. It can add a line to a quote too, through the same availability and discount checks a person goes through, while issuing quotes, confirming jobs and approving discounts stay with a person. Access is on request for now.
Where it isn't there yet. Cue-RMS is the newest of the three, and we'd rather you heard the gaps from us. Rate cards with night, weekend and public holiday loadings are on the roadmap (today each crew role carries its own rate). Serial numbers and kits are set up in the app rather than imported from a file. Accounting is Xero only. And if you need a long list of third-party integrations today, the other two have been at it longer.
The verdict
For a New Zealand AV, lighting, staging or event hire company with one to twenty people in the office, Cue-RMS is the one we'd pick. For a four-person team it costs less than a third of either alternative. It's the only one of the three priced in NZ dollars and supported from New Zealand. And the parts a hire company lives in every day (quoting with live margin, crew on their phones, clients signing online) come in the base plan rather than as add-ons.
Rentman is the better fit for a larger, multi-country operation that wants the biggest integration list and is happy to build its plan module by module in euros. Current RMS (OnRent Events) makes sense if you're already settled on it, or you need QuickBooks, Sage or MYOB rather than Xero.
Switching over
Coming from Rentman, the Cue-RMS team can bring your catalogue and contacts across directly, keeping Rentman's own ids so the import can be re-run as a refresh while you change over. From Current RMS or a spreadsheet, equipment and contacts come in from CSV files, with a row-by-row preview of exactly what will be created or changed before anything is written. Starter and Standard both start with a 30-day free trial, and nothing is charged until it ends.