News

Introducing Rentals

Travis Frank

Co-Founder & CEO

Published March 11th, 2026

Today, we're releasing Rentals in Prospero. Rentals is a suite of tools that streamline renting out your venue and equipment, unlocking new revenue streams for your organization.

Why rentals?

It all began a year ago, when we introduced Booking Portals to Prospero to help you manage internal requests for your spaces. Bookings were quickly adopted by most of our users, and by the spring, a few of our enterprising clients were beginning to use them to manage venue rental requests. After all, rental requests are ultimately space bookings, right?

At Prospero, our mission is to strengthen performing arts organizations through technological innovation. That means creating resiliency in the business model of non-profit arts organizations, in both top-line revenue and operations. Supporting rental workflows in Prospero advances our mission at two levels.

First, for organizations already renting their venue on a regular basis, moving the rental process into Prospero helps us deliver on our core promise of a calendar of record: a single source of truth that every team member trusts, eliminating double-booking and breaking down organizational silos.

From day one at Prospero, we identified operational efficiency and cost savings as central to fulfilling our mission. As I wrote in Introducing Booking Portals, rental calendars are a common siloed calendar that must be manually kept in sync with other department calendars. Bringing rental workflows into Prospero cuts down redundant work and saves on software subscriptions.

Second, for producing organizations that don't commonly rent out their venue, bundling rental workflows into Prospero lowers the barrier to getting started. Many of our clients have been looking for ways to open new revenue streams, but venue rental has typical obstacles:

• "Who's going to manage rentals? We're already under-staffed as is."
• "Nobody on the team has the expertise to make this happen."
• "We're a producing organization and a rentals department might distract from our mission."
• "The upfront costs are too great: adding headcount, implementing a new system, training staff."

At these organizations, Prospero is already the central nervous system for ops, coordinating activity across the venue every day. And because we embedded rentals directly into the app, the tools you need are already at your fingertips, with straightforward, opinionated defaults. You can start renting your venue today, without additional headcount or an expensive and slow implementation- all while continuing to put your energy and focus towards your mission.

That's why we built rentals. Here's how we did it.

Booking Portals 2.0

Remember when I mentioned the early adoption of booking portals as rental inquiry forms? Internally, we were thrilled (and nervous). We designed bookings with internal room reservations in mind, so these early rental pioneers were running into sharp corners at first. But with eager users, we could tell booking portals would be the launchpad for rentals. We rolled up our sleeves, took notes, and set to work upgrading bookings.

Venue rentals are often complex, multi-day bookings. Booking portals can now be configured to support all of your inquiry needs:

1. Allow renters to submit multi-event booking requests for large-scale rentals, like productions or conferences.
2. Enable multi-location bookings.
3. Split inventory options into multiple custom fields, sorted by tag, to simplify A/V and lighting rental. Inventory fields give your bookers a familiar "shopping cart" interface to quickly spot what they need.
4. Use Consumables, a new resource in Prospero, to give renters catering & supplies options.

Once you start receiving rental inquiries, you can connect rentals from repeat customers with a directory of Customers and Contacts:

1. Access your customers from the sidebar.
2. Track key administrative information, like tax numbers and addresses.
3. Assign as many contacts as you need to a customer to ensure bookings get to the right party.

When you're ready to check availability, Triage Mode gives you a focused workflow to compare the request to your existing events:

1. Get a quick overview of the events in the booking, including what you still need to review.
2. Highlight booking events directly in the calendar, allowing you to check live availability.
3. Add a customer and contact to track rentals over time and speed up later workflows.
4. When you're ready, approve or deny the booking.

Alongside the core tools we released last year, like customizable forms, booking management pages, and change requests, these improvements give you everything you need to streamline communication of requirements with renters.

Money Problems

One of the biggest time sinks (and barriers to entry) for venue rental is creating cost estimates for renters. Maintaining pricing sheets, cross-checking rate cards, and calculating overtime all require serious time investment. Not to mention that every time there's a change, you have to re-do all of your work.

We designed rentals to automate every money problem with a single button click. No more Excel headaches or false offers based on out-of-date rates.

Rentable resources, like locations, roles (labor), and items come with fully customizable rate cards:

1. Separate rates into customizable price tiers, like commercial or non-profit tiers.
2. Charge per hour, per item, or a customizable unit, like day.
3. Automatically add taxes.
4. Add as many overtime rates as you need, including trigger hour and the new price.

Build an estimate for a potential renter with a single click. Based on the booking request and your configured rates, Prospero will automatically generate an offer:

1. Select a price tier to automatically switch between your saved rates.
2. Separate line items into sections. Prospero automatically groups line items based on resource or event.
3. Select a resource to jumpstart your line item, or create custom line items on the fly.
4. Adjust units, pricing, discounts, and taxes.
5. Add metadata, like customer address, memo, custom fields, and expiration date.
6. Prospero offers and invoices break down subtotals at each section and the end of the document. The breakdown at the end highlights any discounts you're offering and how much of the total is taxes.
7. When you set an offer or invoice to active, you'll be prompted to send an email notification to the booker with the PDF attached. You can always skip it and do this yourself.

The invoice builder is equally streamlined. A single click lets you generate an invoice based on either a previous offer or the resources now assigned to the booking itself (perfect for invoicing post-event, incorporating day-of charges).

When you're ready to standardize your documents, you can create offer and invoice templates to automatically apply default choices:

1. Create as many offer and invoice templates as you need.
2. Standardize cover, canvas, and final pages to use your branding and terms & conditions.
3. Use template variables to create custom messages in memo and footer fields, like the total cost, booking date, or customer name.

As you start signing rental clients, the documents will pile up and you'll need an overview of what's in flight:

1. Access all of your offers and invoices in the sidebar.
2. Use status filters, the search bar, and table sorting to find the right documents.
3. Get key figures at a glance with the summary at the top of each page.

Each of these features, and the design choices we made while building them, tie back to our mission: to strengthen performing arts organizations. We built rentals to help our clients diversify their revenue, streamlined and intuitive so that you can start renting out your venue today.

The future of Rentals

From here, we want to build more automation for admins to save time and simplify backend management. Richer booking management pages for renters to cut down on back-and-forth. And change history for all parties to foster trust and clearer communication.

Beyond these specific improvements, we're eyeing key fundamental upgrades this year: repeating events, system-wide audit trails, advanced inventory management. Because rentals is built atop the core resource management systems in Prospero, the evolution of the rest of the platform benefits these modules.

Every step we take in this direction makes your venue more valuable. So you can leverage the assets you already have—and the tool you already know—to build a financial foundation for the decades of performances to come.

Rentals is available now in Prospero. Reach out to get started.