How your catalogue shows up in RentGPT: category, required fields, capacity

The first question from every rental company that hears about a new channel is the same: “Do I have to enter my products again?” No. RentGPT is not a separate marketplace; it is a search layer built on top of the catalogue you already keep in Rentificial. There is no second listing, no export file, no overnight sync job. If the product exists in your panel, the assistant sees it.

That said, one thing is true: the assistant seeing a product and the assistant being able to offer it are not the same. Being seen only needs the record; being offered needs that record to carry the fields that answer the question. This article is about exactly that gap.

The category ties your product to a shared vocabulary

Naming in rental is scattered. The same physical product is a “combo bouncer” at one company, an “inflatable play set” at another, “castle + slide” at a third. If a customer is to reach the right product whichever word they use, there has to be a shared vocabulary in between. In Rentificial that vocabulary is the taxonomy: a sector → category chain, with a fixed code for every category.

When you pick a category on the product form, you bind the product to that code. From then on it does not matter whether the customer says “bounce house”, “bouncy castle” or “jumping castle”; all three resolve to the same code and your product is inside that set. A product with no category is never bound to the vocabulary — it sits in the panel and is absent from search.

The required fields are the filter

As soon as you choose the category, category-specific fields appear below. They are not decoration; they are literally what the assistant matches the sentence against. “For twenty kids” goes to capacity, “my yard is 15×15” to footprint, “done by six” to setup time.

The last column is where most of the practical loss happens. An empty field does not mean “unknown”; in practice it means “this product cannot answer that question.” An inflatable with no capacity is silently dropped by every sentence that mentions headcount. The product looks perfectly fine in the panel; it is simply absent from search.

The calendar decides what gets offered

Category and fields say what the product is; the calendar says whether you have it that day. The assistant reads availability from the calendar your team works on, not from a copy kept somewhere else. That is a guarantee in both directions: a unit drops out of search the moment it is booked, and returns the moment it is cancelled.

In practice this means an occupancy you do not keep in the panel does not exist in search either. A booking taken over the phone and never entered leaves the assistant believing that day is free. Making the panel the single place of record is no longer only accounting hygiene — it is now a condition of search accuracy.

The price is whatever your tariff says

The number the customer sees comes from your tariff, not from marketing copy. Daily rate, delivery line, service fee and deposit are shown separately. Two consequences: first, no surprise appears at the payment step; second, every correction you make on the tariff side is reflected in search immediately.

If you run tiered pricing — a discount past three days, say — the tier is read from the same place. So a sentence that says “three days” sees the three-day price; it does not multiply the daily rate by three.

The booking comes back to you as a contract

A booking completed through the assistant does not sit as a separate record of a separate channel. It appears in your panel alongside every other reservation, with the same documents and the same reporting. There is no new screen for your team to learn.

There is one protection in between: when the customer moves to payment, the unit is locked for fifteen minutes. During that window the same unit cannot be sold a second time, in the assistant or in the panel. Double-selling is the most expensive mistake in rental; the fix is not two systems knowing about each other, it is a single lock.

Where to start

Three questions we get a lot

I have several branches — do they all show up?

Yes, but only branches with a location. Because search works on proximity, what matters is which branch a product sits in and whether that branch has coordinates. A branch with no coordinates falls outside radius search even if the city name is spelled correctly. Reviewing your branch addresses once is, for most companies, a ten-minute job you do a single time.

I use my own custom category — what happens?

You can keep using it; nothing changes in the panel. But a product that is not bound to a predefined category never enters the shared vocabulary, so it does not appear in search. Those products carry an “unmapped” badge in the panel, so you can see at a glance which ones are being left out.

What if I change a price for a campaign?

A change on the tariff is reflected in search immediately; there is no separate publishing step. The same holds for the cancellation policy, the delivery fee and the deposit. That is the practical benefit of a single place of record: there is never a second price list to keep up to date.

There is no need to fix the entire catalogue over a weekend. Most searches land on a small number of heavily rented products; starting there gives the fastest return.

1. List your twenty most-rented products.
2. Pick the right category on each — the code gives you an exact match rather than a guess.
3. Fill the required fields; above all, do not leave capacity and dimensions empty.
4. Put your delivery coverage and its fee into the tariff.
5. Make the calendar the single place of record: phone bookings go into the panel too.

The assistant does not know what you know; it only knows what you wrote down. The quality of your catalogue is the quality of the search.

When those five steps are done you can ask a concrete question: does your system answer “what do you have for 20 people in Garland on Saturday?” correctly? If it does, you will not have to answer it on the phone.