Loadout | Equipment and Tool Rental Flutter App With PHP Script

Loadout – Equipment & Tool Rental System

Loadout runs a rental yard: what went out, what is coming back, what is damaged, and who owes for it. It is a self-hosted Laravel application with a customer booking portal and a companion mobile app for the crew, sold once with full source included.

It was built around the two things rental shops actually lose money on - double-booked equipment and disputed damage deposits.

Availability is decided per machine, not per category

Most rental software asks “how many excavators do we own, and how many are out this week?” That arithmetic is right on Monday and wrong on Wednesday, when the fourth machine is in the workshop and the third comes back at four o’clock.

Loadout gives every serialized unit its own calendar row. A booking is made against a specific machine, and that machine is blocked for the hire window plus the category’s turnaround buffer. Scheduled maintenance and in-transit transfers block the same way. When a booking is saved the units are row-locked and re-checked inside the transaction, so two staff quoting the same Saturday cannot both walk away with the same machine.

A deposit claim that carries its own evidence

Deposits run hold, then release or partial claim. The hold ring-fences the money without taking it. On a clean return one tap releases the whole balance. When something comes back damaged, the claim is raised from the return screen and the return photographs come with it – each one timestamped, attributed to the staff member, and tied to that exact unit on that exact hire.

The customer gets an itemized notice showing what was kept, why, and the pictures it rests on. The rest of the deposit is released automatically.

What is in the box

• Owner and staff dashboard – front desk, unit-level calendar, bookings, serialized inventory, categories, bundles, maintenance windows, inter-location transfers, customers, deposits, reports, rates, staff and settings.
• Customer portal – a public catalog and booking flow per shop, with the customer’s own rental history and active deposits.
• Mobile app for the yard – Flutter, for scanning a unit out and back in, taking condition photographs and scoring returns. Works with no signal: work queues on the phone and syncs when it reconnects.
• Platform admin – tenant management, branding, legal pages, analytics, support tickets and email delivery.
• REST API – token-authenticated, documented, and the same one the mobile app uses.

Also included

• Multi-location, with per-location pricing and transfer approvals
• Rate ladders – nine days bills as a week plus two, not nine daily rates
• Late-return automation: grace period, incremental fee accrual, escalation emails, and automatic flagging of repeat offenders
• Bundles, so a six-item package books as one line
• Waitlist when a category is fully booked
• Printable QR asset labels, single or by the sheet
• Utilization, revenue and damage-cost reporting, all exportable to CSV
• Light and dark themes
• Role-based access – owners and managers see money, counter and yard staff do not

Requirements

• PHP 8.4.1 or newer, with the standard Laravel extensions
• MySQL 8 / MariaDB 10.6 or newer
• Composer, to fetch the PHP libraries once after upload — marketplace rules do not allow an item to ship its vendor folder, so this is one command (or one button, on cPanel and Plesk) before the browser installer takes over
• Flutter 3.44+ only if you want to build the mobile app yourself. A ready Android APK is included, so this is optional. Building for iOS additionally needs a Mac with Xcode and an Apple Developer Program membership — see below

Node.js is not required. The compiled CSS and JavaScript are in the download, so the product installs and runs on shared hosting as-is. The full front-end sources and the Vite config are included if you want to rebuild them.

Third-party services and costs

The purchase price covers this software only. Loadout is fully functional on a plain PHP and MySQL host with no external account of any kind. The optional services below are separate sign-ups with their own pricing, billed to you directly by the provider. Nothing is resold, bundled or included here, and no account, credit or free trial comes with this item.

• Stripe / Paystack (card payments — optional). No licence fee, but the provider keeps a percentage of every transaction and may charge for disputes and payouts. Their published rates apply. Without a gateway, deposits and payments can be recorded manually.
• SMTP email delivery (optional, but nothing is emailed without it). Loadout sends the mail; a mail service has to deliver it. Most hosting plans include an SMTP mailbox at no extra cost; a dedicated provider such as Postmark, SES or Mailgun is a paid subscription above its free tier.
• SMS. Loadout does not send SMS and has no SMS provider to configure, so there is no SMS cost. Notifications go out by email and in-app.
• Object storage, live chat and websockets (all optional, all off by default). Billed by their provider if you switch them on.
• Mobile app store accounts (only if you publish the app yourself). A ready-to-sideload Android APK is included. Putting the app on the App Store or TestFlight needs an Apple Developer Program membership (US$99/year, billed by Apple) and a Mac with Xcode; Google Play needs a one-off Google Play Developer registration (US$25). Neither is included here, and neither is needed to use the software — the web dashboard and customer portal work in any browser.

Web hosting, a domain name and an SSL certificate are also not included and are yours either way.

Demo Instructions

https://loadout.foundrcode.com

The demo is read-only. Every screen and every button works, but nothing you submit is saved — creates, edits and deletes are all refused — so no visitor can break it for the next one and the accounts below always behave the same way.

Staff dashboard — https://loadout.foundrcode.com/login

• Owner — Email: owner@northgate.test | Password: password
• Manager — Email: manager@northgate.test | Password: password
• Counter staff — Email: counter@northgate.test | Password: password
• Yard crew — Email: yard@northgate.test | Password: password

Admin panel — https://loadout.foundrcode.com/platform/login

• Administrator — Email: admin@loadout.test | Password: password

Customer portal — https://loadout.foundrcode.com/r/northgate-plant-tool-hire/sign-in

• Customer — Email: marcus@bellgroundworks.test | Password: password

Mobile app (Android, sideload) — https://loadout.foundrcode.com/downloads/loadout-field.apk
Sign in with Email: yard@northgate.test | Password: password. The server address is already set.

Payment gateways on the demo are in test mode — use Stripe test card 4242 4242 4242 4242, any future expiry, any CVC. None of the addresses above belongs to a real person: .test is reserved by RFC 2606 and can never be routed.

Documentation

Included in the download: installation, architecture, the REST API, the deployment guide, a customization guide covering branding, gateways and adding your own screens, and the licensing notes. Every page is written for someone who has never seen the codebase.