Equipment Loans

An equipment loan lets you hand equipment to a borrower at no charge and get it back — think demo units, courtesy loaners, or trial gear. A loan is operationally the same as a rental, just without the billing.

Loans live in the Inventory module, so any plan that includes Inventory can use them — you don't need the Rentals module.

In this section #

Detailed guides for everything covered here:

• Loan Agreements — A loan agreement tracks a free equipment loan from creation through reserve, check-out, and return — with availability enforcement and a full audit trail, but no billing.

When to use a loan vs. a rental #

• Loan — free, no invoice. You still track who has it, when it's due back, and whether a unit is available.
• Rental — paid, with rates, deposits, and an invoice on close.

Both reserve a unit over a date window, so a single piece of equipment can never be double-promised across a loan and a rental at the same time.

The loan lifecycle #

A loan agreement moves through a simple set of states:

1. Draft — you're still building it.
2. Reserved — the equipment is held for the loan's date window.
3. Checked out — the units are physically out with the borrower.
4. Partially returned — some, but not all, of the units are back; the rest are still out.
5. Returned — everything is back in stock.
6. Cancelled — the loan was voided before or during the loan period and will not proceed.

You can check out directly from Draft if you're handing equipment over on the spot; reserving first is optional.

Per-unit tracking and partial returns #

Knowledge tracks the life of every individual inventory unit, so checking out a loan always hands out specific units — even when a line is a quantity of a Product (5 of a Product checks out 5 real units) or a kit (every component unit is checked out). Each unit is linked back to its loan line.

Because of that, you don't have to return a loan all at once. When equipment comes back, choose which units to check in and pick the destination bin:

• Return a subset and the loan becomes Partially returned — the returned units go back to stock and become available again, while the rest stay out.
• Return the last outstanding unit and the loan flips to Returned.

A loan line is marked returned once its final unit is back, so a multi-unit line can be brought back in several trips.

Creating a loan #

1. Go to Inventory → Loans and create a new loan.
2. Choose the borrower (a customer, contact, or staff user) and the loan's start and expected-return dates.
3. Add the equipment — specific units, Products, or kits.
4. Optionally fill in any custom fields and link an appointment.
5. Reserve to hold the equipment, then Check Out when it leaves, and Return it to a bin when it comes back.

Availability #

While a loan is reserved or checked out, its equipment is unavailable for the overlapping dates — to other loans and to rentals. The availability check is shared, so you can trust a single answer to "is this unit available?"

Doing it from the API #

The same lifecycle is available over the REST API: create a loan agreement, add line items, then POST to /reserve, /check-out, and /return.

# Create a loan agreement for a customer
curl -X POST https://your-domain.com/api/v1/loan-agreements \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "borrower_type": "customer",
    "borrower_id": "<customer-id>",
    "start_date": "2026-06-01",
    "end_date": "2026-06-08"
  }'

# Check the equipment out
curl -X POST https://your-domain.com/api/v1/loan-agreements/<loan-id>/check-out \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN"

A checked-out loan exposes the units still out as out_units, each with a checkout_id. To return everything, POST to /return with just a bin_id. To do a partial return, also pass the checkout_ids of the units coming back — the loan stays partially returned until the last one is in.

# Return only two specific units
curl -X POST https://your-domain.com/api/v1/loan-agreements/<loan-id>/return \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "bin_id": "<bin-id>",
    "checkout_ids": ["<checkout-id-1>", "<checkout-id-2>"]
  }'