Appearance
A day as the owner
The manager pages cover running the shop. This one is about the things only you can do, in the order you will actually need them.
You are the only role that can open Settings. If a manager asks where to change something, the answer is almost always "that is on your login".
Week one: set the shop up
The Get started card on your Dashboard walks this. It is four steps for a rental shop and it tracks itself from real data, so a step ticks off when the thing actually exists, not when you clicked past it.
Beyond it, the settings worth doing early:
Settings → Business. Name, contact email and phone, address, currency. Fill in the email and phone: they are what your online store shows and what the chat assistant gives out when a customer asks how to reach you.
Currency is worth setting before you enter any prices. Every amount in the back office and on your storefront is shown in the currency you pick here, formatted the way that currency is normally written. It changes how numbers are displayed, not what they are: it will not convert prices you have already typed, so set it first and enter your rates once.
Settings → Booking. One setting: the Default Agent Commission your agents earn. It is deliberately short.
Settings → Payments. See Getting paid. At minimum decide whether you are taking cards, and connect Omise if so.
Settings → Task checklists. This is where your operating standard lives, in three senses.
The checklist itself is the difference between "clean the scooter" and a cleaner who knows what you mean.
Each template can say when it is created automatically: when a vehicle, property or trip booking is confirmed, or when an order arrives from your online store. Leave it alone and you get the built-in set for your vertical. Configure one and it replaces the built-in set for that kind of booking rather than adding to it, so if you set up one trip checklist, trips get exactly that one task.
Tasks are created with nobody attached. That is deliberate: your team sees unclaimed work, and starting a task claims it, so the board behaves like a shared job list rather than a set of private inboxes.
Bringing your team in
Users → Invite. The roles worth knowing:
- Manager: runs the shop. Everything except Settings, Outreach and Lead-gen.
- Agent: sells. Sees their own bookings; can create bookings and customers.
- Employee: does the jobs. Dashboard and Tasks only.
Two things to know while you are here. First, auto-created tasks belong to nobody until somebody starts them. Your team can see them and claim them by starting; assign one yourself when you want a specific person on it. Owners and managers get an Unassigned filter on the Tasks page to see what nobody has picked up.
Second, role changes and commissions are yours alone: a manager cannot change anyone's role or set an agent's commission.
Switching what you run
Settings → Plan & billing → What you run. Vehicle rental and property rental are available on every plan. Trips & tours needs the Business plan.
Turning one on adds its menu items and its settings sections. They are not mutually exclusive: run a fleet and properties from the same account if that is your business.
Buying capability
Settings → Plan & billing → Add-ons. The list, the prices and what each one does are in the overview.
The dependency to internalise: every AI add-on requires the Omnichannel inbox. Buying the assistant without the inbox buys you nothing that runs. The Integrations page warns about this, but it is worth knowing before you spend.
On a trial the inbox, both AI tiers, the co-pilot and crypto are switched on for you. Outreach, lead-gen and Viator are not.
The online store
Off by default. Turn it on at Settings → E-Shop: enable it, pick your subdomain, pick a template, set the theme colour and hero text.
Your customers get https://yoursubdomain.ranchao.app. The link is shown to you on that page.
It publishes what you sell, in whatever vertical you run: vehicles marked Available, properties marked Available, and trips that have a price. It follows the verticals you actually have turned on, so a scooter shop never shows an empty villa section.
Two things are deliberately left off, because a card with no price is worse than no card: a property with no nightly rate, and a trip with no rate set. If something is missing from your shop, that is the first thing to check.
Prices are shown per day, per night or per person, whichever the thing is sold by, in your own currency.
An order from the store lands in your Bookings list as a Quote, and creates a task, Check online order BK-123, so it shows up in somebody's day rather than sitting unseen. Nothing auto-confirms it.
Finding it is harder than it should be. The status filter has no "Quote" option, so you have to look under All statuses and spot the purple Quote badge; the "E-Shop" label only appears once you open the booking. If you switch the store on, put "check the bookings list" into somebody's daily routine.
Teaching the assistant
If you have bought the AI add-ons, Settings → AI Assistant is where you set the bot's persona, its goal and its knowledge base. This is worth an hour of your time. The bot answers only from what you write there and refuses to guess, so a thin knowledge base produces a bot that constantly says it does not know.
Full detail, including how to take a conversation over from the bot and where co-pilot commands go, is in The inbox and the AI.
Watching the money
Reports covers revenue, bookings by status and fleet utilisation over a date range.
Treat the Dashboard's Revenue (Month) tile as an indicator, not a number: it sums bookings marked Completed whose record was last modified this month, so it follows edits rather than payments.
Settlements is where you reconcile with vehicle or property owners, partners and agents.
Crypto Payments is a read-only ledger of USDT taken and paid out.
Growth tools
Both of the tools below are switched on by us on request rather than bought at checkout, because both send from your own accounts and the pacing matters more than the price. Both are owner-only.
Outreach is cold outreach over WhatsApp. You import contacts from a CSV, their reachability is checked in the background, and you build a campaign in three steps: audience, message, schedule. The rate settings are the important part: a minimum gap between messages (the wizard refuses anything under 30 seconds), a daily cap, and a sending window. Write two or three variations of your message, because identical text sent to many people is what gets a number flagged.
Replies land in your normal Inbox as ordinary conversations, and the AI bot is deliberately kept out of them so a human answers a cold reply.
Two limits to plan around: there is no opt-out or unsubscribe list, so keep your own; and the daily cap resets at midnight UTC, not your local midnight.
Lead-gen watches Telegram group chats for people expressing buying intent, qualifies them with the AI against a description of your product, and forwards the good ones into a Telegram group of yours, plus a list in the app. It does not create customers, tasks or inbox threads: leads arrive in that group and nowhere else.
Account balance, in the top bar on desktop, is the referral programme. Your link is ranchao.app/signup?ref=YOURCODE, and you earn 10% of everything a tenant you referred pays, for their first year. The person you referred gets half their first month.
Credit comes off your next invoice automatically. Up to half of what you have earned can be requested as a cash payout instead, from the same panel; that sends us a request and we arrange it with you. Credit funded by card payments is held for a while before it becomes withdrawable, since a card payment can be reversed.
You can also pass credit to another operator as a gift code. Gifted credit is spendable but never withdrawable.
Before your trial runs out
Read Plans, the trial, and getting into your account. When a trial expires the app does not lock you out, it just silently refuses to save anything.