Software for the yard running concrete screeds.

A concrete screed is the unit a crew reaches for in the minutes after the truck pours — to strike off the excess, consolidate the slab, and pull it flat before the concrete sets. That timing is everything. Unlike most rental gear, a screed is judged against a deadline the concrete sets for itself: the crew is placing whether or not the right unit shows up, and a late or broken screed cannot be made up later. Screeds come in three real shapes — a single-operator power hand board, a vibratory truss that bolts together to span a full bay, and a roller tube — and each behaves differently in the yard. EquipFlow handles screeds the way the yard that built it handles short, pour-driven rentals: dispatch, billing, maintenance, and return inspection on one record per unit, sections and all.

Built inside Rental King, right now.

Rental King is a heavy-equipment rental yard in Odessa and Midland, TX. They run concrete screeds, manlifts, forklifts, light towers, generators, compressors, and water trucks on MSA contracts through the Permian Basin — 24/7, oilfield pace. EquipFlow was designed and first deployed inside that yard. Every feature was tested against their live operation before it shipped. The product runs there today.

Screeds are low-dollar, high-frequency rentals, and the money leaks in two places a loose system never catches. The first is the pour itself: send the wrong unit, a section short, or a no-start engine, and the customer eats a failed slab on a deadline that does not move — that is the kind of miss that loses an account, not just an invoice line. The second is the return: a screed comes back caked in dried concrete or missing a truss section, and if the yard does not catch and charge it before the unit goes off-rent, the next customer inherits a unit that will not work and the yard eats the cleaning. When dispatch, billing, maintenance, and inspection all read from one unit record — power head and sections together — the dispatcher confirms the assembly before the truck leaves, the bookkeeper bills the short rental and any damage cleanly, and the next pour goes out with a unit that actually runs.

Concrete Screed specs the rental record tracks.

Every number below is a sourced specification range. The render layer is the only path these values reach the page — they live on the unit record, not in a dispatcher's head.

Engine power (gas)

9-11hp

Max screed length

15-65ft

Truss section length

2-10ft

Vibration frequency

10000vpm

Screed blade length

4-16ft

Truss section weight

37-180lb

Power unit weight

32-50lb

How EquipFlow handles concrete screeds on the dispatch board.

A concrete screed dispatch runs against the pour clock, not a loose return window. The concrete is ordered, the truck is coming, and the crew is placing whether or not the right unit reaches the site, so the board treats the pour date as a hard commitment and surfaces it the moment a unit is assigned. The trap with truss screeds is the assembly: the unit is a power head plus a set of bolt-together sections sized to the bay width, and a screed dispatched a section short, or with the wrong section lengths, will not span the pour. The dispatcher confirms the section count and the power unit on the rental record before the truck leaves, the same way the telehandler board confirms an attachment. Because screeds are light, weekend-loaded, and often booked in a batch when several crews pour at once, the board flags the conflict at assignment instead of at the gate on a Friday afternoon.

Billing concrete screeds — MSA, standby, and site-level tax.

Screed rentals skew short — a day, a weekend, sometimes a single pour — so the rate that matters is the day-and-week rate on the rental, applied cleanly without a clerk re-keying it. For contractors and operators under a master agreement, the negotiated rate override lives on the customer record per equipment class, so a screed rental created for that account picks up the right number automatically rather than from a rate sheet held in someone's head. When a pour gets pushed by weather or a late concrete truck and the unit sits on site idle but committed, standby is billed at a rate separate from active days, and the dispatcher marks it so the invoice carries both lines. A dried-on-concrete cleaning or damage charge from the return inspection rides the same invoice. Tax is set on the delivery-site record, so a unit that moved between job sites still gets the right rate per location. Invoices post to QuickBooks Online on close.

Maintenance on concrete screeds.

Screed PM is hour-meter driven where the power unit carries a meter, and the maintenance module advances the service clock from the reading captured at return. The wear on a screed is concentrated in two places. The engine — usually a small recoil-start gas unit — needs regular oil, air filter, spark plug, and pull-cord attention, and a hard-started engine on a cold pour morning is the most common service call. The vibration mechanism is the other: the eccentric shaft and its bearings run at high frequency in a wet, abrasive environment, and worn bearings are the failure that pulls a truss screed out of service. Work orders, parts, and meter history live on the unit record, alongside the truss-section inventory tied to that screed, so a bent or missing section flagged on a return inspection becomes a repair or replacement ticket on the same record.

Concrete Screed return inspections.

The return inspection is the yard's control point, and on a screed it is mostly about concrete and count. Before a unit goes off-rent, the driver runs a mobile-web checklist on a phone — no app install — records the hour-meter reading where the power unit carries a meter, and attaches required photos that cannot be skipped. Two screed-specific things get checked hard. First, dried concrete: a screed returned with hardened concrete caked on the blade, truss, or vibration housing is treated as damage, not normal wear, and the photos taken at return are what back that charge. Second, the section count: every truss section that left has to come back, straight and unbent, because a missing or bowed section makes the whole assembly useless to the next customer. Tying the inspection to the rental record before the truck leaves the site means a cleaning or damage dispute has a timestamp and an image behind it.

Common concrete screed classes in the field.

The product, the same way it runs for concrete screeds.

The sections below are the EquipFlow modules that matter most when running concrete screeds — each links to the full feature detail.

Operator guides for running concrete screeds.

Field-tested playbooks that go deeper on pricing, dispatch, billing, and maintenance for fleets like this.

• Concrete Equipment Rental Operations →
• Adding a New Equipment Category to Your Yard →
• Aerial Lift Inspection Requirements →
• Air Quality Equipment Rentals →

What you give up running concrete screeds in EquipFlow.

EquipFlow is a web app, so the return inspection needs a signal to load. A crew finishing a remote pour with no coverage cannot complete the mobile inspection on site; most yards run it at the yard on return, which means the section count and dried-concrete photos land a little later than ideal. There is no built-in scale or vibration-frequency telemetry, so the unit's real condition still comes from the operator check and the return inspection, not a sensor feed. And while the record tracks truss sections against a screed, it expects the yard to keep that section inventory honest at intake — the software flags a missing section, but a person still has to count them off the truck.