Verhuurmaat Suite - One Order and Rental Platform Behind Multiple Brands

Project overview

The Verhuurmaat platform bundles order planning, CRM, and automatic billing for four rental brands. Customers place orders through different websites, after which the system plans routes, confirms delivery times, and sends periodic invoices.

This is not a classic multitenant SaaS platform. It is one order and rental platform behind multiple websites and brands. The companies remain separate, but they are managed from the same system. Most brands follow a similar workflow, while Verhuurmaat itself is the outlier with a more dynamic process than the others.

• Customer portal - real-time order status, digital signature screen, and self-service modifications.
• Supplier portal - separate login for suppliers with purchase orders and inventory feeds.
• Rental module - dynamic pricing calculator for long- and short-term rentals with deposits, transport costs, and tiered pricing.
• Counter mode - second screen where customers in the store see their order live and sign.

Collaboration

I was brought in for a period of time to add development capacity to this platform. In that role, I worked on further development, improvements, and feature expansion in coordination with the party already responsible for the project and the people using the system day to day.

The priorities were mainly driven by operational needs: planners and office staff needed to work faster, while management needed better control over billing and financial insight.

Technical implementation

• Laravel + Blade as main framework; selective Vue components for interactive dashboards.
• Buddy CI/CD: automated deploys to staging & production.
• Central platform logic with brand-specific workflows and variations inside the same system.
• Pricing engine in PHP for real-time rate calculations.
• MessageBird SMS for delivery notifications and reminders.
• Pusher + Redis for live updates on the counter screen.
• Postcode API for distance and transport cost calculation.

Challenges

• Working inside an inherited platform, where you first need to build enough context quickly before making useful improvements.
• No fixed sprints: ad-hoc requests via phone, email, and Jira/Monday required quick context switches.
• Refactoring legacy code without downtime for 4 active brands.
• Maintaining a consistent UX while functionality varied slightly per brand and Verhuurmaat itself followed a more unusual workflow.

Results

• 4 rental brands (Containermaat, Toiletmaat, Rolcontainermaat, Verhuurmaat) managed from one central system.
• Planning, notifications, supplier handling, and rental flows come together in one platform instead of being spread across separate steps.
• Automatic billing and central processing reduce manual back-office work.
• The counter screen with live Pusher updates supports a faster and clearer in-store customer flow.
• The platform is still actively used and further developed today, now by another party.

Reflection

What made this project valuable was that it was not about building something from scratch, but about adding capacity inside an existing business-critical system. That requires more than technical execution. It also requires quickly understanding existing workflows, priorities, and code structure well enough to make useful changes.

For me, the value was in improving a platform used daily by planners, office staff, and management. That combination of operational pressure, brand variation, and ongoing expansion made it a realistic and instructive software project.