Unpaid balances, cars that never come back, fake papers: the 4 checks before you hand over the keys

Friday, 6.30pm. The customer wants a small hatchback for three days, he pays cash, he is in a hurry, and two people are waiting behind him. You photocopy the CIN, the Moroccan national identity card, and the driving licence, you take the money, you rush the condition report, you hand over the keys.

Monday morning, the car is not in the yard and the phone rings out. You dig out the photocopy: the name on the licence is not the name on the CIN. On Friday, you did not see it.

That is not bad luck, it is a hole in the procedure at your counter. Here are the four checks to run before you hand over the keys, including on a Friday evening when everyone is waiting. Three of them need only your eyes and your phone.

Do the arithmetic once, with your own figures. A city car rents for a few hundred dirhams a day depending on the town and the season. The deposit, when it is actually collected, commonly runs between 2,000 and 5,000 MAD, from what agencies report. A vehicle that stays out ten days too long has already eaten it.

Then add the rest. The drive to fetch the car back from three hundred kilometres away. The clutch, the tyres, the fuel that was never put back. The fines that land two months later on the carte grise, the vehicle registration document, so on you. The lawyer's fees. And the next customer, who had already booked.

A file like that does not cost you a deposit: it costs several weeks of margin, plus the owner's own hours. On fifteen cars, two of them a year wipe out everything you gained by working on your rates.

The order matters; being consistent matters more. A procedure you only apply when the counter is empty is not a procedure, it is an intention.

Tell the customer in one sentence, in darija, everyday Moroccan Arabic: I am checking the papers, two minutes. Nobody honest takes offence.

The simplest of the four, and the one that pays best. Put the two documents side by side and read both full names, first name and family name, in Arabic and in Latin script. Not a glance: a reading.

You are not looking for a slip in the transliteration, you are looking for two different people. The classic case: the licence belongs to a brother, a cousin, a friend with a clean record, and the CIN is the one belonging to the person in front of you. The contract goes out in the name of somebody who will never drive the car, and the day you file a complaint, you no longer have a driver anyone can identify.

Compare the date of birth on both documents, look at the photo. And photograph the documents rather than photocopying them: an end-of-day photocopy is unreadable two years later, and that is the document you will carry to the police station.

Since the road code (law 52-05) came into force, the Moroccan licence has been a time-limited document: it is valid for ten years and has to be renewed. Plenty of drivers have no idea, and licences that expired months ago turn up at the counter regularly.

This is not administrative trivia: in the event of an accident, it is a conversation you would rather not have with your insurer. Look at the date, then at the category: B for a passenger car, E(B), C or D for a van or a minibus. Same logic for a foreign customer: passport, national licence and, depending on the nationality, an international permit.

Add your own rule on years held. Plenty of agencies turn away anyone with less than two years of licence, or raise the deposit instead. That is a commercial choice, but write it down: otherwise every agent improvises his own.

This one on its own is worth the other three. Ask for a number that is not his: a parent, a spouse, an employer, somebody who will know where he is. Then dial it in front of him, let it ring, hang up the moment it is picked up.

Either the number is genuine, and you have a real contact for the day the first one stops answering. Or the customer stiffens, looks for an excuse, gives you a number that rings out into nothing, and you have learned what matters in twenty seconds.

It is the check that best filters out files built on borrowed papers: an arrangement like that rarely survives a live call. Write the number down with the first name and the relationship; a number with no name attached is no use to you six weeks later.

The first three checks are about the documents someone hands you. The fourth is about the customer's history, and it is the only one you cannot run on your own.

A customer who does not bring a car back does not stop at one agency: he changes neighbourhood, changes city, changes category of car. The same CIN can pass across six counters in eighteen months, and every agency finds out at its own expense. It is the one risk in this business where the information already exists: it is sitting with the agency down the road.

There is a fifth signal that fits into no box at all: behaviour. Urgency with no reason behind it. Refusing to say where he is going. The one who asks for the most expensive car without a single question about the price. None of these on its own is enough to refuse; two or three together, with a doubt about the papers, is.

Let us be honest: for five cars, one counter and an owner who sees every customer come through, a notebook and an Excel file do the job. Your memory is your database, and it is free.

A four-column spreadsheet, CIN, name, date, reason, is enough to keep your own history. You can even share it with two or three fellow agency owners in a WhatsApp group. Plenty of agencies work exactly like that, it works, and it costs nothing. The spreadsheet breaks in three precise places, not before.

You are no longer alone at the counter. The day an agent you did not train yourself hands over the keys, your memory is no longer any use. A customer turned away at the city-centre branch comes back three days later to the airport branch and drives off in a car.

The check has to take ten seconds. A file you have to open, filter and read through will not be consulted on a Friday evening; a search by CIN that answers straight away will be.

The information is with other people. Your file only contains your own accidents. The customer walking in for the first time is by definition absent from your list, and he is the one who should be worrying you.

It is for that fourth check that we built a customer blacklist shared between car rental agencies in Morocco into our management software for rental agencies. You enter a CIN or licence number and you see whether another professional has reported that file, with the reason, the agency and the date.

Those three pieces of information matter more than the report itself. An 800 MAD unpaid balance reported three years ago and a vehicle never returned reported last month do not call for the same decision. The reason and the date leave the judgement with you; a red flag forces you either to refuse or to ignore it.

The rest follows the same logic. The CIN and the licence are scanned from a photo, so the names land in the contract without anyone retyping them: part of check number 1 is dealt with. Check-in and check-out are done with photos, odometer reading and fuel level at both ends, and late or excess charges calculate themselves.

Now the limits. A shared list is only worth what the agencies put into it: if nobody reports, it is empty. It will never replace the first three checks, because a customer never reported anywhere can perfectly well turn out to be your next lost file.

There is also the matter of personal data. In Morocco, law 09-08 governs the processing of personal data and the CNDP expects such processing to be declared. A file that ties a CIN to a reason for an incident is not a trivial thing: it implies a legal basis, informing the customer, a retention period and a right to contest. We are building the feature in that spirit, reason mandatory, reporting agency identified, date visible. For your own practice, check with your legal adviser what you may record and what your rental terms need to say.

And if a colleague tells you that a WhatsApp group between five agencies does the same job, he is not wrong on the substance. He is wrong on two points: it cannot be consulted in ten seconds while a customer stands there waiting, and it disappears the day whoever kept the group alive stops.

Once it has happened, the hour matters more than the tone.

H+2. One call, calm. Two hours late is nothing unusual. Note the time and what was said, in the file.

H+6 to H+12. Call the second number, the one from check 3. This is where it pays for itself: cars do sometimes reappear the same day simply because a third person has been told.

H+24. Formal notice in writing, by WhatsApp at the very least, keeping the trace. Restate the end of the contract and the daily rate that keeps running.

H+48. Put the file together and go to the police station: signed contract, copies of the CIN and the licence, departure condition report with photos and odometer reading, proof of payment, call history. Your legal adviser will talk to you about breach of trust, article 547 of the Moroccan penal code expressly covering the hire of goods. What matters at your end: a complete file moves, a patched-together one drags.

A word about the money: the criminal fine set out in that article is small next to your loss. The complaint is there to recover the vehicle and to establish the facts, not to compensate you. Compensation is fought in the civil courts, and civil cases are won with dated evidence: that is the real reason to take a photo condition report seriously.

This is also where GPS tracking changes the conversation: live position, trip history, real mileage, an alert when the vehicle leaves a zone. On our side, a module at 69 MAD a month. On a single vehicle recovered, the cost question stops being a question.

The rates, so you do not have to go hunting for them: Starter at 99 MAD a month, Professional at 399, Enterprise at 899. The online booking site is a module at 49 MAD, GPS tracking at 69 MAD. Fourteen days of trial, no bank card.

And let us be clear about the 99 MAD plan: it is enough to get you out of the paper notebook, customers, contracts, planning, one single place that says who has which car and until when. If you have several branches, several users and rights that need separating, it is not the right plan, and nobody is doing you a favour by saying otherwise.

The honest calculation is not a monthly one. At 399 MAD a month you are a little under 5,000 MAD over the year: one single deposit swallowed by a file that ended badly. If the procedure makes you avoid one bad file a year, that settles it. If it does not, stay on your spreadsheet.

One last point. If your customers already reach you on WhatsApp or Instagram, push those requests through an online booking form: the information arrives before the customer does. You run the four checks calmly, the day before, rather than on a Friday evening with three people waiting.

If you take away only one thing: print the four checks, stick the sheet on the counter, and give your agents the explicit right to refuse a rental. That last point is almost always the one missing. An agent who is afraid of being blamed for a lost sale will rent to anybody.

Write the rule down: if one point does not add up, it is a higher deposit or a refusal, and it is not up for debate at the counter. An honest customer accepts two minutes of checking without blinking; the one who loses his temper because you are reading his licence has just told you something.

Software does not replace that rule, it only makes it hard to get around. You can see how all of this is organised inside the application, but start with the sheet taped to the counter.