Store leased Christmas lights one customer per labelled bin, with an asset record behind each bin: the strands, the bin number, the condition at takedown and the buyout value. Jason Geiman at Christmas Lights HQ puts a 10 by 20 storage unit at $2,000 to $3,000 a year; across 50 leased customers that is $40 to $60 a season each, against a $1,865.20 lease season on GlowBid's default card. Below: the record, the bin system and the liability cap.
I run a permanent lighting company in Ottawa and I built GlowBid. LightQuoter's inventory guide gives you a spreadsheet and tells you to hold off on leasing because it "turns inventory into a real asset-management problem." It does. The answer is not to avoid the lease; it is to keep the record the lease needs.
What goes in the asset record?#
One row per item type a customer has on their house or in your storage. This is the record GlowBid keeps on every lease estimate; on paper it is six columns.
| Field |
What you write |
Why it is there |
| Description |
"C9 socket cord, 9 runs cut to the drawing", "C9 LED bulbs, warm white", "All-in-one clips" |
The takedown crew collects it, the re-install crew hangs it |
| Quantity |
222 ft, 225, 300 |
Enough to re-order a match, not a guess |
| Storage bin |
41 |
The only thing the August crew needs to find it |
| Condition |
new, good, worn, damaged or retired |
Written at takedown; sets the repair list and the buyout |
| Buyout value |
$300.00 |
What the homeowner pays to keep it, per the disposition clause |
| Notes |
"Peak 3 strand replaced January 2027" |
The history a spreadsheet loses |
The record hangs off the customer and the lease, not off a product category. That is the difference between inventory and assets. Inventory is how much cord you have; an asset is whose cord it is, where it is, what shape it is in and what it is worth. Tinsel's inventory tracking works by type and job and can tag materials by client; LightQuoter's spreadsheet has a tote number and a condition note. Neither carries a buyout value, and a free-text condition note is not a state a renewal call can price from; the buyout is the number the lease turns on.
How do you label the bins?#
The bin gets a number, the number goes on the lid and two sides, and the number goes in the record. Nothing else on the bin: not the customer's name, not the address. A bin with a name on it is a customer list in a storage unit that a landlord, a contractor or a thief can read.
Inside the bin, each strand is tagged with the run it came off, in the words on the drawing: roofline front, roofline garage, peak 1 through peak 4, ridge. Geiman's method is colour-coded zip ties, one red tie on the right for first-floor strands and two for second-floor, with peaks numbered right to left. It works, and it needs a key. Ours is simpler because the drawing already names the runs: the tag matches the run label, the run label matches the work order, and the crew hanging it in November has the drawing on the phone with the same names. Change the drawing and the labels are wrong, which is why the drawing is the master and the tags copy it.
The tag goes on the male end, because that is the end the crew reaches for first. Cord gets coiled to the run's length, not to a standard loop, so a 42 ft garage run comes out of the bin as a 42 ft coil.
Trays, totes or boxes?#
Geiman's storage post is the one credible comparison I have found and I agree with it. Stackable fruit trays ventilate and take the least space per strand, and they are the hardest to source. Plastic totes are weather-resistant and stackable but seal in moisture, so drill drainage holes or leave the lids loose in a dry shop. Cardboard is cheap and breathes and lasts two seasons if it is lucky.
What the comparison misses is the record. A tray with no number is a pile with better airflow. Pick the box your unit and your budget allow, then spend the saved money on labels and the hour it takes to write the record.
Where do you store, and what does it cost?#
A shop shelf if you have one, a rental unit if you do not, and a heated one only if the product needs it. Geiman's figure for a 10 by 20 rental unit is $2,000 to $3,000 a year. That unit holds a lot of bins, and the cost per customer is the number to carry into the lease line:
| Leased customers |
Unit at $2,500 a year |
Per customer per season |
Share of a $1,865.20 lease season |
| 25 |
$2,500 |
$100.00 |
5.4% |
| 50 |
$2,500 |
$50.00 |
2.7% |
| 100 |
$2,500 |
$25.00 |
1.3% |
The lease season is the recurring price on the two-storey in our lease agreement template, GlowBid's default seasonal card. At 25 customers, storage is a real line and the lease premium over a plain re-install has to carry it. At 100 it is noise. That is the arithmetic behind lease vs buy: the lease pays you for storage, in-season repairs and takedown, and storage is the cheapest of the three once the unit is full.
Two costs that do not show on the unit's invoice. Replacement stock: a shelf of matching bulbs and cord so a worn strand can be swapped in August without an order. And the January hour per customer to test, tag, pack and write the record, which is the same hour LightQuoter's January checklist describes (spreadsheet updated the same week takedown finishes) and the one that gets skipped in the second week of January when the trucks are cold.
Customer-owned or leased: which inventory is which?#
Both live in your unit and they are not the same thing. Customer-owned lights that you store as a service are their property in your care: you owe reasonable care and a return, and the seasonal service agreement in our contract template says so. Leased lights are your property on their house, and the lease says so in clause 1. The record is the same six fields for both; the buyout column is only meaningful on the lease.
LightQuoter's advice is to start customer-owned and lease only once your labelling and spreadsheet discipline has survived a full season. The labelling is identical either way. What is simpler about customer-owned product is that it has no buyout value and no wear budget, so the spreadsheet does not need to know what it is worth. Once you lease, it does, because the display is on your books, it comes back to you at the end of the term under a flat schedule, and the homeowner can buy it under a declining one. The record is what turns that from a guess into a number.
What is the storage liability cap?#
It is clause 6 of our lease: off-season storage is included, and our liability for lights in storage is limited to replacement with equivalent product or $500, whichever is less. Sample wording, not legal advice; have it reviewed for your province or state.
The cap is there for the burst pipe, the break-in and the unit that floods, and it does two things. It stops a claim at retail for product that cost you a quarter of that at the supplier. And "equivalent product" says what the homeowner actually expects, which is that the house looks the same next year, not that they get the same strands back. The record is what makes the clause work: without a condition written at takedown, a dispute about whether the strands were worn before the flood is your word against theirs.
Two more notes. Ask your broker whether customer property in your care is covered under your policy and at what limit, because the lease cap is what you owe the homeowner, not what your insurer owes you. And put the same cap on the seasonal service agreement when you store customer-owned lights, because those strands are worth less and the homeowner's estimate of them is worth more.
A worked example: one lease customer's record#
The two-storey from the lease template: 130 ft of roofline, 72 ft of peaks, three jumps, C9 LED at 12 inch spacing, 202 lit feet, on a three-season flat lease at $1,865.20 a season after year one. Here is bin 41, written at the season 1 takedown, with the buyout column set from supplier replacement cost, which is our example setting and not a default.
| Description |
Quantity |
Bin |
Condition |
Buyout value |
Replacement at supplier prices |
| C9 socket cord, 9 runs cut to the drawing |
222 ft |
41 |
good |
|
$67.73 at $305.10 per 1,000 ft |
| C9 LED bulbs, warm white, faceted |
225 (9 packs) |
41 |
good, 3 replaced |
|
$179.55 at $19.95 per 25 |
| All-in-one clips |
300 (3 packs) |
41 |
worn |
|
$41.97 at $13.99 per 100 |
| Vampire plugs, male and female |
8 |
41 |
good |
|
$8.00 at $25 per 25 |
| Photocell timer |
1 |
on the house |
good |
sold to the homeowner in season 1 |
|
| Display total |
|
|
|
$300.00 |
$297.25 |
Three numbers fall out of the record. Replacement is $297.25, so the $500 storage cap sits above the whole display on this house; the cap protects you on the 500 ft house, not this one. The buyout is $300 in season 1 and it drops as the condition column moves from good to worn, so when the homeowner asks in season 3 whether they can keep the lights, the answer is a number from the record, not a negotiation. And storage at 50 customers is $50 a season against $1,865.20, so the lease line is carrying the repairs and the takedown far more than the shelf.
Footage came from the drawing, the way the free roofline tool does it, so the 222 ft of cord is the 202 lit feet with the 10 percent buffer and the record matches the quote.
How does the record get used across the term?#
The lease is signed in October. GlowBid creates the install job and the takedown job for every season of the term on the day of signing, so a three-season lease has six jobs on the board before the first strand goes up. The takedown guide covers the window and the pricing; the storage side is four moments:
- Season 1 install. The record is created from the bill of materials the drawing produced: cord by run, bulbs, clips, plugs. Condition new. Bin number assigned.
- Takedown, January. The crew's checklist asks for strands labelled by run, damaged bulbs and clips noted, packed into the bin recorded on the estimate, and a photo of the packed and labelled bins. The office updates the condition column the same day.
- August. The condition column is the repair list. Worn clips get replaced from the shelf before the truck rolls, and the season 2 install job carries the bin number so the crew loads the right box.
- Renewal, or the end of the term. Under return, the record says what came back and what it is worth to the next house. Under buyout or keep, the buyout column is the price. The install and takedown checklist is the paper version of step 2.
That is the whole system, and it is the part LightQuoter's warning leaves out: the lease is an asset-management problem only if nobody wrote anything down in January.
Mistakes we have made or watched others make#
- Customer names on bins. A storage unit is not a locked office; use numbers and keep the key in the record.
- Standard coils. A 42 ft run coiled to a 25 ft loop is two coils, and the November crew joins the wrong ones.
- No condition at takedown. Every dispute about a flooded unit starts with "they were new."
- Storing the timer. The homeowner bought it in season 1; it stays on the house and off your record.
- A storage cap in the lease and no clause on the seasonal service agreement. Customer-owned strands are the ones that get argued over.
- Skipping the January hour. The bin gets packed, the record does not get written, and August starts from a pile.
- Tracking by product type only. You know you own 4,000 ft of cord and not which house any of it goes back on.
- A buyout "to be quoted at that time." Write the number in the record now and let the condition column move it.
The record, the bin number and the buyout value live on the lease estimate in GlowBid, next to the drawing the footage came from, and the takedown job carries the bin number to the crew's phone. The founding price covers the lease chain on every plan.
