GETTING STARTED
Where to start.
Inventory, rentals, power, DMX, then invoicing and teamwork. That order and no other: it is the one in which the application refuses nothing.
1. Fill the inventory
Always start here. Everything else hangs off it: a rental takes gear out of the inventory, a power calculation adds up its watts, a DMX patch reads its channel counts.
Enter the equipment
Inventory tab. For each item: name, quantity, condition, location. For anything that draws power, its wattage. For a DMX fixture, its channel count and its modes.
The catch — Gear hired in from a colleague is not gear you own. An inventory holds both, and mixing them falsifies your stock the day you return the truck. Separate them from the start.
A fixture’s modes
The same model often exists in 8, 16 or 32 channels. Enter every available mode: the patch will pick the one actually set on the unit.
The catch — The channel count depends on the mode, not just on the model. A unit in 16-channel mode addressed at 001 occupies 001 to 016: the next cannot start before 017. A wrongly recorded mode produces a wrong patch with nothing to flag it.
2. Take gear out and bring it back
A rental says who has what, since when, until when. It is also what makes availability real rather than theoretical.
Create a rental
Rentals tab. The customer, the dates, the equipment lines. A rental starts as "planned", becomes "out" when the truck leaves, then "back" on return.
The catch — Only rentals that are **out** hold gear. Counting planned ones would make the inventory unavailable as soon as you sketch a quote — and you would stop entering quotes, which defeats the purpose.
Record the returns
On return, enter what comes back, line by line. What is missing stays visible: the screen tells you what never came back, and from whom.
The catch — The inventory never moves when gear leaves. It says what you own; what is out is calculated. Decrementing on the way out would be simpler and wrong — one forgotten rental would leave a stock figure nothing puts right, and you could no longer tell theft from breakage from a typing mistake.
3. Prepare the power
Do this before the rig, not during. This is the screen that keeps a breaker from tripping mid-show.
Declare the boards
Boards tab. Each board has a number of circuits and their rating. A 16 A circuit at 230 V holds about 3,600 W in theory, less in practice.
Let Scenika allocate
Power tab. Hungriest first, then into the first circuit that takes it. The rule is simple on purpose: a technician must be able to redo it in their head on site, because it is by hand that they plug in.
The catch — A unit hungrier than a whole circuit is refused and named, never forced in. And this calculation is not an electrical inspection: it ignores cable length and section, the state of the board, real simultaneity and inrush current — a discharge lamp can draw several times its rated power while striking, and that is often when a breaker trips.
4. Address the DMX
The patch tied to the real inventory: overlaps show before the rig, not during.
Place the fixtures
DMX calculator tab. Pick the item, its mode, its address. The 512-channel map shows the universe at a glance: what is taken, what is left.
The catch — A DMX universe holds 512 channels, not 511 and not 513. Beyond that you need a second universe — Scenika says so instead of producing an impossible patch, and offers the last usable address.
The free version
The same calculation exists as a public web page, no sign-up, on the Scenika site. The formula lives in one place: the two cannot diverge.
5. Invoice, and work as a team
Two things Scenika does not do alone, and that is deliberate.
Export to Ohmnia
From a rental, Scenika prepares invoice lines — description, quantity, price, inventory reference — for Ohmnia to import.
The catch — Scenika does not invoice, and will not. Building a second invoicing module here would mean maintaining VAT and numbering rules twice, in two programs that would eventually disagree.
Multi-workstation mode
A rental company has several people touching the same inventory. Settings → Multi-workstation mode: the machines then talk to a Nexika server you install yourself, on your network.
The catch — Local mode stays the default. Without an explicit choice from you, nothing changes and everything works offline. And the server refuses to listen on the network until an administrator exists and encryption is on — otherwise the first passer-by would create their own account and take the inventory.