This is our general news and announcements page.
The system now allows for setting up a list of locations for schools that operate from more than one airfield.
Bookings contain a location, which is included in the email notifications sent to students and instructors. The system will prevent people from making a booking for a location where an aircraft or instructor is not set as available.
The billing system creates invoices for flights, ground school and membership. Usually you want these to appear in the student's Bills & payments tab so they can make payment (or leave the system to charge their stored card). But schools have asked whether it's possible for invoices to go to a separate address.
Perhaps this is because the student's parents have agreed to fund the lessons, or perhaps schools offer air experience days to an organisation who will pay for everyone's flights.
Since the billing system was introduced early last year it has become one of the most popular features in Flight School Booking.
Getting it up and running was a huge amount of work. To get the feature into production more quickly we simplified the scope, so for example, the system provided the full list of transactions as a CSV file, but did not provide reports, or export directly to Xero, QuickBooks or Sage.
Those of you using the Sales by Customer report will notice quite a big change the next time you run it.
The previous version of this report showed the net sales for each customer invoiced in the report's date range.
The new report still contains this information and more. It has now been expanded to show the following information for each customer:
It is likely you have written procedures which avoid a conflict of interest where an instructor has to check/evaluate a trainee he/she has trained. This has been difficult to keep track of, so we have made a change to the summary section of each student's Training tab which makes it easy.
Someone asked whether it was possible for the Hobbs meter be used to record logged engine hours and the Tacho to log airframe hours.
The system did not cater for this, it was designed to use the Tacho for engine hours and the Hobbs to pre-fill the flight times, which then go on to the airframe hours (minus the taxiing time). It's always been a bit of a headache setting systems up in just the right way because it seems each school does something different!
So we thought it was time to develop something better, and we hope you like it.
Now the government are easing restrictions on flying, perhaps this is a good time to think about currency and safety before self-hire members return to flying your aircraft!
By default the system allows students and members to book out any aircraft, but you can configure restrictions under Admin > Booking out.
Before anyone can book out, they can be required to agree to certain statements. You specify these yourself under Admin, as an example, "I have checked the NOTAMs".
Every aircraft you manage is listed in the Aircraft tab, and instructors are listed under People (filtered by the Instructor role).
You can now restrict aircraft and instructors to certain groups of people.
As an example, some schools operate Group A and Microlight training, and customers need to make sure they book on the right type of aircraft and with an appropriate instructor. By adding two custom roles, you can make your Group A aircraft and instructors visible to only the people who fly group A, and similarly for a microlight group.
The safety reporting part of the system has been popular, especially with large schools.
We have identified a potential problem where reports could easily become lost and forgotten.
The aim is for all reports to be closed once the necessary steps have been taken, and while "open" the report should be updated regularly with comments to explain any work in progress.
By default, the system collects a single "grade" for each training session.
If you want to use your own grading scheme for flight and ground school training, you can. Once you have set this up under Admin > Training notes, the instructors will see a form similar to the one below:
