Blog

Someone recently pointed out how time-consuming it was to use the system for cash sales.

We suspect most flying schools are not handling a lot of cash, and not putting through large numbers of cash transactions.

Some schools have asked about closer integration between Flight School Booking's billing system and their bookkeeping software. This would save entering each invoice or customer in the bookkeeping package while still having a copy of every transaction. We don't think it's necessary to duplicate this information - see "Simplify your bookkeeping", but if you would still rather keep everything in the books, read on!

I'm quite excited about this feature, being paperless here since 2012 I should have thought of it already. If you're maintaining paper copies of agreements, membership forms or signed terms and conditions, you might find this useful!

Instead of - or as well as - keeping the paper, you can upload documents into a customer's account, making it really easy to find them if you need to. No more manual searching through paper copies!

A new safety reporting system is now live for the Silver or Gold Plans, including trial systems.

Thanks go to one of the schools for this suggestion!

Someone asked whether it would be possible to show the times of sunrise and sunset on the booking system. That way they could tell at a glance whether the flight was possible (Day / VFR).

This feature is now live, with the times shown just underneath the form. It also shows a moon symbol to the side of the time slots before sunrise and after sunset. Pilots are still expected to check official sunrise and sunset times for their location prior to flight to remain legally within VFR rules.

The system calculates the times for any date chosen. To do this it needs a location (latitude and longitude). You'll find these fields in your system under Admin > Basic settings > Location & time zone.

Here in UK we were able to resume dual flying with an instructor this week.

And perhaps as things get busier, you might find the following new feature useful: drag and drop.

The new layout shows a popup if you hover over a booking or any unavailability period. It also combines slots into one cell, allowing more details to be shown such as times, aircraft or instructor (space permitting).

The Day View also features the equivalent of a time-bar. Any booking slots prior to the current time are shown greyed out (see the first two slots above). This makes it easy to see who should be active 'now'.

Thanks to one of our existing customers for this suggestion!

If you've used the system to manage your customers, you will already be aware of the built-in roles available. When setting up your users I expect you will have picked "Student" or "Member" for most of them, and perhaps a few people as "Office Staff".

You can now define your own roles (i.e. groups of users).

We're really pleased with how this feature turned out!

If your school sell logbooks, training books or your own merchandise, you can now set up a short list of products in the billing system. For each product, you choose what gets transferred to a customer invoice, the price, tax code and accounts code (if you use them). Doing this setup once makes it a lot quicker to sell products and means your instructors and office staff can avoid worrying about using the wrong tax code or price.