This is our general news and announcements page.
You might already know Flight School Booking can sell vouchers for air experiences, ground school and so on.
Until now, this has only been available on the Gold Plan. But we're now making that feature available on the Silver Plan.
After a suggestion we received from one of the schools, we've added some options under Admin > Billing > Notifications.
These allow you to turn off the notification emails sent to customers when a new invoice is added to their account. You can also choose a delay of up to 7 days.
Feedback we received was that students on a land-away were surprised at receiving an invoice so quickly after their first flight and by adding a longer delay (e.g. 5 hours) the student would receive them at home.
Customer information becomes outdated when people move house, or change their phone number or email address. When you give your customers access to the system, they can maintain this information themselves. But it's easy to forget.
User summary tabs now include a Contact information section, which displays a warning if the user is missing an email address, postal address, phone number or next of kin.
You'll find new settings under Admin > Bookings.
The orginal setting to add time slots if sunset is later than office hours has been extended to allow for removing slots and for an allowance (in minutes). The system can be set to remove slots from the booking form if the slot is during sunset (+ the allowance).
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.
