This is our general news and announcements page.
The system was developed with a field to record fuel added before booking out. This suits schools that provide their own fuel bowser or jerrycans.
But if you use fuel from an airfield fuel pump and want to record this in the log, this has always been a number of steps: booking out for the taxi to the pump, booking back in and out again with the fuel added.
But now you can record fuel added before booking out or when adding flight details.
This request has come up a few times, mainly for night flying. Normal bookings are by picking time slots, but instructors can now make bookings outside their working hours by clicking make a manual booking.
The system has a feature to allow you to send all flights, (including those out of airport hours) to any email address you like. The intended use is for the airport operator to more easily record flights out of hours. The email contains a link to a list of flights for the previous week. It contains only the flight and aircraft details; personal information is removed.
There is now an example link for you to view your flight summary to see how the information is presented.
Newsletters, booking confirmations, reminders and follow-up emails are sent by the system with your school email address in the "reply-to" field. That means if your customer replies to your newsletter or booking confirmation, it will be sent direct from them to you.
Have you ever wanted to send a newsletter at a particular time? Perhaps what you're writing is time-sensitive, and you want to promote a particular event or price reduction at a certain time. Or maybe you just want to maintain that professional image by only emailing in office hours! The newsletter form now includes a date and time field so you can choose when the newsletter is sent.
It's common to invoice students based on the Hobbs meter while service intervals depend on the Tach time (which relates to engine revolutions).
When entering flight details, you normally record the engine hour meter. For aircraft with a Tach timer fitted, this should be used because it determines the next service time. Otherwise, for aircraft fitted with a conventional Hobbs meter, use that. If an aircraft has both, use the Tach timer.
What if you could choose between Day View and List View?
We've heard a few times that people prefer to use the Day view for getting an overall view on the bookings. The List view is more powerful as it can be filtered to show cancellations, or waiting bookings. But as a list it is harder to read at a glance.
We've re-written the system that sends reminders for bookings. The system has sent these since the beginning, but early in 2019 a powerful general purpose system under Admin > Reminders & follow-ups was developed. This is where all your follow-up emails to students etc and reminders are managed. And it's a better system for handling booking reminders.
We received some valuable feedback from one of the schools using a trial system. It was about billing and it flagged up a situation we hadn't anticipated.
We designed the system to allow for different rates for each aircraft, type and instructor. But the feedback was about instrument training. The flying school charge a premium for this compared to their standard dual rate. After about a week's work this is now a new feature in the system!
Would you like to offer remote ground school sessions? Using the system, it is now possible to set up a voucher for use as ground school training. The billing system handles the invoicing and tax for you, and once you provide the training session, it marks the voucher as used. Nowadays people are using remote working systems such as Google Hangouts, Microsoft Teams and Zoom. But you could deliver a course as a one to one session over Skype or FaceTime.
