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One of the quiet frustrations of any scheduling grid is that it was designed for someone else’s operation. Most booking systems hand you a wide grid built for a busy ops desk, then expect a student to make sense of it on a phone screen.

Flight School Booking takes the opposite starting point. The default view is built for the person who books most often — the student — and the wide grid is there for the schools that genuinely need it.

We have made a little improvement to the booking system with a new setting for short notice bookings.

There is now a new Notice board feature.

Use it to keep your customers updated about such things as runway conditions, fuel test status and local weather. The notice board displays a complete list to office staff, but a filtered list to everyone else. Regular users only see notices they have been allowed access to, and do not see any expired notices.

We were asked a question by a couple of schools, and it's worth sharing online. The question was whether it was possible to set up a monitor in the clubroom to display the current day's bookings, just like the booking form. Except, unlike the booking form it should not be possible to make any changes: this is for display only.

The access control system used by Flight School Booking is based on role-based permissions. Until recently, these permissions were set up by us and could not be viewed or changed by anyone. But we've exposed just under 100 of them to system owners to give more control over who can do what. They're all found under the various main features under Admin.

As an example, the permissions tab for Booking out settings is shown below:

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: