This is our general news and announcements page.
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.
Thanks to one of our trial users for this improvement!
If you're a long time user of the booking system you might be used to the clean and simple look. But we think this change is worth the visual assault on your eyes!
Announcing our new YouTube channel!
The system is designed to be easy to use, and most people use the system to book lessons without even knowing there's a user guide! But there are some useful tips in here which make using the booking system faster, especially when run as a web-app on a phone.
We decided to make a series of videos to act as a quick "how-to", so you can actually see how to make a booking, pay for flights and so on.
We've split the videos up into two playlists (so far!). The first playlist is aimed at people who use our booking system to book flying lessons, or aircraft (qualified pilots). You'll find this in our YouTube channel in the User Guide playlist. We've purposefully kept each video as short as possible, usually under 90 seconds.
This post is a follow-up from the post in October about automating your voucher sales. At the time, we integrated with Squarespace eCommerce and automated the voucher sales process. Squarespace use Stripe to take payments, and after the big announcement about our new billing system, so do we. So it makes sense to provide you a better system so you aren't tied and can use any website you like.
If you record the fuel added to aircraft, the system has been showing the average fuel consumption based on the previous 30 days flights.
But we've found over the winter this just isn't accurate enough because the flight time for some aircraft has dropped to single digits per month. That means we're dividing by a small number, which leads to a big variation in the fuel consumption figure.
So we're now running a more thorough calculation, based on the last 100 hours engine run time instead of the last 30 days of flights.
There may be some information you don't want to post publicly on your school website. The Restricted content area may be a good place to post this, and direct your students and members to it.
Pages can include text, images and even attached files such as PDFs, ZIP files and so on. You can then restrict access to groups of users, for example students, associate members and so on.
You might the restricted content pages useful for:
