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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:

• School Rules
• Airside / Airport Rules
• Pilot Operating Handbooks (POH) for your aircraft
• Checklists
• Recommended routes
• Links to local weather stations
• ... and so on.

I'm excited to announce a new feature is now available!

I know issuing invoices and taking payments from students is part of the job, but I also know it's a headache preparing them, keeping track of who owes what and chasing up people who pay late. In terms of time productively spent doing what you love, it just isn't efficient.

I'm a member at a local flying club and I'm told I'm one of a handful of people who pay invoices early. So at least I'm not costing the school time chasing me up for late payment. But even so, someone has spent a few days working out all the invoices, entering them into the bookkeeping system, issuing them and checking payments have arrived in the bank account. It just seems like such a waste of time and money, especially when the booking system knows exactly who flew, in which aircraft and with which instructor.

Most of the development focus is on the new billing system at the moment, but we did have some time to add a small feature which may be useful.

When you use the system to record all your flights, the system collects the fuel added (in Litres). The total fuel and the burn rate are now shown on the Aircraft tab, and they look something like this:

Imagine you've spent a few minutes with your student, writing their training notes for the last flight. Right at that critical moment when you're nearly finished someone else needs your attention. Perhaps it's the phone, or maybe someone has just arrived for their air experience and you want to make them welcome.

It's easy to get distracted and forget to click Save, which means all those notes you've spent time working on are not stored in the system. You may have even logged out of the computer, or closed the browser window.

More than half of all internet browsing is now on a mobile device such as a phone or tablet (as compared to a desktop or laptop).

So it was important that we create a booking system that would run on mobile devices as well as desktops. Typically flying schools have access to computers in their offices, so while on site it isn't such an issue, but I still wanted as much as possible of the system to be mobile-friendly. I'm pleased to say the entire system works on mobile!

Do you want to sell air experience flights online? Perhaps you already do, but it isn't fully automated.

UPDATE, 20 Jan 2020: The work mentioned later is now complete, meaning you can sell your own flying school vouchers online straight from your website!