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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!

Have you ever wanted to book an hour someone else has already booked? What if they cancelled their booking; wouldn't you like to know?

We thought it would be nice if the system could keep track of which slots you'd like to book and could let you know if they become available. This really only applies to students and members because instructors will generally want to guarantee their bookings with students can go ahead.

As a student or member looking to make a booking, you may have seen "Busy" in the booking form. When you see this, it means someone has booked these slots, and they have not opted in to be contacted by other members.

In some circumstances you might want to add some additional notes when booking out. This is an optional text field, and you can use it for any purpose you like. For example, you might want to give additional information about your intended route or include your total fuel on board.

If you fly in someone else's aircraft - perhaps when you revalidate a pilot's license - you probably want to record this in the booking system. But you won't want to create an aircraft record for use just once, or clutter the system with aircraft details you don't use regularly.