Discounts, Block Time, and Reimbursements

A few months ago at FSANA 2020 I uncovered some accounting needs and got some great suggestions about how to better handle discounts. Going to shows like FSANA and others has always provided great opportunities for me to talk to prospective customers and get a sense for what they need and I was pleasantly surprised when someone's request turned out to be the solution to multiple problems I had been trying to solve.

TLDR; Check out this video demonstrating the new features.

Discount Item Mapping

The default behavior when setting a special price with price tier has been to simply reduce the amount charged for that item. This can work a lot of the time, but sometimes it breaks down. Leaseback owners don't always appreciate their airplanes flying for free just because a new CFI needs to get checked out. For this you can create a CFI checkout price tier that zeros out the flight by charging the regular price for the airplane time and then using a discount item that is tied to your CFI checkouts expense account. The leaseback owner still gets paid for the use of the aircraft and your expense for using the aircraft has been tracked.

Block Time

Whenever people asked me about block time I never had anything to say other than "I haven't quite figured out how to make that work in a way that makes sense" and now I'm happy to say that there is a solution. You can create block time entries for a single aircraft, a group of aircraft, or for flight instruction time.

As your members go through their block time they can audit how much they have used by reviewing their member page which will also show any special pricing options you have configured for them and what aircraft they are authorized to use.

Fuel Reimbursements as Discounts

Previously a fuel reimbursement could be issued as a payment credit. While this is still supported it is now possible to select a fuel reimbursement from a previous flight when creating a new invoice and use the reimbursement balance as a discount. When the invoice gets imported into quickbooks the discount item for the fuel reimbursement will show up as a fuel expense associated with the reimbursement airplane's accounting class so you can still accurately handle your fuel expense accounting.

There is always more work going on to improve the system. If there is something else that would really help your organization manage their aircraft then contact us at [email protected] and lets see if it is already on the long list of features we want to add, but haven't had the demand to make it a priority.