Flight School Invoicing

Most billing errors at a flight school come from retyping. Someone reads Hobbs off a clipboard, looks up the rental rate, remembers the instructor's rate, and builds an invoice by hand. Sky Schedule removes that step.

When the instructor or front desk completes a flight, they enter Hobbs and Tach in and out, flight instruction hours, ground instruction hours, and landings. If auto-billing is on, a draft invoice appears in the Auto billing tab right away. It can include:

• Aircraft rental for the billable time, measured by Hobbs, Tach (with an optional multiplier), reservation time, or flight time, depending on how your school bills.
• Instructor time at that instructor's flight rate and ground rate.
• Membership discounts for students on a membership plan.
• Package hours drawn from a prepaid package, so covered time isn't billed twice.
• Fuel reimbursement credits for fuel receipts pilots upload on the reservation, when you turn that on.
• Sales tax on the lines you've marked taxable.

Every aircraft and every instructor rate shows up in the Products Library automatically, and you can add your own products for fees, supplies, or discounts. Flights that weren't auto-billed can be invoiced from the reservation with Add invoice, and the composer handles anything else you need to bill, from a headset to a checkride fee.

Not every school wants an invoice in front of a student the second a flight is completed. The setting "Review auto-drafted invoices before customers can pay" keeps drafts with your staff. Students can't see or pay them until someone at the school sends or charges them.

A typical review looks like this:

1. Open the Auto billing tab and pick a draft.
2. Check the meter times and rates against the flight. Fix a typo in Hobbs, add a line, or remove one.
3. Choose what happens next: send the invoice, charge the student's card or bank account on file, apply their prepaid balance, or leave it as a draft for later.

If you leave review off, students can see their own drafts and pay them directly, which suits schools that trust their meter entries and want money in faster.

Sending. A sent invoice is emailed with the PDF attached and a Pay Now link to a secure checkout page. The link doesn't expire, so a student who opens the email a month later can still pay. If a parent or guardian email is on the student's profile, they're copied on the invoice.

Paying. Students pay by card from the link, or with a card they've already saved. Staff can charge a saved card or bank account from the invoice, or pay it from the student's prepaid balance. Payment options are covered in more depth on the flight school billing software page.

Paying at the end of the flight. Students with permission to pay their own flights can complete the flight and pay its invoice in the same step. That works well for renters who fly on weekends when the office is closed.

Receipts. Turn on automatic receipts and the person billed gets a PDF receipt as soon as an invoice is paid.

Reminders. Send a reminder from any unpaid invoice. With unpaid invoice reminders turned on, Sky Schedule keeps following up every 3 days until the invoice is paid or voided, so the office doesn't keep a list of who still owes what.

Split bills. Two students sharing a cross-country flight, or a safety pilot splitting the cost, is common. Click Split bill in the invoice composer and the lines are divided evenly between the customer and the other person on the flight. The second invoice can be edited before it goes out. For flights that are always shared, set the activity type to split the bill and auto-drafts are divided evenly among everyone on the reservation, up to 4 ways.

Refunds. Refund a card payment in full or in part from the invoice. A sales-tax-only refund can be credited to the student's balance instead of going back to the card.

Voids. Void an invoice that shouldn't exist, and its Pay Now link closes so nobody pays it by accident. Package hours drawn by a voided invoice go back on the package.

Mark paid. When a student pays at the counter, record the payment as cash, check, Zelle, or another method so the invoice closes and the balance stays correct.

Drafts follow the flight. If staff correct a completed flight before its invoice is sent, the draft updates to match. Once an invoice is sent or paid, editing the flight never changes it, so what the student was billed stays on record.