Documentation

A4Flight Academy handbook

How the club, the aircraft, the training syllabus and the member portal work — written for members, students, instructors, mechanics and administrators.

Administration

Club setup guide for admins

First-run checklist for an admin: bases, fleet and rates, maintenance baselines, people and roles, agreements, billing, applications, automations and integrations.

admin

Order of operations

Set the club up in this order — later steps depend on earlier data. The Setup guide under Help & admin walks the same list and verifies each step against live records.

  • Bases → fleet → maintenance baselines.
  • People and roles → agreements.
  • Billing → applications.
  • Daily ops and automations → website → integrations.

1. Bases and 2. Fleet

  1. 1In Fleet → Manage locations, add each base with airport identifier and FBO name.
  2. 2Add each aircraft with tail number, make, model and home base.
  3. 3Set the wet hourly rate — the website and billing both read it from the aircraft record.
  4. 4Open the tail number to complete Hobbs, inspections, installed equipment, ICAO data and weight & balance.

The aircraft table is the single source of truth for rates and specs. Never hard-code a rate anywhere else.

3. Maintenance baselines

  • Record last annual, 100-hour, ELT and transponder dates so remaining time computes correctly.
  • Log known squawks with severity — grounding squawks stop dispatch.
  • Confirm the Hobbs reading matches the airframe so the 100-hour countdown is honest.

4. People and roles

RoleGrants
adminEverything, including billing, website and integrations
instructorStudent records, worksheet grading, instruction billing
mechanicMaintenance items, squawks and airworthiness
ownerOwnership reporting on their aircraft
member / studentBooking, documents, billing and training

Roles stack. Set instructor hourly rates for each CFI; billing beyond queuing instruction is admin-only.

5. Agreements

Publish the membership, rental and safety agreements members must sign. Mark the mandatory ones as required — the portal gates dispatch until they are signed. Bump the version whenever terms change and every member is re-prompted.

6. Billing

  • Confirm dues at $100/month and the club buy-in at $500 including a one-hour checkout.
  • A4 bills everything on one invoice, instruction included; the club pays contract CFIs directly.
  • Card payments run through hosted checkout. Cash, check and ACH are logged manually against the invoice.
  • Issue one test invoice and confirm the line items and totals read correctly before go-live.

7. Applications

Public signup is closed — membership is application only. Applications arrive from the website form into the Applications queue, staff get a notification, and approving or declining sends the applicant a branded email. Approved applicants land on the member track of the setup wizard.

8. Daily ops and automations

  1. 1Open Daily ops and walk today's generated checklist: flights, maintenance, currency and records.
  2. 2In Automations, start every job in Suggest only and review the previewed changes.
  3. 3Switch the jobs you trust to Auto-apply.
  4. 4Enabled jobs run daily at 6:15 AM; the run history shows what each one did.

9. Website and 10. Integrations

  • Website: edit marketing copy per page, publish to go live, reset to fall back to built-in copy.
  • Fleet pages read rates and status from the aircraft table — fix data there, not in copy.
  • Integrations: connect Flight Circle to import aircraft, squawks, maintenance and reservations.
  • Confirm the sender domain shows verified so member email delivers, then announce go-live with Broadcast.
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