Review of our experience with Flight Schedule Pro

FSP customer from Feb 2024 – May 2024

This is not meant to be a rant against FSP, but more of a thorough review of our experience with them so other flight schools and clubs know what they are getting into before they sign any paperwork. I wish we had known.

We began looking for a new scheduling, accounting, maintenance tracking, and billing program for our large flight school. We have two locations with over 40 instructors and 29 aircraft. We did a lot of research on options, including many trials. We finally settled on trying Flight Schedule Pro due to their claims of amazing functionality. But, key point here, you have to sign a contract before you actually get to see how everything works. Up until then, it is merely a trial where they tell you all the bells and whistles you will get. *tricky*

After we signed, we were immediately billed for the first year for all 29 aircraft. What was not explained was how long it would take for us to set meeting with an FSP representative, who would then give us so many options on how to build our program. Yes, we had to go in an set up everything. They do not help you set up anything. It is not a simple process. It took us over 2 months to get the system up and running, the entire time of which we were billed for 29 aircraft. Luckily, we began to have a sense of how this might end up working out, so we only set up our Monterey location with 5 airplanes first.

A few major hiccups…

  1. Billing issues: Customers and CFIs must submit billing twice to pay. First, they create an invoice. Then they have to go separately back in to pay the invoice. We were told they are trying to fix this to not need redundancy as this leads to customers not paying.
  2. Payroll: There is no way to have your instructors paid without go into reports, running a report for CFI billing, looking up CFI pay rate, doing the math, and crediting their account. Simply put, there is no payroll functionality whatsoever. Our system before FSP did all this automatically when a flight was checked in or a CFI billed for ground instruction. Ditto for our office staff. We were told there is an option for employees to clock in and clock out. Not true. We found out after we signed the contract, but were told differently before we signed.
  3. Accounting: Despite being told we could create reports for all our accounting needs, after two months of setup and meetings with their reps, we still couldn’t access data for accounting. It is a total mess, not intuitive, and their reps eventually came back to tell us it can’t be done.
  4. Maintenance tracking: I can’t even begin to explain how badly managed this is. Clunky, hard to use, but great if you love tracking everything except when inspections are coming up or due.
  5. Part 141 and syllabus: The main reason we decided to switch to FSP was help implementing our Part 141 program and desire to enter our own syllabus. While the program does do this, it is an absolute nightmare building a custom course. Even the pre-built syllabi like Sporty’s are hard to use.
  6. Scheduling: This is much better than most programs. The drag-and-drop feature is great. However, there are a lot of technical issues and flags that make it a process to book.

When we discussed all these issues and eventually said this just doesn’t work for us, they were nice enough to only charge us for an entire year of 29 airplanes, regardless of the fact we only used their program for 3 months with 5 airplanes. Honestly, we would be willing to split it as we understand there are costs associated with the video calls to tell us how to build our program, but no such luck.

I wish other schools or clubs had shared their experience before we found out the hard way. I hope this helps someone else. Knowledge is power. Whether you go with Flight Schedule Pro or not, have the information you need before signing anything! We would have saved ourselves many, many thousands of dollars and a huge amount of workload.