How TachTab works

Step 1

Bring what you already have

Drop in your MyFBO export or your club spreadsheet and the group builds itself. Nobody retypes anything.

Signing up asks for your tail number, your rate and the people you fly with. If that already exists in a file — a MyFBO report, a Flight Circle export, or the spreadsheet a treasurer has been keeping for nine years — put the file in instead and TachTab reads the aircraft, the rates and the partners out of it.

It shows you what it found and which column it thinks is which before anything is saved, so you can correct a wrong guess rather than discover it a month later.

Starting from nothing is fine too. It takes about two minutes either way.

Step 2

Tell it what your aeroplane costs to fly

You do this once, when you sign up, and then almost never touch it again.

Put in the hourly rate your group charges, say whether that rate is wet (fuel included) or dry, and pick whether you bill on the Hobbs meter or the tach. If you also put money aside for the engine overhaul, add the reserve per hour and what you think the overhaul will cost.

Monthly dues — hangar, insurance, the subscriptions — go in here too, as one total for the whole group. TachTab splits that between partners, either equally or by ownership share.

Set the aircraft's home time zone while you are here. Every booking and every flight date is shown in the time zone the aeroplane lives in, so a partner booking from another state doesn't have to do arithmetic to work out who has it on Saturday morning.

Change a rate later and it applies to flights from that point on. Invoices already issued are never quietly rewritten.

Step 3

Book the aeroplane

Pick the aircraft, the start and the end, and add a note if it helps. That's a reservation.

Everyone in the group sees the same calendar, in the aircraft's home time zone. If someone already has it, the booking is refused rather than accepted and argued about later. Two bookings that meet exactly — one ends at noon, the next starts at noon — are allowed on purpose, because handing the aeroplane over at the top of the hour is the normal way a group flies, not an edge case.

If your group charges a daily minimum for long trips, set it per aircraft. A booking that spans more than one calendar day bills at least that much per day, because a partner who takes the aeroplane away for three days has made it unavailable to everyone else for three days whether the engine ran for two hours or twelve.

A flight that starts and finishes on the same day never gets that minimum, however short it is. Charging a full day for a half-hour circuit would make exactly the local flying that keeps an engine healthy the most expensive kind to do.

Step 4

After you land, type in the Hobbs

This is the only thing anyone has to remember to do. It takes about twenty seconds.

Open your booking and log the flight straight from it — the aircraft and the notes are already there, and the starting meter reading is carried over from the last flight, so you only type the number you finished on. If you bought fuel, add the gallons and what you paid.

Then press the button. That's the whole job. The booking is marked as billed, so a trip can't quietly be charged twice.

No booking? Log the flight on its own. Nothing about the calendar is compulsory.

Step 5

The invoice writes itself

You don't build the bill. It already exists by the time you've shut the hangar door.

TachTab works out the hours from the two meter readings, multiplies by your rate, and itemises it. If you flew on a dry rate and bought fuel, the fuel you paid for is credited straight back against the charge, so you are never out of pocket for filling up the group's aeroplane.

Every line says what it is and how it was worked out. Nobody has to take anyone's word for a number.

Step 6

Everyone sees the same numbers

The dashboard is the same for every partner. There is no version only the treasurer can see.

Your own balance is at the top. Underneath it, the engine reserve fund: how much cash is actually in it, what the overhaul is expected to cost, and how many hours are left before the engine reaches TBO. More than one aeroplane means more than one reserve — each aircraft keeps its own fund and its own TBO clock.

That reserve number is the one that quietly poisons partnerships — everybody assumes somebody else is tracking it. Here it's on the front page, and it moves on its own every time somebody flies.

It moves on the hours actually flown, too. If a long trip billed a daily minimum, the extra covers the group's fixed costs — it does not pretend the engine ran longer than it did.

Next to it, what each partner currently owes. Not to shame anyone: so the conversation happens now rather than in a year.

Step 7

On the 1st, statements go out

Dues are added, statements are built per partner, and the emails send themselves.

Each partner gets their own statement for the month with every line itemised — flights, dues, fuel credits, anything you adjusted. They can download it as a PDF, and you can export the lot as a CSV for whoever does your books.

You don't have to do anything to make this happen. It happens whether or not you remember it's the 1st.

Step 8

Partners pay you directly

Connect Stripe once and partners can pay by card or bank transfer from their statement.

The money goes straight into your group's own Stripe account. It never passes through us, and we never hold it. If you'd rather keep taking cheques and bank transfers, you can — mark an invoice paid by hand and write down how it was paid.

Step 9

Typed the wrong Hobbs? Nothing breaks

Void the invoice, give the reason, and TachTab issues a proper credit memo and a replacement.

Nothing is ever silently edited. The original stays, the credit memo cancels it, and the corrected invoice sits alongside both — so three months later the trail still explains itself, and the reserve fund is corrected too.

This sounds like bookkeeping pedantry until the first time someone questions a charge from last spring.