TachTab vs Coflyt

Short version: Coflyt is a maintenance and compliance tool with billing attached. TachTab is a billing tool and nothing else. If your worry is whether the annual is due and the ADs are current, Coflyt. If your worry is who owes what and whether the engine fund is real, TachTab.

Choose Coflyt if…

• Airworthiness compliance is what keeps you awake — inspections, ADs, squawks, service bulletins.
• You want your A&P looking at the same maintenance record you are.
• You need scheduling in the same app.
• You're a single owner, or an owner-plus-one, and the money side is simple enough to handle in a spreadsheet.

Coflyt does maintenance tracking properly and has done for years. We don't compete there and we don't intend to.

Choose TachTab if…

• Three or more people share the aircraft and the monthly reckoning has become somebody's unpaid second job.
• Someone has asked "how much is actually in the overhaul fund?" and the answer took more than five seconds.
• Partners buy fuel out of pocket at different airports and crediting it back correctly is a monthly argument.
• Your dues should split by ownership share, not equally.
• You need statements that survive scrutiny — because one day a partner will leave, and their share has to be worked out from the books.

Where the difference actually bites

The engine reserve. Coflyt tells you how many hours are left to TBO. TachTab shows the hours and the money next to each other — cash accrued against hours flown, visible to every partner, all the time. Knowing the engine is 400 hours from overhaul is useless if nobody knows whether $28,000 exists to pay for it. Partnerships don't break up over maintenance schedules. They break up over money nobody can see.

Corrections. A real App Store review of Coflyt, from an aircraft partnership:

Our partnership paid the $360 for annual subscription… Most frustrating aspect is the "accounting" function, it is almost useless, once a flight/charge/payment posts it is not editable, you have to use weird workarounds to get the balance to display correctly

TachTab was built around this exact problem. Correct a flight and it issues a credit memo plus a replacement invoice automatically. The wrong number is never silently overwritten — it's voided, on the record, with the right one beside it. That's how a bookkeeper expects to see it, and it's how you avoid the conversation where a partner asks why the number changed.

Fuel credits. Partner lands away, buys 40 gallons on their own card, photographs the receipt. TachTab credits it against their wet-rate bill automatically, on that flight's invoice. Doing this by hand once a month across three partners and four FBOs is precisely the job people give up on.

Share-weighted dues. A 40/30/30 partnership shouldn't split the hangar bill in thirds. TachTab does the arithmetic to the cent, every month, without anyone thinking about it.

Where Coflyt beats us, plainly

• Maintenance and AD tracking. We have none. If that matters, they win.
• Scheduling depth. Both of us have it. Theirs sits alongside maintenance and inspections in one app; ours does one thing they don't — the booking you made becomes the invoice you pay, with the meter start already filled in.
• Mobile app. Coflyt ships native apps. TachTab is an installable web app — it works offline in a hangar with no signal and queues the flight log, but it's not in the App Store.
• Track record. They've been at this for years. We're new.

Plenty of groups run both: Coflyt for the aeroplane, TachTab for the money. That's a perfectly sensible answer and we won't argue you out of it.

Money

On payments: TachTab never touches your money. Your group connects its own Stripe account and partner payments land there directly. We're a subscription you pay, not a place your money sits. For a group deciding whether to trust new software with the club account, that distinction is the whole conversation.

The honest summary

If you have one aeroplane and one owner, you probably want Coflyt and a spreadsheet.

If you have one aeroplane and four owners, the spreadsheet is the problem, and that's us.

Not sure? Email hello@tachtab.com and describe your group. If Coflyt is the better answer we'll say so — we'd rather lose a trial than gain a customer who churns in six weeks.