TachTab vs Flight Circle

Flight Circle is the most common answer when a club asks "what should we use?", and for a lot of clubs it's the right one. It's a scheduling platform first, with billing built alongside — Hobbs and tach rates, invoicing, auto-pay, QuickBooks sync, at roughly $10 per aircraft per month.

TachTab now does scheduling too, but a narrower version of it — and considerably more of the money.

Choose Flight Circle if…

• The calendar is the daily problem. Who has the aeroplane, when, and did somebody just double-book Saturday.
• You want one system for booking and basic billing, and "basic" is enough.
• You're price-sensitive and the billing pain is mild.
• You have a bookkeeper who's happy in QuickBooks and just needs clean data.

That's a lot of clubs. If it's yours, use Flight Circle — you'll spend less and get what you need.

Choose TachTab if…

• Your billing isn't simple. Wet and dry rates, out-of-pocket fuel to credit back, share-weighted dues, an engine fund that needs to be visible.
• You need a reserve ledger, not just a line on an invoice — cash accrued against hours flown, with the TBO clock beside it, visible to every partner.
• You correct things. Meter readings get mistyped, and you need the fix to produce a credit memo and a replacement invoice rather than a silently edited number.
• Someone will eventually leave the partnership and their share has to be computed from records that hold up.

The real dividing line

Flight Circle bills. TachTab does bookkeeping.

That sounds like a small distinction until a partner leaves, or the engine goes early, or two people remember the fuel arrangement differently. At that point "we sent invoices" and "we have an auditable ledger" are very different positions to be in.

Concretely, things TachTab does that a scheduling-first tool generally doesn't:

• Reserve escrow tracking with a hours-to-TBO progress bar next to a cash balance, and a projection of whether you'll actually have the money in time.
• Automatic fuel-receipt credits against the wet rate, on the flight's own invoice.
• Share-weighted fixed costs — 40/30/30 splits the hangar 40/30/30, to the cent, every month.
• Credit-memo corrections with a full audit trail.
• Per-partner monthly statements as PDFs, emailed automatically.

Where Flight Circle beats us

• Scheduling maturity. We have scheduling now, but they have had it for years and it is the centre of their product. Ours is a week old and covers booking, conflicts and a daily minimum — no instructors, no dispatch, no recurring bookings. If the calendar is the thing your club lives in, theirs has been proven by more clubs than ours has.
• Price. ~$10/aircraft against our $29. We're more expensive because we do a deeper job on one thing, not because we're better value in general. If your billing is genuinely simple, we're bad value and you should say so.
• Maturity. Years of clubs using them in anger.

You no longer have to run both

Until recently the sensible setup was Flight Circle for the calendar and TachTab for the books, reconciled by hand at month end. That is no longer necessary, and the reason is worth a sentence.

In TachTab the booking and the invoice are the same record. You land, open your own reservation, and the meter start is already there from the last flight — type the end reading and it bills. Nothing to copy across, nothing to reconcile, because there was never a second record to reconcile against.

Running both is still perfectly reasonable if your members already live in Flight Circle's calendar and you don't want to move them. But it is now a preference, not a workaround.

Money

Honest summary

Two aeroplanes, twenty members, a working spreadsheet and a booking headache: Flight Circle.

One aeroplane, four partners, and a monthly reckoning nobody wants to do: TachTab.

Not sure which you are? Email hello@tachtab.com with a description of your group and we'll tell you straight, including when the answer is them.