TrackOps
Operations & accounting portal
Trip support, from the quotation to the ledger.
One record carries the whole commercial life of a trip: the estimate you quoted, the sectors and services you arranged, the job orders you placed with vendors, the documents and email that went out, the invoice you raised, and the ledger entry behind it.
Flight brief
| Aircraft | Gulfstream G650 | Registration | 9H-TOPS |
|---|---|---|---|
| Call sign | TOP248 | MTOW | 45,200 kg |
| Operator | SkyBridge Aviation | Flight type | Business pax charter |
Sectors
| Call sign | Date | From | ETD | To | ETA | Chocks off |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TOP248 | 14 Aug | OMDB | 06:40 | EGGW | 13:55 | 06:32 |
| TOP248 | 14 Aug | EGGW | 16:30 | LFPB | 17:20 | — |
Services
| Airport | Category | Service | Date & time | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OMDB | Permits | Departure slot arrangements | 14 Aug 06:05 | Confirmed |
| EGGW | Permits | Landing permit | 14 Aug 12:40 | Confirmed |
| EGGW | Handling | Ground handling services | 14 Aug 13:55 | Confirmed |
| EGGW | Fuel | Fuel | 14 Aug 14:45 | In progress |
Handling and fuel
| Airport | Vendor | Contact | Remarks |
|---|---|---|---|
| EGGW | Signature Luton | +44 1582 000 000 | Ramp 4 |
| EGGW | World Fuel Services | +44 1582 000 111 | 8,400 lb uplift |
Fig. 1A flight brief generated from a document template. The header and footer are your organisation’s, the layout is yours, and every value is substituted from the live trip file at the moment it is produced.
The problem
The trip and the money live in different systems.
Most trip-support desks run at least three things at once. An operations system, or a shared spreadsheet, holds the sectors and the services. An accounting package holds the invoices and the bills. The correspondence that actually agreed the work sits in somebody’s mailbox.
Each one is defensible on its own. Together they mean the same trip is keyed in twice, a service that was delivered at two in the morning never reaches an invoice, a vendor bill arrives for a job order nobody can find, and the question of whether a customer is profitable takes a week of reconciliation to answer.
The fix is not a better spreadsheet. It is one record that the dispatcher, the documents and the ledger all read from.
The trip
A service order can be ad hoc, scheduled or an open release, and it knows the difference.
It begins as an estimate and becomes a service order.
A trip cost estimate is built from your own template, with placeholders that pull in the aircraft, the route and the services being quoted. When the customer accepts, the work becomes a service order: a customer, an operator, a vendor and an aircraft registration, with everything else hanging beneath it.
Each sector is a leg. It carries the airports, the estimated departure and arrival, and then the times that actually happened, down to chocks off and airborne, along with the call sign, the flight type and the crew and passenger counts.
Against each sector sit the services you are arranging, at a named airport and a named time, each moving from new to confirmed to in progress. Where a service needs a vendor, it becomes a job order you can track to closure.
| Category | Services |
|---|---|
| Permits | Landing permit, overflight permit, departure and arrival slot arrangements, PPR and parking |
| Handling | Ground handling services, airport fees, VIP lounge |
| Fuel | Fuel uplift |
| Flight planning | Flight plan package, test flight plan |
| Travel | Crew and passenger travel arrangements |
| Catering | Catering |
| Flight charter | Charter arrangement |
| Others | Anything the eight categories above do not cover |
Eleven flight types are recognised, from private and business charter through cargo, ambulance, ferry and VVIP to military pax and cargo, because a permit application is not the same letter for each of them.
Paperwork
Requesting a landing permit and requesting fuel are different letters. The system knows which is which.
Your documents, produced from your templates.
Templates are written once in a rich-text editor and filled in from the trip. Single placeholders substitute a value, such as the call sign, the registration, the maximum take-off weight or an airport. List placeholders expand into a table, so a template can print every sector on the trip without knowing in advance how many there are.
Documents produced this way are kept on the service order and are versioned, so a brief revised at ten in the evening does not overwrite the one already sent at four.
| Produced from a template | Types |
|---|---|
| Operational | Flight brief, general declaration, fuel release, fuel delivery receipt |
| Sales | Invoice, cash invoice, credit note, customer payment |
| Purchase | Bill, debit note, cash expense, vendor payment |
Correspondence
Email templates are held per service, grouped by permits, handling, fuel, catering, travel, flight planning and charter. Mail is composed and sent from the trip through your own configured account, and the thread stays on the service order.
The practical effect is that the person covering the night shift can see what was asked of a vendor, when, and what came back, without being copied on anything.
Money
Every service carries an invoiced or not-invoiced flag, so delivered work cannot quietly go unbilled.
A delivered service becomes a line in the ledger.
On the trip’s finances tab, the services you delivered resolve into an invoice and the job orders you placed resolve into bills. Nothing is re-keyed, and the invoice can be raised against a chosen set of services rather than the whole trip.
From there it is ordinary double-entry book-keeping. Invoices can be credit or cash and run from draft through finalised to partly paid and paid. Payments are allocated against specific invoices and bills rather than merely recorded, which is what makes part payments, credit notes, debit notes and refunds come out right.
What you can then ask
| Statements | Commercial reports |
|---|---|
| Profit and loss | Sales by client |
| Balance sheet | Sales by line item and category |
| Cash flow | Bills by client |
| Trial balance | Bills by line item and category |
| General ledger | Expenses by client |
| Statement of account | Customer, operator and vendor performance |
Because the ledger is fed from the trip rather than from a separate system, “was this customer profitable last quarter” is a question you answer by looking, not by reconciling.
Control
Around sixty resources, four permissions on each, set per user.
Permission by record, not by job title.
There are no fixed roles to squeeze people into. Every user holds a list of permissions, and each resource in the system carries read, create, update and delete independently. A fuel coordinator can be given everything on job orders and nothing on invoices. A bookkeeper can be given the ledger without being able to alter a sector.
| Group | Governed independently |
|---|---|
| Core | Users, clients and their documents, email and document templates, print components, labels, configuration, audit log |
| Aviation | Service orders, sectors, services, crew, pax, job orders and attachments, documents with their versions and files, email, estimates and templates, aircraft, registrations, airports, revisions |
| Accounting | Invoices, credit and debit notes, bills, cash expenses, customer and vendor payments and their allocations, accounts, journals, line items, statements, the ledger |
| Task management | Tasks, steps, task documents, categories |
Two kinds of history
Revisions record what changed on a trip: the aircraft registration or operator on the order, the airports, estimated departure and arrival, call sign, crew or passengers on a sector, and the country, airport or timing of a service. Trips change constantly, and this is how a desk shows what was agreed and when.
The audit log records who did it. Every login, creation, update and deletion, filterable by user, event and resource.
| Time | User | Event | Record |
|---|---|---|---|
| 14:02:11 | a.rahman | Update | Sector ETD, service order 2481 |
| 13:58:04 | s.malik | Create | Job order, EGGW handling |
| 13:41:37 | a.rahman | Update | Service status, confirmed |
| 13:12:02 | n.iqbal | Create | Invoice 4417, draft |
| 08:30:00 | a.rahman | Login | Session opened |
The rest
The parts that make the rest work.
- Client records
- One record per company, which may act as customer, operator or vendor on different trips, with its own documents. The same firm arrives in a system under four spellings, so duplicates are detected and merged rather than left to accumulate.
- Aircraft and registrations
- Registrations with their maximum take-off weight, weight unit, fuel type and supporting documents, tied to the customer, operator or vendor they belong to. Aircraft types and airports are held as registries the rest of the system draws on.
- Trip cost estimates
- Quotation templates with their own placeholders, and the estimates generated from them, so a quote and the trip it becomes are built out of the same parts.
- Task management
- For the work that is not a trip. Tasks with owner, assignee, category and reference, ordered steps with their own statuses and dates, attached documents, and a workflow graph rather than a flat checklist.
- Reporting
- Service order reporting, customer, operator and vendor performance, and job order outcomes including fuel, alongside the financial statements in section four.
- Dashboard
- A section per module, showing each user what their organisation runs and their permissions allow them to see.
Questions
Questions we are usually asked.
Do we have to take the accounting module?
No. Aviation, accounting and task management are switched on per organisation, and the core, clients, users, templates and audit, is always there. Desks that keep their books elsewhere run the aviation module alone; the finances tab simply stops at the point of handover.
Is this a replacement for our accounting package?
For most trip-support companies, yes: it keeps a chart of accounts, manual journals and a general ledger, and produces profit and loss, balance sheet, cash flow, trial balance and statements of account. The reason to use it is that the ledger is fed from the trips themselves rather than from a monthly export.
How are permissions set?
Per user, per resource. Around sixty resources each carry read, create, update and delete independently, so access follows what somebody actually does rather than a job title.
Can the documents look like ours?
That is the intent. Briefs, general declarations, fuel releases, invoices, credit and debit notes and payment advices are all produced from templates you write, with your header and footer, and values substituted from the live record.
What happens when a trip changes?
It is recorded. Changes to the aircraft, operator, airports, timings, call sign, crew, passengers or service details are kept as revisions against the order, the sector or the service, so the trip’s history survives the trip.
How do we get started?
Workspaces are provisioned per organisation. Write to us and we will set up your users and permissions, switch on the modules you need, and load your document and email templates before the demonstration.
Ask for a demonstration.
Half an hour, on a real trip of yours: the estimate, the sectors and services, the job orders, the brief that goes to the customer, and the invoice and ledger entry at the other end.