Our team has been busy developing new features to incorporate into NeedleNine that will add value to flight schools already using our system, as well as for flight schools who may be looking for a better management tool. This article outlines new features that are now available for use by current NeedleNine users. Moving forward, we plan to announce new features and collect feedback through this blog. If you’d like to be notified when new blog posts are published, subscribe to our newsletter.
New Features:
Price Plans
Do you charge a different rate for some of your clients? Maybe you negotiated with the local university and offer their students a certain discount that is not available to your other clients. Or maybe you are looking to thank the veterans in your community by offering members of the military a special Armed Forces discount. No matter the reason behind your discounted rates, we’ve made it simple and easy to offer varying prices with our new Price Plans feature! Once you’ve set up your desired Price Plan, you assign each client to a single Price Plan, and NeedleNine will automatically generate invoices for every client according to their assigned Price Plan.
We knew that Flight Schools want the ability to easily charge their clients (students, renters, club members, etc.) varying rates, and that they want flexibility in those options. That’s why there is no limit on how many Price Plans you can have. Plus, if your flight school utilizes the Club feature of NeedleNine, clients who enroll in the Club will automatically be assigned to the Club Price Plan when enrolled, and the Retail Price Plan if they unenroll. You can easily audit who is assigned to each Price Plan by filtering the User List.
CRM Workflow for Flight Schools
Customer Resource Management, or CRM, is an important part of managing a profitable flight school. Being able to capture leads and convert them into regular customers positively contributes to your businesses bottom line. NeedleNine’s new CRM features allow you to automatically capture inquiries from a website “Contact Us” form, share notes about their interests, and convert them into a client. Additionally, you can easily assign members of your staff to follow up with specific prospective clients, ensuring that no leads fall through the cracks.
For advice on how your flight school can utilize these tools and develop a formal acquisition funnel, check out this blog post.
Forecast Maintenance Due Dates
Keeping track of upcoming maintenance items is one of the most important tasks for a flight school. With NeedleNine’s new feature, you will be able to better forecast and plan for when your aircraft will be downed for the required maintenance items.
This feature calculates the estimated date that your aircraft will be downed based on the scheduled reservation for each aircraft. The date will get more and more accurate the closer the maintenance item is due.
Coming Soon – Exportable Flight Training Record
Since launching, all flight training records have only been electronically available within NeedleNine. We are soon going to release an exportable PDF for use by your Chief Flight Instructors. In addition to the Flight Training information that your Flight Operations teams are surely interested in, this report pairs training events with the total cost of each lesson. Are you working with a financial partner, such as a university or loan provider, who requires records of student training progress per dollar spent? This report was designed with you in mind!
Small Fixes
Our team made a series of small changes to the User Interface to display more information to users without having to click any buttons. For example, every entry in a user’s logbook now displays both the client’s (and instructor’s, if applicable) name in the top right corner! We hope these will make your experience using NeedleNine even better.
Finally, while none of us like them, bugs are a reality in using a Software-As-A-Service product. Thank you to all of our users who let us know they were experiencing peculiar behavior that we were able to fix! Here is a sampling:
- Instructor Time Off returned incorrectly when using a custom filter on schedule – Fixed!
- Incorrect Stage Completion percentage – Fixed!
- Draft Course Version Numbering Wrong – Fixed!
- Miscellaneous Documents Saving to Wrong Tab – Fixed!
Get Involved!
If you ever have feedback on a specific feature in NeedleNine, or maybe it’s not working as you expected it to, let us know! Email our support team at [email protected].
Additionally, if you’d like to be involved in new feature development, let us know! We are always looking for additional perspectives to ensure that our product meets the needs of our clients. Send an email to our support team, and we will get in touch!
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