June 2023

Our development team has been hard at work improving existing features. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to our support team!

Improved Features

• When reservations are dispatched, all users can now download, save, and/or print a Dispatch Release Report! This presents a fixed record of the status of the aircraft, pilot, and instructor’s relevant documents and airworthiness requirements, at the moment of dispatch.
• In our Role Based Access Control update late last year, we seem to have overlooked the permissions of users to hover over reservations on the schedule. We have now enabled employee users, including Staff, Instructors, and Mechanics, to now be able to hover over reservations to see basic information, including start and end times. 
• We have been taking steps to ensure the Flight Training Security Program records and reports are accurate. In this endeavor, we’ve decided to restrict the ability to graduate students from courses with FTSP Approval still in Pending status. To learn how to manage FTSP records, see our documentation. 
• For those flight schools who do not have or use a more sophisticated accounting software, we’ve added the ability for you to delete transactions from user’s accounts. If you are already connected to an accounting software (i.e., QuickBooks Online or Desktop), you’ll continue to manage transactions through that software. 

June’s Helpful Hint

NeedleNine has lots of functionality intended to make it easier for flight schools to administer their programs. However, we know that some features are being under utilized. We are going to start adding a “Helpful Hint” section to these blog posts, highlighting a feature that you may not be aware is available to you. 

In this first round of Helpful Hints, we’d like to point out the Payment Processor Report. This lives under Reports > Accounting, on the second tab from the left. If your flight schools uses Authorize.net as your payment processor, it will say “Authnet Report”; if you use Gravity, it will say “Gravity Report”. This feature is most useful when client credit card payments are not successful. For instance, if autopay is not working for a client, you can use this report to determine if it’s because their credit card expired, or perhaps their billing address is incorrect. 

You can filter this report based on a date range, if it was an autopay charge, and if it was successful or failed. This data can also be exported as a CSV file, allowing your team to use whatever tool is easiest for you to track down a particular user’s payment history. 

Upcoming Changes

At the end of this month, we are going to release an update that will affect user’s ability to dispatch themselves in the short-term.

Currently, users are able to enter information — such as their pilot and medical certificates, and renter’s insurance — to their own account with no verification from staff. With the update, an admin will need to verify the information entered by the client is complete and accurate before NeedleNine will show the user as having no dispatch errors. Documents uploaded by the users themselves will show as “pending” until they’ve been verified. 

Since no records are currently verified, this will result in all dispatches failing (or, requiring an override) until individually addressed by an administrator. We understand that this will be a minor inconvenience, but we hope it becomes of great value to you in ensuring accurate records. 

We recommend that you review reservations a day in advance to preemptively resolve any dispatch errors one day at a time. This should capture the bulk of the administrative workload, while spreading the process out over a reasonable amount of time.