Flight School Contract ManagementSoftware

Flight school contract management software tracks the structured agreements between a school and its students or sponsors — ab-initio training programs, airline cadet contracts, VA benefits Chapter 31/33 enrollments, prepaid block-hour packages, and any custom training program. It manages how much time or value is allocated to each activity (dual flight, solo flight, ground), how payments are scheduled, how overage hours are billed, and how revenue is recognized as flights are flown. Aviatize Contract Management is part of the billing module and integrates seamlessly with QuickBooks, Sage Intacct, and Exact Online.

Each contract has allocations across five activity types: aircraft (the rental fee on any flight), flight instruction & briefing, dual, solo, and ground. Each allocation can be denominated in hours or value and filtered by aircraft type or resource type — so a single contract can carry, for example, 20 hours of dual on single-engine piston, 10 hours of dual on multi-engine, 15 hours of dual on FNPT-II simulator, 30 hours of solo on single-engine, and 40 hours of ground. When a flight doesn't map to one allocation, its aircraft and instruction time are each drawn from the right one. The system determines which allocation is eligible and uses the first match — no manual matching required, and a usage ledger records every draw-down, the rate applied, and the remaining balance.

Yes. Allocations can be scoped three ways to fit how training managers organize their programs: cross-program / cross-syllabus (one allocation usable across multiple programs), single training syllabus only, or differentiated per syllabus section. This supports both real-world patterns — flight schools that set up training as individual programs per stage (PPL → CPL → IR) and flight schools that run one integrated syllabus with all stages (e.g. ab-initio MPL).

Multiple payment schemes per contract: monthly recurring payments (typical for ab-initio programs), phase-based payments (initial down payment plus payments triggered as phases complete), or combinations. Each contract can use the school's standard rates or custom rates specific to that contract. Overage rates can also be configured per allocation type — dual overage at one rate, solo overage at another, ground overage at a third — all within the same contract, and you choose how prepaid overage is billed.

Contract templates can require manual activation: a new contract sits in a Pending Activation state and grants no benefits until a manager activates it, with the validity period counted from the activation date so the customer always gets the full duration. You also choose when each installment is billed — a deposit collected immediately at purchase, the balance charged the moment the contract is activated, or payments spread at fixed intervals. Every contract holder can track their own usage on a My Contracts page, colour-coded as they approach each allocation limit.

No. A DUAL training flight no longer drains prepaid DUAL hours for briefing time — ground briefing bills against the customer's GROUND allocation (or the open balance if there is none). So a 1-hour flight with 30 minutes of briefing consumes 1 hour of DUAL, not 1.5. The booking coverage banner shows the split per portion and matches the final invoice exactly.

When a contract is signed and an upfront payment is made, the value is booked to a deferred revenue (liability) account in your accounting platform — not directly as revenue. As the student flies the hours, the system recognizes revenue out of the deferred account and into the appropriate revenue accounts (aircraft, instructor, ground), with line-item GL mapping. The same logic applies to multi-phase contracts and to airline scholarship contracts. Real flight schools recognize revenue when flights are flown, not when packages are sold — Aviatize is built so the books reflect that automatically.

Sponsorship tracking (on the roadmap) extends contracts to handle airline sponsorship contracts and VA benefits programs. It is not directly integrated with FAA / VA government software — Aviatize does not push to government systems — but it tracks the full lifecycle: payout requests sent to airlines or VA programs, payments received, outstanding balances. Crucially, every sponsored student sees their real-time allocation status and remaining coverage on every flight, replacing the end-of-month manual reconciliation by the VA program manager. Different sponsorship percentages per user are fully supported, including partial-coverage handoff where remaining coverage subtracts and the rest of the invoice is paid normally.

A contract is bound to the student ID it was issued for and cannot be transferred between students. Partial refunds depend on the flight school's policy and are special cases that require manual intervention today — the software does not automate the refund decision because every school's contract terms are different.

No. The Contract Management module is part of the billing system and ties into training seamlessly, but it is not directly required inside the training module. Training managers can keep their training workflow as-is, and accounting managers can keep their accounting workflow as-is. The contract layer connects them without forcing either side to change. This is intentional — different flight schools structure training and accounting responsibilities differently, and the software should support both.