Flight school reports: what to track, and why
Most schools run on a calendar and a bank balance. That tells you the month was busy, not whether it was profitable — or which aircraft paid for itself. This guide covers the reports worth having, the numbers that actually change decisions, and how to get them without exporting anything to a spreadsheet.
The three questions reporting has to answer
Owners tend to ask the same three things, and a calendar answers none of them: is the fleet earning? (revenue and hours per tail), where is money leaking? (flights flown but never invoiced, cancellations, unpaid balances), and what is about to stop us flying? (a lapsing medical, a maintenance item coming due, a grounded aircraft). Good reporting is mostly about being able to ask those three quickly enough to act on the answers.
The reports, by category
Every report below filters, groups, sorts, and exports the same way, so learning one teaches you all of them.
Financial
What the school billed, what it actually collected, and what is still owed.
- Revenue
- Billed, collected, and outstanding — broken down by aircraft, instructor, customer, or lesson type.
- Payments received
- Every payment, by method and by customer, over any window.
- Items sold
- Which line items earn — instruction, rental, fuel, fees.
- Tax collected
- Tax by rate and by period, for filing season.
Operations
What was booked, what actually flew, and what fell through.
- Utilization
- Booked vs flown vs billed hours per aircraft, and the efficiency between them.
- Flight log
- Every flight with Hobbs, tach, and close-out status.
- Cancellations & no-shows
- What is being cancelled, by whom, and for which reason category.
Fleet
Which tails earn, which sit, and which are grounded.
- Fleet
- Hours, revenue, and downtime for every aircraft and sim.
- Squawks & downtime
- Open and resolved squawks, with how long each grounded a tail.
- Maintenance due
- What is coming due by hours or by date — before it bites.
People
Who is teaching, who is flying, and who has gone quiet.
- Instructor activity
- Flight and ground hours per CFI, students seen, and cancellation rate.
- Customer activity
- Spend and hours per student or renter, and when they last flew.
Compliance
Who is legal to fly today, and who is about to lapse.
- Document expirations
- Medicals, insurance, and reviews already lapsed or due soon.
- Pilot currency
- Currency by type and by person, with what expires next.
Save the question, not just the answer
The report you build at month-end is one you will want again next month. Configure it once — filters, columns, grouping — and save it as a named view. Share it with the school and everyone reads the same definition of “instructor hours” instead of four people rebuilding it four slightly different ways.
A dashboard where every number is clickable
Most dashboards are a separate thing from the reports underneath them, which is why the summary and the detail so often disagree. In AerScheduler a tile is a report — the number on the card is produced by running the report you click into, so the two cannot drift apart. Pin any saved view to the board, drag the tiles where you want them, and give each one its own window.
- Number cards, line charts, bar charts, and tables
- Per-tile date ranges — 'this week' beside 'year to date'
- Per-tile filters, so one card can watch a single aircraft
- Drag and resize freely; collapses to one column on a phone
- A needs-attention strip for overdue invoices, open squawks, and lapsing documents
Who sees what
Reporting access follows role, by category. Owners and admins see everything including revenue; dispatchers get operations, fleet, people, and compliance without the financials; technicians see fleet reports. It is enforced on the server, not hidden in the interface — a dispatcher cannot reach a revenue figure by guessing a URL.
Have it arrive without asking
The report you remember to run is the one that gets run. Schedule a saved view and it arrives as a CSV — daily, weekly, or monthly — to whoever at the school should see it.
- Each email covers the period since the last one — no gaps, nothing counted twice
- A weekly send covers the previous seven days; monthly covers the previous calendar month
- Times are your school's, so 7am means 7am at the field
- Recipients are people at your school, picked from your roster
- Anyone who loses access to a report stops receiving it automatically
Go deeper
Aircraft utilization
Booked vs flown vs billed, and what the gaps are costing you.
Read the guideRevenue reporting
Revenue by aircraft, instructor, and lesson type — and where it leaks.
Read the guideFAQ
- What reports does a flight school actually need?
- Five families cover almost every question an owner asks: financial (billed, collected, outstanding), operations (booked vs flown hours, cancellations), fleet (utilization and downtime per tail), people (instructor and student activity), and compliance (expiring documents and currency). AerScheduler groups its reports into those five families, and every one of them filters, groups, and exports the same way.
- How do I measure aircraft utilization at a flight school?
- Compare booked hours against flown hours against billed hours for each aircraft over the same window. Booked-vs-flown shows how much of your schedule evaporates; flown-vs-billed shows how much flying never made it onto an invoice. Utilization on its own — hours per tail — hides both problems.
- Can I export flight school reports to CSV or Excel?
- Yes. Every report in AerScheduler exports to CSV with the filters and columns you are looking at, so what you open in Excel is what you configured on screen.
- Can I build a custom dashboard?
- Yes. Add tiles for any metric from any report, drag and resize them, and give each tile its own date range and filters — so a 'this week' revenue card can sit next to a 'year to date' one. Every figure links through to the report that produced it.
- Can I stop instructors and dispatchers seeing revenue?
- Yes. Report access follows role by category. Owners and admins see financial reports; dispatchers see operations, fleet, people, and compliance but not revenue; technicians see fleet reports only. Students and renters have no reporting access at all.
- Can AerScheduler email reports on a schedule?
- Yes. Save a report as a named view, then schedule it daily, weekly, or monthly to anyone at your school. The CSV arrives attached. Each email covers exactly the period since the last one — a weekly send covers the previous seven days — and times are your school's, so 7am means 7am at the field.