Kent, I'll tell you this much: the folks at RFC fretted and researched the matter to death, and settled on ScheduleMaster only after pretty exhaustive research. I believe that they have been very pleased with the results- I know the members have been.
Y'see, we've been very happy with aircraftclubs.com too, and it's cheaper than the standard ScheduleMaster service. From a purely "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" point of view, this will be a hard sell! I certainly need to play around with it a bit and make sure we won't lose any functionality in the process.
Some things that aircraftclubs.com has that we use frequently that I don't yet know about on ScheduleMaster:
* Files section: Our bylaws, standard operating procedures, various avionics manuals, checklists, weight and balance spreadsheets, and billing statements are kept in the files section on aircraftclubs.com. It's probably one of our most frequently-used features, and if schedulemaster doesn't have it, it'll probably be a no-go right off the bat.
* Unlimited users: While it appears that schedulemaster is currently unlimited, they don't say they'll stay that way and already appear to have the ability to charge extra for more users if they so choose. We like having a couple of extra users - The FBO maintenance department can log in and create a maintenance reservation if something needs to be done to one of the planes, and the line department can read our schedule so they know which airplanes are supposed to fly on a given day and they can have them out of the hangar and on the line ready to go for us.
However we don't use it for billing. Unless you have a dispatcher to record hobbs/tach time I don't see how it will work.
Another thing I'll have to play with. Currently, members fill out flight cards and leave them at the airport. My assistant and I pick them up and enter them into a spreadsheet on Google Docs, and I do the billing from that. Can individual pilots enter their own times, or does there have to be only a single person doing that?
Squawk Management is overstating the feature (assuming we are using it correctly). The way we have it set up any member can ground an airplane for up to 24 hrs. The maintenance director for that plane or any member of the board can extend or override it. We can attach comments to the plane or to the maintenance schedule.
Well, considering that our current "system" involves the pilot calling the maintenance officer and nothing else, even that would be an improvement. I'd like to see squawks when they come in, and it'd be nice if the next pilot could look and see what squawks were there as well.
We like ScheduleMaster and going from a paper schedule at the FBO (which cost about the same) to on-line increased our utilization about 30%, I believe. It was a 5-6 years ago and I forgot the exact number.
The telephone interface is a BIG plus. The most valuable to me is the ability to extend your schedule from an intermediate stop, or at least know you need to contact the next person.
I don't think we'll see any increase because we're already online, in fact we may see a decrease at first until folks "find" the new one. (Yes I'll let them know, but old habits like typing "aircraftclubs" into the URL bar die hard...)
We have the phone interface on aircraftclubs too, but we keep talking about whether or not to keep it. It would almost cut the cost in half to get rid of it. I've used it, but I don't use it as much as I used to. The big advantage is that if someone gets back early, they can call from the ramp rather than waiting to get home.
We use it to store and validate dates for fight reveiw, medical and a club specific annual proficiency check.
Glad to hear it does that, we keep track of the exact same things on aircraftclubs.com.
However we do not consider it secure enough to keep track of all the other personal information it allows.
We just have phone numbers and email addresses so that club members can contact each other WRT reservations, flying together, etc.
Thanks for the insight... I need to go bang on it now and see if there's anything missing.
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