If you fly for clients rather than an agency, the Business group in the sidebar holds the commercial side of the operation: Clients & Jobs for the pipeline, Profit & Loss for the money. This article covers building a quote, what accepting one creates, scheduling multi-visit work, and reading the P&L.
The suite is one chain: a quote becomes an invoice and a job, the job becomes calendar entries with pilots assigned, those become shift logs and flight records, and the payments land in the P&L.
Before you start. The business suite comes with the Complete plan and can be switched off for your organization under Admin → Business Suite. If the pages are missing from the sidebar, check the plan first and that toggle second — your data is kept while it is off.
Two different permissions. Global admins get everything. Anyone else needs the Business booking switch on their user profile (Admin → Users) to reach Clients & Jobs; who books work varies by company, so it is granted per person rather than by role. Profit & Loss stays global-admin only.
Adding a client profile
On the Clients tab, choose Add client. A client record holds the company name, a contact first and last name, email, phone, an address that searches as you type, and notes. You need not add clients up front: on a new quote, pick + New customer… in the Customer dropdown and fill in the same fields inline.
Click the eye icon on any client row for their profile: total revenue with the last payment date, quotes won and lost with their dollar values, open pipeline, outstanding invoices, and the full quote and job history.
Building a quote
From the Quotes tab, choose New quote. Beyond the customer and line items, four fields shape everything downstream:
- Job location — the site address, searched as you type. It carries to the invoice, the job, the calendar entries, and the pilot's briefing.
- Site visits — how many separate trips the work takes; leave it at 1 for a single engagement.
- Visit spacing — appears once visits is above 1: daily, weekly, monthly, or custom, where you pick each date later.
- Crew per visit — how many flight crew the site needs, carried through to staffing.
Line items each take a description and an amount; the total is their sum. Valid until defaults to three months out. Save the draft, then Mark sent when it goes to the client.
Sending locks the document. Once a quote is marked sent its content is immutable — only its status can move (accepted, declined, expired), and the same applies to invoices, so the copy the client saw and the copy in your records stay identical. To change terms, issue a new quote or void the invoice and reissue.
The quote-to-invoice-to-job pipeline
Choose Accept on a quote and two records appear at once: a draft invoice with the same line items, and a pending job on the jobs board. The quote is marked accepted and linked to the job.
| Carried to | What comes with it |
|---|---|
| Invoice | Line items, title, job location, visits and spacing, crew per visit, notes, Net 30 due date |
| Job | Client, title, total amount, job location plus its geocoded coordinates, visits and spacing, crew per visit, notes |
The accept step runs once — accepting an already-accepted quote will not create a second invoice and job.
The chain works in reverse too. A standalone invoice from the Invoices tab also creates a pending job, because invoiced work is work someone has to fly. A job created directly gets its draft invoice the same way, as long as it has an amount and is not comped. Job locations are geocoded on creation and whenever the address changes, so the coordinates behind the briefing and the calendar entry stay current.
Branded quote and invoice PDFs
Every quote and invoice has a PDF view — the PDF icon on the row, or View PDF in the read dialog — rendered on your own letterhead with the organization name and logo from your agency settings. It carries the document number, the client's contact block, dates, line items with a total, the job site and visit count on multi-visit work, your notes, and terms at the foot. A paid invoice is stamped PAID.
Two layers of terms print on an invoice. The payment terms line is per-invoice: Net days (or "Due on receipt" at zero) or a specific due date, plus a monthly late-fee percentage when one is set. Beneath it sits the terms and conditions body, org-wide text you edit under Admin → Business Suite. The shipped template covers scope, validity, weather and airspace delays, site access, and Part 107 compliance — have your counsel review it before you send it to clients.
Payment plans and recording payment
On a draft invoice, switch on Payment plan — split into monthly installments, enter a count between 2 and 36, and pick the first due date. The total splits into equal monthly installments with any remainder cents on the last, and the dialog previews the per-month figure.
Open the invoice and mark each installment paid as the money arrives. Each one writes a payment into the ledger and rolls the due date to the next unpaid installment; when the last is collected the invoice flips to paid on its own. Mark paid while a plan is still running settles every remaining installment at once as an early payoff. Invoices without a plan default to Net 30 from issue.
Invoice payments cannot be edited. A payment created by marking an invoice or installment paid is immutable in the revenue ledger — void the invoice instead. Payments recorded by hand (checks, cash, deposits) on the Revenue page can be edited or deleted, and every change is written to the finance audit log.
Multi-visit jobs and getting them on the schedule
The Jobs tab splits into Open (pending and active) and Closed. A pending job needs one more step before anyone flies it: choose Finalize….
The Finalize dialog builds the crew schedule. A single-visit job takes one date, start and end times, a pilot as rPIC, and a unit. A multi-visit job shows one row per visit with dates prefilled from visit 1 at the job's spacing — move visit 1 and the later dates re-derive. An All visits row sets times, pilot, and unit across every row at once, and each row stays editable afterward. Custom spacing leaves the dates blank so you pick each one. When the job specifies a crew size the dialog says so; the extra crew are added to each schedule entry afterward on the Schedule page, where visits left unassigned can also be staffed.
Finalizing moves the job to active and creates one calendar entry per visit, each carrying the job title, client name, visit number, job site, and assigned pilot. That hand-off is on by default and can be turned off under Admin → Business Suite. See scheduling and shift logs for what happens next.
Open a job with the eye icon for the operational picture: billing and amount collected, its source quote and invoices, every scheduled visit, and — once crews have flown — each visit's shift log with its flights linked through to the flight records. Marking an active job complete while an invoice is open prompts you: say it was paid and the payment is recorded, say no and the invoice stays on the Invoices tab.
Checking flight conditions for a job site
Any quote or job with a location has a Conditions button next to the address in its detail dialog. It opens a Flight conditions briefing for that site:
- The forecast for the visit date when it falls inside the seven-day window — high and low, precipitation chance, maximum wind, sunrise and sunset.
- Current conditions: temperature, wind with gusts, visibility, cloud cover.
- The nearest METAR with its flight category.
- The surface airspace class, whether it is controlled, and the facility name.
- TFRs within 40 miles, sorted by distance, flagged active or upcoming.
On a job the briefing targets the next upcoming visit; on a quote it geocodes the address on the fly, so you can check a site before committing. That matters most when you are quoting a date: controlled airspace may need an authorization you cannot get overnight, and a TFR can take a date off the table. See airspace authorization, LAANC, and TFRs for the lead times involved.
The location also lands on the calendar entry, so the pilot's pre-shift weather and airspace check defaults to the job site rather than wherever they are standing.
Reading the profit and loss
Profit & Loss is cash-basis: revenue lands in the month the payment was recorded, not the month you invoiced. Pick a month range and you get four summary cards — Revenue, Expenses, Comped services, Net — over a monthly table splitting expenses into monthly recurring, annual recurring, and one-time.
Expenses come in two shapes, managed in the tabs below the table:
- Recurring costs are effective-dated: a name, amount, monthly or annual cadence, category, and start month. Use Change amount when a price changes permanently from a chosen month forward, and Adjust a single month for a one-off overage or credit that should not move the baseline.
- One-time costs are a date, description, amount, category, and note. Categories across both are equipment, software, insurance, fuel/travel, marketing, fees, subcontract, and other.
Every number drills through. Click the Revenue or Expenses card, or a month's figure in the table, and you land on the detail page listing the exact payments or costs behind it — each opens a dialog with its own change history and a per-entry PDF.
Work you give away is separate. Tick Comped on a job and record its market value instead of billing it: that figure appears in the Comped services column as a memo and never counts as cash.
The P&L menu exports the range to Excel or to a branded PDF on the same letterhead as your invoices, and opens the Finance audit log — an append-only record of every payment and cost entry, edit, and deletion, with who did it and the field-level before and after. For flight-side reporting, see reports and exports.
Frequently asked questions
Do I have to start with a quote?
No. Create an invoice or a job directly and the rest of the chain fills itself in: a standalone invoice creates its pending job, and a job with an amount creates its draft invoice. Start with a quote when the client needs pricing approved first, and with an invoice or job for repeat work you have already agreed.
Can I edit a quote after I have sent it?
Only its status. A quote is locked the moment it is marked sent, and so is an invoice, which keeps your records identical to the copy the client is holding. To change the terms, create a new quote, or void the invoice and issue a replacement.
What happens if I change the number of site visits after accepting?
Visit count, spacing, and crew per visit stay in sync across the paper trail. Editing them on the job updates the linked invoices and the originating quote, and editing them on a draft invoice pushes them back to the job and quote. Schedule entries are created at finalization, so change the visit count before you finalize.
Who can see the financial side?
Profit & Loss — revenue detail, expenses, exports, and the finance audit log — is restricted to global admins. Staff granted the Business booking permission can work the pipeline of clients, quotes, invoices, and jobs without seeing the P&L. Every financial edit is attributed in the audit log to the person who made it.
Where to go next
Once jobs are on the calendar, scheduling and shift logs covers assigning crews and how a shift log links its flights back to the job. For the thinking behind pricing, insurance, and client agreements, read the drone service provider business guide.