On Nov 27, 2:09*pm, Dave Springford wrote:
We had a computer system running at our club about 8 years ago, but
have gone back to a paper system with the data entered into the
accounting system at a later time. *The intent of the computer system
was to save the time punching in all the flight data. *As it turns
out, it didn't actually make much difference in time-savings over the
course of a year.

Some of the problems are much as Dave mentions above, such as a power
source at the launch point and computaphobes.

Other problems included:

1. The issue of small mid-week operation not taking the computer to
the launch point to enter the flights (too much effort for just a
couple of flights) and then someone else having to enter all the mid-
week flights before the Saturday morning operation could start.

2. Entering new members into the system at the launch point - the
member database was not easily updated on the fly.

3. Errors entered into the launch point computer are transmitted
directly into the billing system. *If there is no paper trail, these
can be difficult to correct.

With the paper system, one person in a quiet space enters all the data
and checks it for validity before it gets to the billing system.
Granted, this person does a lot of data entry, but we have also found
that they catch 99% of the errors before the numbers hit the billing
system.

Our system (for a club of about 150 members with about 3500 flights
per year) now works like this.

a. *The pilot fills out a flight card before take-off with glider ID,
their name and account #, type of flight and tow height. *(types of
flight include Intro/Famil flight, student flight, solo flight, flight
in private ship etc)

b. *The flight card is passed to the time keeper who enters the flight
on the daily log sheet, assigns a flight number and then adds take-off
and landing time on the card.

c. *The card is a two part carbon form, where one copy goes to the
accounting system and the other goes to the pilot after the flight

d. *The flight info from all cards is entered into our "flight card
processor" (FCP). *This is a program written in Visual Basic with a MS
Access backbone. *This converts the feet and minutes for each flight
into dollars and cents. *It also produces a monthly listing for each
member with all the details for each flight.

e. *At the end of each month the FCP data is entered into the
accounting system (Quickbooks)

f. *Statements are emailed to each member the first week of each month
with a complete listing of all their flight details from the FCP, as
well as all the credits/debits to their account from Quickbooks.

You could consider using digital pen technology with a template that
specifies all the relevant flight info fields to be filled out:

http://www.livescribe.com/

At least then you'd have a paper copy of all the original entries.
You'd need to figure out the OCR part - which in theory would be
easier as you'd know whether each field was alpha or numeric - but
even so it would be a fair amount of coding. And you'd need to make
sure nobody lost the pen!

Bill mentions integrating with GPS loggers. While interesting I think
it may be overkill for the simple purpose of getting flight times -
unless you had a wireless way of downloading everything from the
aircraft. Even more coding and the wireless technology on loggers
isn't quite available yet.

9B