Finishing Your Flight

Overview

The Finish Flight workflow is the bridge between your reservation and your club's records. When you land, one guided dialog records your meter readings, creates the flight log entry, completes your reservation, and — if your club uses billing — shows you exactly what the flight will cost before you leave the flight line. It is the single most important habit for keeping a club's data trustworthy: when every flight ends with Finish Flight, the flight log is continuous, maintenance intervals track reality, and billing never surprises anyone.

Finishing through the workflow is always better than entering a manual log later. The dialog pre-fills what it can, ties the log entry to your reservation, and handles the billing side automatically. Clubs can see who skips this step — the Unfinished / Overdue Flights report lists reservations whose end time passed without the flight being finished in-app.

The Current Flight Card

While your reservation is in progress — its start time has passed and it hasn't been completed — Centerline shows a Current Flight card in two places:

• Your Dashboard — front and center, with the aircraft, your reservation window, and action buttons.
• The Flight Logs page — the same card appears above the logs table as a reminder that the right way to log this flight is to finish it, not to type a manual entry.

The card carries the Finish Flight button, and, when you've returned before your scheduled end time, the Arrived Early option that releases the remaining reservation window for other members (see Arriving Early).

Step 1 — Record Your Times

Clicking Finish Flight opens the dialog on the times step:

1. Start Hobbs / Start Tach — pre-filled from the aircraft's last known readings. Verify them against what you actually recorded before engine start; the gauges win any disagreement.
2. End Hobbs / End Tach — the readings after shutdown. For aircraft with Track Hobbs Time turned off, the Hobbs fields don't appear at all.
3. Fuel Added / Oil Added — optional, but valuable. Oil consumption trends are one of the earliest engine-health signals a club has.
4. Comments — anything worth attaching to the permanent record: unusual weather, a rough mag check, "first flight after annual."
5. Maintenance Flight — check this if the flight was for maintenance purposes (post-repair test flight, ferry to the shop). Maintenance flights skip billing entirely.

Step 2 — Cost Summary (Billing Clubs)

If your organization has the Billing feature enabled and this wasn't a maintenance flight, the dialog moves to a cost summary before anything is final. You'll see the flight time that will be billed (hobbs or tach, depending on how the aircraft's rate is configured), the hourly rate in effect, and the resulting charge. No math surprises at the end of the month — you see the number while you're still standing next to the airplane.

Off-Field Fuel Reimbursement

If you bought fuel away from home base and your club's rate includes fuel (a "wet" rate), the cost summary includes an Off-Field Fuel Reimbursement section. Enter the gallons and price from your receipt, and attach a photo of the fuel receipt — on a phone, the attach button opens your camera or photo library directly. The reimbursement appears as a credit alongside the flight charge, and the receipt photo is stored securely where your club's billing admin can view it when reviewing the entry.

Whether reimbursement is per-gallon-capped or receipt-actual depends on how your club configured the aircraft's rate — see Aircraft Rates for how admins set this up, and Managing Billing Entries for the admin's view of the resulting entry.

What Happens When You Confirm

Completing the dialog does three things at once:

• Creates the flight log entry, linked to your reservation, with all the readings you entered. It appears immediately in the Flight Logs table.
• Completes the reservation, so the aircraft shows as available for the next member.
• Creates the billing entry (billing clubs, non-maintenance flights), calculated from the effective aircraft rate — including any fuel reimbursement credit.

Because the billing entry is generated from the readings you just confirmed, the flight log entry locks for members once billed — you can view it but not edit or delete it. If you realize after finishing that a reading was wrong, contact your club's booking admin, who can correct both the log and the charge. See Logging Flight Time for the details.

If You Forget to Finish

Life happens — sometimes you drive away without finishing the flight. The current flight card remains visible for a period after your reservation ends, so finishing late through the workflow is still the best fix. If the flight has aged out entirely, enter a manual log entry on the Flight Logs page and make sure the meter readings are continuous with the previous entry (the gap detection described in Viewing and Exporting Logs will flag it if not). Booking admins can create the billing entry from a manual log afterward.

Repeatedly skipping the workflow is visible to your club's admins through the Unfinished / Overdue Flights report — not as a gotcha, but because unfinished flights are where log gaps and billing disputes come from.

Tips

• Finish before you leave the flight line. The readings are in front of you and the receipt is in your pocket. Thirty seconds now saves an email exchange later.
• Photograph the panel meters as a backup. A quick photo of the hobbs/tach after shutdown gives you something to check against if you finish the flight from the car.
• Check the cost summary. It reflects the rate configuration your club set up — if the billed hours or rate look wrong, say something before confirming, not at month-end.
• Keep fuel receipts until they're entered. The receipt photo is what lets your billing admin verify the reimbursement without chasing you down.