After years of using an outdated landing fee management program, an upgrade and change was long overdue. Airport staff conducted a comprehensive research project to poll peer airports. Their findings: most regional airports utilized home-grown DOS or excel based systems with limited functionality. These systems were mostly manual, error prone, and not user friendly. Alternatively, existing industry software for larger airports was complex and unnecessarily expensive. Thus, they started to research other alternatives and found Stephen Smith, owner of Controllership Solutions LLC. Smith is an accounting technology expert.
A needs assessment meeting was held, system specifications and functionality requirements were identified and AirKeeping was born. Although the airport does not use QuickBooks, by utilizing the QB platform’s core reporting and functionality, time consuming programming did not have to be built from the ground up. To incorporate accounting data into their primary General Ledger, system procedures and control reports were developed.
Where the airport’s work flow differed from the core program, add-ons and logic were programmed into the application software to provide a seamless custom experience. The troubleshooting, training, and implementation process was efficiently rolled out over approximately three billing cycles with few incidents. Currently, Airport customers have the option of receiving invoices electronically or traditionally. Customers can pay via a secure portal with credit card or ACH directly from a customer specific portal that provides an account activity history. And airport staff are able to efficiently capture daily landings, generate management reports and accurately automate the monthly billing process.