AirFlite is an award winning full service FBO, offering 24/7 private aircraft services. AirFlite also maintains the corporate flight department for Toyota Motor Sales and other Toyota companies. Having modeled itself after Toyota and Lexus, AirFlite is setting the standard for improving productivity for its pilots and crew by cutting costs due to inefficiencies with their expense reporting process.
We interviewed Chris Sdun, Director of Operations at AirFlite. Chris discussed how he has managed to improve productivity and tackle some of the pain points relative to expense reporting for his pilots & crew. Here is the interview –
AirFlite is regarded as a trend-setter within the Business Aviation community. Can you tell our readers some more about AirFlite?
AirFlite has been operating aircraft on behalf of Toyota Motor Corporation and its subsidiaries since 1985. We currently operate a fleet of Gulfstreams with most of our flying being international. We were the sixth flight department to achieve IS-BAO certification back in 2003 and continue to work to maintain our IS-BAO Stage 3 certification.
Airflite’s operations is obviously a very busy one. Do your pilots fly all over the world?
That is correct. Most of our flights are international and begin from our base in Japan.
What have been the biggest expense reporting pain points in the past for Airflite?
One of our biggest challenges was that pilots had to come in to the office to submit and sign their expense reports. This was a huge problem simply because these pilots had to plan in a detour while they were getting ready to embark on another trip.
The other issue was that the collating and submitting of receipts with expenses was a time consuming process and also prone to errors. Sometimes accounting would want to tweak or fix some errors but the pilots were already on the next trip. So this caused delays and frustration for our crewmembers.
As a manager, I had to spend time handling some of these issues and tracking receipts for the pilots when they weren’t available. So we were all not being very productive in managing this process.
Was this making your pilots & crewmembers inefficient during trips?
Yes it was. We were just spending too much time doing this work, which shouldn’t have been the case.
What about morale?
It did affect the morale a little bit. Being pilots, they are always on the road and not having an automated system to help with this process placed some burden on them. Lets face it – no one likes to do expense reports but we still had to get them done and submitted on time. Our current laborious process became an emotive subject for some of our pilots and for me too as a manager. So this urged us to find a solution.
How has the Gorilla Expense application helped tackle these issues?
Gorilla Expense has conformed very well to fit our unique processes. The pilots use the mobile app to submit receipts. And it is complete right there, which is a big thing, not having to save the receipts and remember where and when the expense occurred. With this approach they no longer have to come in either. All the pilots have iPads and they are able to complete their entire report. The interface is simple to use and the pilots have had no issues with getting up to speed with it.
As a manager, since all the routing of expense reports and approvals are electronic, I have full visibility including all the receipts. If I need to tweak anything before sending to accounting, I can easily do that. What used to take us hours now gets done in minutes! So huge improvements…
Besides this, Gorilla Expense also customized some of the functions for us like making the PDF report resemble our existing report, rolling up expenses to single account numbers etc. which made a big difference in achieving a much quicker user adoption.
What are some of the features that have truly made a big difference for the users and the managers?
For the pilots, it has definitely been how easy the application is to use. For the manager, it is having all the reports at my fingertips is huge. Also being able to mine through old reports in the system helps. I can also search by additional parameters such as trip number or tail number to find the report I am looking for.
So the pilots are very happy. What about Accounting? What has been their perception so far?
Since the Gorilla Expense team tweaked the application to meet our needs, the migration to this system has been transparent to them. They still receive the same report with all the required details and pertinent information, so no complaints there.
Any concluding thoughts?
The team at Gorilla really took the time to listen to our needs and concerns. Tech support has been fantastic. Anytime we have had a question they have been accessible very quickly by phone or e-mail. Overall this has been a seamless process that has saved our associates a significant amount of time and headache. Gorilla has been a great partner in simplifying what was once a cumbersome process.
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We hope you enjoyed reading the interview. If you have any questions or want to send us a quick email, click here. We are happy to discuss your requirements and find out how Gorilla Expense can help meet your needs.