New Parking Fee's - Billing Nightmare?

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joefremont
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Re: New Parking Fee's - Billing Nightmare?

Post by joefremont » Thu May 02, 2019 5:47 am

I suppose its my suspicious nature after dealing with many who try to game the system. I setup the parking system so that if you change the advanced finance setting from true to false during the month it still charges you, and for Venture Hawaii it was changed on April 2nd. Going forward I can see many VA's getting hit with the parking fees and then turning them off advanced finance and getting angry the next month when they get them again. So I updated it so that if you can change up to 7 days after the start of the month and not pay parking fees.

I also fixed the bug where you could not turn off advanced finance.

I Still need to analyze the numbers you are referring to Cat.
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Re: New Parking Fee's - Billing Nightmare?

Post by joefremont » Thu May 02, 2019 6:18 am

I think that when an aircraft is sold or transferred between fleets we may need to generate the parking fees then, that seams to be causing some confusion. Also adding the date range to the description may help reduce some confusion.
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Re: New Parking Fee's - Billing Nightmare?

Post by joefremont » Thu May 02, 2019 7:00 am

Cat wrote:
Thu May 02, 2019 4:35 am
I've been working the numbers all day .... the transactions section refers some charges to aircraft no longer owned and has many duplicate charges, yet when I compare the fleet charges (aircraft pages), they come out on top - they do not correspond as one would think they should line for line.

total transaction fee's: $195,760

total fleet parking fee's: $200,611

Number needed to balance the books with FSA overall cash on hand: $201,146

So our only solution at this point is to make a separate spreadsheet for the parking fee's and then add an "adjustment" (fudge factor) to balance the books as the FSA numbers do not add up.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing

So going forward, we will turn off individual aircraft parking fee's and just see what FSA charges as a whole and then add whatever fudge factor we need to balance the cash books again. Somewhere, somehow transactions are disappearing into a black hole and not showing up yet still hitting the overall account balance.
Hi Cat, I took a look at your spreadsheet and your numbers do not match mine at all, especially the fleet totals. We need to figure out where the problem lies, is it in the data, or in the tool your using to get the data, So lets start from the beginning, with the raw data, I created this spread sheet

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing

That has all the Fly Vegas parking transactions directly from the database sorted by fleet name and description, off to the right is a summary of totals by fleet.

That you are getting a different number for the VA and the fleet in my mind there is problem extracting the data as both the va total and fleet total is just a sum of the transactions and I don't see any transactions missing a fleet id.
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Re: New Parking Fee's - Billing Nightmare?

Post by MrBingham » Thu May 02, 2019 2:05 pm

Hi,

i was very shocked yesterday when i saw how much Parking Fees we paid. It was almost about v$360.000 and thats huge. There was a news somewhere?
I can not understand how it works because we also paid for planes which are in use. As example, i parked only for 2h in OTBD and paid for this v$7?? Also we have some double bookings in our account...
Why we paid for parking in our Hubs?
I thougt that the parking fees only for planes which stayed for long term (longer than a month)?? This is the only idea i have which make sence for me. :?:

So, now we paid for all planes which staying for hours and for month? For planes which are in maintance and on the market?

Should i sold now our hole Fleet (about 130 planes) to get no parking fees?

I hope we can get a solution about this situation

Best regards
Henning

SkyUnited CEO

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Re: New Parking Fee's - Billing Nightmare?

Post by Cat » Thu May 02, 2019 2:18 pm

I'm not "extracting data" with any tool, those are screenshots right from FSAirlines Finances/Transactions page and from the individual aircraft pages.

I just printed them off and entered them manually into a spreadsheet to figure out why they don't add up.

Then I went through each airplane one by one and pulled the numbers off each entry for parking. Nothing matches up .... There is no logic to the parking fee dump into transactions, aircraft are scattered throughout as if someone took a box of cards and just dumped it on the floor. There are duplicate transactions for a single charge showing in the airplane page and there are airplane charges that do not have a matching transaction in Finances/transactions.
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Re: New Parking Fee's - Billing Nightmare?

Post by Cat » Thu May 02, 2019 2:49 pm

EXAMPLE: FLY VEGAS FLEET BOEING 737-800 N801FV

What i call "Fleet Charges" - I open each one and enter the number in my sheet.
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total of these charges is - $11,161

Then I try to find matching charges in Fly Vegas / Finances / Transactions and I get this scattered over 3 pages -$10,655
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Repeat for each airplane and you will see why we are pegging our 'frustration meter". There is no logic to how the data is dumped into the main airline / finances /transactions page. KLAX transaction never shows up in the Fly Vegas finances/transactions section and PANC & KABQ are posted twice.
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Re: New Parking Fee's - Billing Nightmare?

Post by Cat » Thu May 02, 2019 3:33 pm

PS - You may want to move this thread to Bugs & Problems as it's all that and then some :roll: Hang in there, I am not trying to be an old nag, just giving you feedback from data that we view on FSAirlines so you can get it fixed. :wink:

I am going over my Fleet numbers again - pulling them one by one can lead to human error and I don't rule myself out.... nobody is perfect.
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Re: New Parking Fee's - Billing Nightmare?

Post by Cat » Thu May 02, 2019 4:18 pm

OK the problem is in FSAirlines Transactions data .... Our fleets match if you calculate two factors: A) I missed a "test run" on N195FV 4-28 for $27 and B) your database has fee's in Fly Vegas Holdings for aircraft sold ... so I can't post what I cannot see. KIGM planes sold from Kingman AZ $508 that is the last of the missing money.
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Re: New Parking Fee's - Billing Nightmare?

Post by joefremont » Thu May 02, 2019 5:51 pm

Cat, I think the issue is one of ordering of the transactions. The pages that show the transactions sort by time of the transaction, well all those parking transactions have the same time sorting may be unpredictable, so I added the reason and transaction ID to the ordering and hopefully that will fix that problem.

I was trying to keep the program that generates the transactions as simple as possible, but that ended up in generating more small transactions, so I am modifying it so that when it calculates the number of hours an aircraft spent at an airport it will subtract four hours for each arrival the aircraft has made.

If there were no arrivals but at least one departure it will also subtract four hours, this is to take into account flights that land before midnight on the last day of the month and depart just after midnight the first day of the month and aircraft that were purchased and then immediately depart.

Also the minimum parking will be 10$, so if your calculated payment is less than that you won't be charged.
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Re: New Parking Fee's - Billing Nightmare?

Post by joefremont » Thu May 02, 2019 5:52 pm

Cat wrote:
Thu May 02, 2019 3:33 pm
PS - You may want to move this thread to Bugs & Problems as it's all that and then some :roll: Hang in there, I am not trying to be an old nag, just giving you feedback from data that we view on FSAirlines so you can get it fixed. :wink:

I am going over my Fleet numbers again - pulling them one by one can lead to human error and I don't rule myself out.... nobody is perfect.
Good idea, done
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Re: New Parking Fee's - Billing Nightmare?

Post by joefremont » Thu May 02, 2019 5:55 pm

MrBingham wrote:
Thu May 02, 2019 2:05 pm
Hi,

i was very shocked yesterday when i saw how much Parking Fees we paid. It was almost about v$360.000 and thats huge. There was a news somewhere?
I can not understand how it works because we also paid for planes which are in use. As example, i parked only for 2h in OTBD and paid for this v$7?? Also we have some double bookings in our account...
Why we paid for parking in our Hubs?
I thougt that the parking fees only for planes which stayed for long term (longer than a month)?? This is the only idea i have which make sence for me. :?:

So, now we paid for all planes which staying for hours and for month? For planes which are in maintance and on the market?

Should i sold now our hole Fleet (about 130 planes) to get no parking fees?

I hope we can get a solution about this situation

Best regards
Henning

SkyUnited CEO
I just changed it so that if your there less than four hours you won't be charged, note this is based on arrivals and departures, transfers do not get this grace period, but there is no parking fee during the transfer.

Aircraft do get a discount (50%) at their fleet base and we never discussed having fees only if it has not been moved in a month. We had talked about how parking would work at length here on the forum over a good number of months.

If an aircraft is in maintenance you should not be charged as its in the maintenance hanger, but on the market you should be.
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Re: New Parking Fee's - Billing Nightmare?

Post by Cat » Thu May 02, 2019 9:26 pm

We had a little finance meeting and decided we will just let the mothership eat the parking fee's and keep it simple, itemizing per aircraft is WAY too labor intensive for our idea of "fun" LOL :shock: So we'll take the bulk invoice for the month and just make that an entry in MISC EXPENSES in our bookkeeping system.
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Re: New Parking Fee's - Billing Nightmare?

Post by joefremont » Fri May 03, 2019 6:20 am

I think I fixed most of the issues., I even discovered one that was preventing all my big 747's parked at JFK from getting charged. I put the new code on beta.fsairlines.net and reset the database back to a backup from 4/30 and ran the parking charge program. Log into beta.fsairlines.net and see what they should look like.

I am basically going to call april a test and will delete all the current parking fees and we will try again at the end of may.
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Re: New Parking Fee's - Billing Nightmare?

Post by Cat » Fri May 03, 2019 5:14 pm

Seeing a mixed bag of individual bills and lump fleet bills with individual billing set to 'no' - Just more FYI for you .....

OR is that due to maybe only 1 aircraft in the fleet being at that airport that month? That makes logical sense if the case. aircraft bill unless more than one in fleet at airport during billing period, then it reverts to bulk transaction.

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Last edited by Cat on Fri May 03, 2019 5:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: New Parking Fee's - Billing Nightmare?

Post by joefremont » Fri May 03, 2019 5:39 pm

The way I did it there is one function that gathers all the data together and groups it up, and a different one uses that grouped up data and creates the transaction. If the second sees there is only one aircraft in the set of data it was given, it adds the registration to the label.

I definitely need to add fleet name to that transaction list;
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