Usage capture screen

What it is

The Usage capture screen is where a syndicate sets what each flight records: which time measures are captured, which one the usage rate bills on, the taxi-minutes prefill, the engine meter’s name, and the words used for the start and end of each measure. These settings are the tech-log content: which measures you capture determines what appears on the tech log.

Usage capture is configured separately from the money. The usage rate, shortfall, minimums, and event fees live on the Asset rates screen; this screen owns only the capture configuration. Saving on one screen never overwrites the other.

Who can use it

Admin: view and change every field.
Members: do not see this screen. They see the resulting names and captured fields on the usage log, the watch and the tech log.

Where to find it

In the app:

Open the syndicate.
Go to Admin → Usage capture.

Route: /syndicates/:syndicateId/settings/usage-capture.

A freshly-created syndicate’s capture defaults are set during onboarding, on the setup wizard’s Rates & capture step. That step asks the same configuration as a short run of questions: whether block times are recorded, whether airborne time is recorded (and whether to fill it in from the block times using a taxi allowance), what flights are charged on, and the hourly rate. The engine-meter choice there is named after the meter fitted, so picking Tacho hours or Hobbs hours sets both the billed measure and the engine meter label. This screen is for ongoing edits and refinements (taxi minutes, start and end names, additional measures).

On a multi-asset syndicate, a per-asset capture override lives on each asset’s own billing screen, where Use the syndicate’s settings discards it again, together with every other setting the asset has of its own (rates, fees, minimums, fuel, taxi minutes, booking-ahead limit and home airfield). When a syndicate is left with one aircraft that has settings of its own, each of them becomes the syndicate’s setting: its capture settings become this screen’s settings, and its rates and the rest move to the syndicate’s other settings screens. See Default and per-asset settings.

Fields / options

Field	Notes
Capture engine meter / block time / airborne time	Tick-boxes. Which time measures the usage log records. At least one must stay ticked. See Captured measures and the billed measure.
Bill on	Selector. Which captured measure the usage rate prices. Shown only when more than one measure is captured.
Taxi minutes	Numeric. Prefills the log’s bracketing times only; it does not affect any charge. Leave blank for no prefill offset. See Taxi minutes.
Engine meter label	Dropdown/custom. The meter’s name as a noun (presets: Tacho, Hobbs), used where the meter itself is named: the tech log’s hours column (“Tacho Hours”), the “Flight logs don’t follow on” notification, and the engine meter’s default start and end names. Shown when the engine meter is captured.
<Measure>: start and end	Dropdown, one per captured measure: Engine meter: start and end, Block time: start and end, Airborne time: start and end. The words pilots see for the moment each measure starts and ends, on Log Flight, the watch and the tech log. Presets include “Brakes off / Brakes on”, “Off blocks / On blocks”, “Engine start / Engine stop” and “Engine on / Engine off” for block time, and “Takeoff / Landing” and “Wheels up / Wheels down” for airborne time. Custom… reveals When it starts and When it ends. The full list and where the words appear: Start and end names.

Behaviour rules

At least one measure is always captured. The sole remaining tick-box cannot be unticked, and the billed measure is always part of the captured set.
Save merges only the capture fields. The money configuration on the Asset rates screen is preserved; the two screens are decoupled and never clobber each other.
Capture config is the tech-log content. Which measures you capture drives which fields the usage log and tech log show.
Changing what you record asks you what the meters read. A flight’s hours are measured by the tightest measure you capture, so ticking a measure on or off changes how every flight already logged is measured — and the aircraft’s flying-hours total would move accordingly, without anything on screen saying so. Rather than let that happen quietly, the save asks you to enter each affected aircraft’s current hours and a reason. What you enter becomes the aircraft’s new opening, stamped with that moment: everything flown up to then is inside the figure you gave, and only flying from then on is counted the new way. Nothing is re-measured.
- Only the aircraft the change actually reaches are listed, and only those whose totals would really move. A syndicate that has logged no flights, or one where both measures give the same answer, is asked for nothing.
- A change to the syndicate default reaches every aircraft that has not set its own capture override, so you may be asked for several readings at once — one per aircraft. One figure cannot stand for a fleet.
- Every reading you enter is recorded against your reason on the aircraft’s meter-edit history, exactly as if you had corrected the meters by hand.
- The requirement is enforced when the setting is saved, not only in the dialog, and the whole change is applied together: if a reading is missing the change does not go through at all, and no aircraft is left half-updated.
- Renaming the meter, choosing different start and end names, or changing which measure the usage rate bills on changes no measurement and is never gated.
Both ends of every captured measure need a name. While a custom pair has an empty box, Save Settings stays disabled.
You cannot stop recording a measure your maintenance counts. If any maintenance item is set to count against the engine meter, unticking Capture engine meter is refused and the affected items are listed by name. Tap one to open that aircraft’s maintenance list and point it at a measure you still record; once nothing counts the engine meter, the change saves normally. Turning capture off would otherwise leave those checks compared against a meter reading that never moves again: they would report healthy forever and could never ground the aircraft.
- Only the engine meter behaves this way. Flying hours and landings are rebuilt from your usage logs whatever you capture, so items counting those never block a capture change.
- The refusal is enforced when the setting is saved, not only in the dialog, and it applies to a per-asset capture override on an asset’s own billing screen as well as to the syndicate default here.
- The rule is applied from the other direction too, so the two cannot be played off against each other: a maintenance item cannot be created against, or moved onto, a measure its aircraft does not record. Without that, an admin working offline could save an engine-meter check at the same moment someone else turned engine capture off, and the check would be accepted when their device reconnected.