Co-Ownership
A Case Study.
Randy and Frank decided to go in halves and purchase a Cessna
172, a small 4 seat airplane. One of the issues, how to
know when the other person has the airplane. Do you have a
schedule book and every time the person who doesn't have the
book call the other person to see if it is available. What
if they aren't home? Also, Frank and Randy decided that it
would be OK if a couple friends could use the plane too.
Now its even more difficult to keep track of. They could
hire an answering service, but that's not exactly the cheapest
way either. And how would they communicate maintenance
issues or other things that might come up. Well, they
found Schedule-Now.Net and here is how they use it.
Setup was a easy 3 step process. First page got Randy's
Name and email address. Second page sets up the
Organization. Just requires a short abbreviation for the
Organization ID (ie: Ces172)and then the full name (ie: Randy &
Franks 172). Third step was to setup the airplane as a
resource. All that was needed was a resource ID (the plane
id# N7163Q) and a description (Cessna 172) and DONE!.
You are then taken to the Login Screen. Login as
Organization ID, First Name, Last Name and Password. You
are taken directly to the calendar and can start scheduling the
plane.
Of course Frank was the other owner and had to be set.
So Randy went to the Membership List and added Frank.
Since Frank is the other owner, Randy made Frank an
Administrator on the Site also.
Already knowing who else were going to be allowed to use the
plane, Randy added Ed, Bo and Jeff. Of course they just
needed to schedule the plane and wouldn't be allowed to add
members or files so they were setup as Members only. If
you include the email address of the added members, they are
automatically emailed with instructions on how to login and are
the club Id, Username and Password.
There were several other features that would be useful to the
members. So everyone could have their own checklist for
flying the plane Randy uploaded a Word document with the
checklist to the Files section. Now if anyone lost
their checklist, they just needed to download it and print it
out.
The other thing that happened is the airport just changed the
combination to the ramp. So Randy added the new
combination to the News section. He checked a box
so it would come up as soon as someone logged in and also set it
so that it would only show for 1 month.
Remember, as soon as Randy first logged in, the site was
fully functional. Randy and Frank only share one resource
(the airplane) and since the site only charges per resource,
this is all available to them for $5.95 a month. This
includes everyone, there is no charge per member, it is per
organization/per resource. $5.95 is the total cost per
month.
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