For humanitarian air services and NGO fleets

Cost recovery per seat, per agency, from the flight log.

UnityTrip charges every seat on a humanitarian flight to the agency and the fund that flew it, and pays each operator from the flight log. A humanitarian air service runs on two kinds of money, donor funding and cost recovery from the organisations that use it, and both leak in the same two places: seats that fly with nobody charged, and operator invoices that nobody can reconcile to what flew. The record that closes both is one booking per passenger per segment, carrying the agency, the fund and the booking number, matched to the flight log the crew signed.

In the humanitarian air services the founders have worked in, seats were charged to user organisations under contract, the payments to the wet-lease operators, each on its own contract, were automated, the flight logs the crew collected were the agreed record for accounts payable, and the staffing cost of running the service fell as a result.

• The seat is charged to the agency that flew it. At booking, against the agency's agreement and the fund it names, with the booking number as the charge reference. The agency's statement is the sum of its seats flown, not a month-end estimate.
• Each operator is paid from its flight log. Each contract gives the fixed costs, the hours flown and the variable costs per aircraft; the crew's log is the agreed, immutable record for accounts payable, so payment works off usage, for every operator the service contracts, and nobody re-keys an invoice.
• The place does not change the rule. Small turboprop and single-engine fleets, airstrips with no commercial service, booking over constrained satellite links: the same record, the same rules, one policy across the flight and the road leg.

What a humanitarian air service can require

• Ring-fenced money stays ring-fenced. A seat is charged to a fund as well as an agency, so a grant given for one response pays only for travel on that response. Budgets attach to funds, cost centres and WBS, and a fund can be made mandatory on every booking, so no seat flies on money that was given for something else.
• Donor reporting from the record, not from a spreadsheet. Cost per seat, per agency, per fund and per month, computed from the same record as the manifest. Flights reserved for a reason outside the schedule, a medevac or an assessment mission, can be excluded from the cost per seat or kept internal; the system does not judge, it accommodates the choice.
• Scarce seats allocated by a rule the service wrote. A priority matrix for the agencies and reasons that outrank others when the aircraft is full, with the medevac boarding unconditionally and the displaced traveller first onto the next flight, the reason recorded.
• Duty of care from a live manifest. Who is on which aircraft now, with no boarding without a booking number.
• Staff seats that pay their own way. Where staff pay part of a seat, the traveller pays through the card gateway and the amount is a direct deduction from the cost of the lease.

Put together, that is a service whose every seat has an agency and a fund, whose every invoice has a flight log, and whose donors can see the cost of a seat without a reconciliation exercise.

What an audit committee can ask

One question: for any flight last month, which agency and which fund was charged for each seat, and what does the flight log say flew? If both answers come from one record, the service can show them in a minute. If one is a spreadsheet and the other is an invoice, the difference between them is the finding.

What it needs from you

Three things the service already holds: the contracts with the operators; the agreements with the user organisations, saying who may book, what a seat is charged and which funds it may be charged to; and the flight logs. Written once into the rules, they become what the engine charges and pays from.

For the review, read access to the bookings, the manifests, the flight logs and the operator invoices. The review reconciles seats charged to seats flown and invoices to logs, and returns the ten largest recoverable opportunities ranked by money, with the rows that prove each one.