Aviation expense management platform MySky reports that charter operators could be losing up to $4,000 per tail per month by not adopting new technology. Analysis of operators managing around 15 aircraft shows that a reliance on disparate systems for back-office operations such as accounting, reporting, procurement, and business intelligence results in considerable overspend.
“On average it takes around 15 minutes for a single cost document to be processed by one person, and a typical charter aircraft will generate around 150 cost documents per month,” explained MySky CEO and co-founder Kirill Kim. “When such a large amount of paperwork is generated by flight operations, accounting bottlenecks can quickly form, which has a serious downstream effect on business.”
Discussions with customers reveal that around 40 hours of accounting work—costing upwards of $2,400 per month—to process the spend associated with just one aircraft. That equates to the equivalent of a full-time person for every four aircraft. Moreover, with factors such as management reporting, labor, and software added, the monthly cost for one aircraft rises to around $4,000.
Harnessing technology such as artificial intelligence can reduce expense document processing times by at least 75 percent, with significant savings in labor costs, while redirecting time and costs into effective business development, the company maintains. With this technology, it said, business processes become fully optimized and scalable, enabling operators to expand while saving time and money.