Getting started
Three short guides covering the first things worth doing: your gear, your first quote, and running the job.
Getting your gear in
Quotes price themselves from your inventory, so the gear list is the thing everything else leans on. It is worth an unglamorous hour early rather than a scramble mid-quote.
About an hour for a first pass
Building a quote
The builder is where most of the day goes, so it is the part worth learning properly. The short version: build it from your inventory, send a link, and let the approval carry through to the invoice without anything being retyped.
About fifteen minutes to get the shape of it
Running the show
A job usually starts before it is confirmed, so Flightcase starts there too. Holds become quotes, quotes become shows, and the crew, schedule, files and gear all hang off the same record.
About twenty minutes end to end
What the first afternoon looks like
The order matters more than the speed. Quotes price themselves from your inventory, and shows inherit what a quote sold, so the work runs downhill from the catalog. Doing it in that order means nothing gets entered twice.
- Gear first. Categories that match how your team talks, then items with rates and quantities, then cases and kits as single lines. Replacement values while you are already in the record, because filling them in later is the job everyone postpones and regrets.
- Then a real quote. Use a job you are actually working on rather than a test one. You will hit the questions that matter, like how you group sections and what your client expects to see, in the first ten minutes instead of the first week.
- Then the show. An approved quote carries into a show record with the venue, the schedule, the crew calls and the files. Nothing is retyped, and the warehouse prepares from what was actually sold.
Questions worth answering before you start
- What are your departments? Lighting, audio, video, rigging, comms, power. These become the shape every quote inherits, so use the words your crew already say.
- What counts as a case? A comms kit should go onto a quote as one line at one rate, not as a pile of parts. Decide the rule once and apply it consistently.
- Who needs access? Admins run the workspace, staff work broadly, PMs are scoped to their shows, warehouse users focus on prep and movement, viewers read. Crew and clients use links rather than seats.
- Which currency and tax setup? A workspace can run in USD, EUR, GBP, CAD or AUD, and tax is labeled for the region so VAT reads as VAT.
Once the basics are in
These are the pages worth reading next, depending on which part of the job you are trying to tighten up.