Getting started
Short guides, with screenshots, to setting up your workspace, your gear, your first quote, running the job, and checking equipment out and back in.
Setting up your workspace
Every quote, invoice and pull sheet inherits what you set here, so an hour in Settings before the first job saves retyping the same defaults onto every document after it. Each tab is one screen and most of them are a single form.
About an hour, and you only do it once
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 project
A job usually starts before it is confirmed, so Flightcase starts there too. Holds become quotes, quotes become projects, and the crew, schedule, files and gear all hang off the same record.
About twenty minutes end to end
Checking gear out and back in
Follow gear from the shelf to the truck and back. Pull records what goes out, Load Trucks records where it travels, and Check In counts the gear that actually left.
About five minutes to read
What the first afternoon looks like
The order matters more than the speed. Documents inherit your settings, quotes price themselves from your inventory, and projects inherit what a quote sold, so the work runs downhill from Settings through the catalog. Doing it in that order means nothing gets entered twice.
- Settings first. Tax and currency, how quotes and invoices are numbered, the default times each event type starts with, whether labor bills by the day or the hour, and who on the team gets which role. Each is one tab and most are a single form.
- Then gear. 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 project. An approved quote carries into a project 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 projects, 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.