Project closeout is where flight records either get preserved properly or disappear into a tangle of old spreadsheets. It’s also where billing discrepancies, incomplete submissions, and missing documentation tend to surface — after the deadline has passed and the client has moved on.
A clean closeout process protects your historical data, finalizes billing, and resets your system for the next project without carrying forward any confusion from the last one.
Invoicing Before You Archive
Before closing out a project, every site needs an invoice entry and a final billing status. FlightDeck’s Invoice Management tool presents each completed site with its Site ID, pilot pay, invoice amount, and current status — Flown and Complete — so you can enter final billing numbers and reconcile against your actual deliverables.
If you’re working with Salesforce for client billing, the Invoicing tool supports a direct Salesforce import that maps your completed site data to the appropriate billing records. The match runs against your project data and updates invoice fields from the import file, which eliminates the manual cross-referencing between FlightDeck and your billing system.
Completing billing before archiving matters because the archived data is your permanent record. Whatever numbers are in the working file when you archive are what go into your historical flight record.
The Combine and Archive Process
FlightDeck’s Combine and Archive tool runs a seven-step process that merges your completed project into the master AllFlightData.xlsx record and resets the working environment for the next project.
The steps run in sequence: first, any blocking applications — including LiveView_DATA, which holds the working data file open — are closed. Excel is closed after a confirmation prompt. Then the current working files are moved to a Combine staging folder, merged with the existing AllFlightData record, and the merged file is saved both as the new AllFlightData.xlsx and copied to the Archive folder as a backup. Temporary files are deleted. Working file templates are reset to blank.
The tool shows progress through each step as it runs, with a checkmark when each completes. The whole process takes under a minute for most project sizes.
What Gets Preserved
The archived AllFlightData.xlsx is your cumulative flight history — every project, merged in sequence. Over time this becomes the record of every site you’ve flown, every authorization you held, every invoice you processed. It’s the data that answers questions like “did we fly this tower before?”, “what was our pilot pay rate for that carrier last year?”, and “how many sites did we complete in Q3?”
That historical record has real business value if it’s maintained consistently. It also provides documentation in the event of an audit, a dispute, or a compliance review — a complete flight history is materially different from a folder of old project files that have to be reconstructed manually.
Resetting for the Next Project
After the archive runs, FlightDeck resets the working templates to a clean state. The next project import starts from scratch — no residual data from the previous project, no risk of mixing completed sites with new ones.
This reset is part of why the Combine and Archive tool asks for confirmation before running. The action is irreversible: once the working files are deleted and the templates reset, the previous project’s working data is gone from the active environment. It lives in the archive, but it’s no longer in the working files.
The confirmation prompt makes that explicit. The progress display makes the steps visible. The end result is a clean system and a complete historical record — which is what project closeout should produce.