Starting an Aircraft Group in Kai: The Essential First Steps
Bringing co-owners onto a shared aircraft is the easy part. Keeping the bookings fair, the hours tracked, and the bills correct is where most groups feel the strain. Kai is built to take that off your plate, but only once it knows how your group works. The good news: you can be set up in an afternoon, and you only need a handful of things in place to get real value. Here they are, in the order we'd do them.
You can start for free. There's a 30-day grace period with no card required, so you can build everything below before deciding on a plan.
1. Create the group and choose how it's run
When you create a group, Kai asks how it's owned and paid for. Pick the model that matches reality: one owner who rents the aircraft to others, or equal partners who share the ownership and the costs. This sets sensible defaults for cost sharing that you can adjust later, so it's worth getting roughly right now. Give the group a name, set your currency, and you're in.
2. Add the aircraft and set its rate
Add your aircraft as an asset, with a name, the registration, and ideally the make, model, and a photo. The one field that does real work is the hourly rate, because that's what turns logged time into a cost. Set it now and every usage log prices itself automatically.
You don't need to enter a starting Hobbs or tach reading here. Kai picks up meter readings from the first usage log, so the numbers stay tied to actual flights.
3. Decide what you bill on: the meter
This is the one aircraft-specific decision worth making up front. Kai can bill usage on Hobbs, flight time, or block time, and the choice defines what every member is charged for. Pick the meter your group already thinks in, set it once, and every invoice follows it. Maintenance can track a different meter entirely (more on that below), so billing and inspections never have to share one number.
4. Invite co-owners and set ownership shares
Invite the rest of the group by email. As each person joins, set their ownership share. Shares decide how fixed costs split and confirm who's entitled to book, so they matter even in a simple two-person group. Equal partners can split evenly, and uneven splits are fine too, as long as they add up to 100%.
5. Agree a few booking rules
You don't need every rule on day one. The point is to head off the two arguments every shared aircraft eventually has: someone holding the aircraft too long, and someone hogging the calendar. At a minimum, set a maximum booking length and either a cap on how many bookings a member can hold at once or a monthly quota. Turn on the waitlist while you're there, so when a wanted slot frees up it goes to the next person in line automatically, rather than to whoever happens to be watching the calendar.
If your group prefers a human in the loop, you can require admin sign-off on bookings. Most groups don't need it, so leave it off unless you do.
6. Add the maintenance you can't miss
Put your non-negotiable inspections into Kai: the annual, the 50 and 100 hour checks, anything with a deadline. For each one, choose whether it counts down on Hobbs or on flying hours, and switch on ground if overdue so an out-of-date aircraft simply can't be booked. From then on Kai shows live hours remaining against the real meter and emails you as each item approaches, comes due, and goes overdue. You can point those same alerts at your maintenance shop, too.
7. Sort out the money
Decide how costs reach people. Switch on automatic invoicing, per flight or once a month, so usage turns into invoices without you assembling them by hand, and set your VAT rate if your group charges it. To actually collect, you have two easy routes: add your group's IBAN and Kai generates SEPA QR codes members scan to pay, or connect your own Stripe account so members pay online and the money lands directly with you. Neither is required to start. You can record payments by hand at first and add online payment whenever you're ready.
What can wait
Plenty. Custom fields on usage logs, accounting sync to your bookkeeping software, pilot licence and document storage, consumable levels, the Flights Map, in-app messaging. It's all there when you want it, and none of it is in the way of getting started.
Do the seven steps above and you'll have an aircraft group that books fairly, tracks every hour against the right meter, and bills correctly from the first flight. Everything else is a refinement you can add once the group is up and flying.
