One FBO. Or twenty. Same system.
Most FBO software makes you choose. Single-site tools leave a chain running five copies of itself, five catalogs, five customer lists and a spreadsheet to add it all up. Enterprise suites make an independent pay for a corporate hierarchy it does not have. RampRelay is one system with two scopes: one location, or the whole business. You move between them from the top bar.
Every screen works at both scopes.
The button in the top bar carrying your name and logo is the switcher. Open it and you see the business with its locations listed underneath. Pick the business and you are looking at everything. Pick a location and you are looking at just that one. Whichever you chose is written at the top of the sidebar, so nobody has to guess what they are reading.
The work in front of the crew today.
Its orders, its ramp, its board, its public page, its stock, its purchase orders. The list narrows to that location, so a queue position means third in line here rather than third across the chain, and every time on the screen is that airport's own clock.
Everything the chain owns, and the roll-up.
The catalog, the customer and supplier directories, the pricing tiers, the team and its roles, the books and the accounting connection. Plus the operational roll-up: one order list covering them all, with a location column and each row stamped in its own zone.
Set once where it should be once. Local where it has to be local.
This is the line most software gets wrong in one direction or the other. Copying a catalog to every location means five things to change when one thing changes. Forcing a single price on every location means the chain cannot price a market. Here is where we drew it.
The business owns it
- Services and products
- One catalog for the business. Each location then says whether a product is public on its storefront, unlisted but orderable by staff and the API, or not sold there at all.
- Customers and suppliers
- One directory. A customer's history follows it across every location it uses, and the tier it sits on is set once rather than re-keyed at each one.
- Pricing tiers
- Retail, Volume, Contract, and whatever else you run. The tiers belong to the chain.
- Team and roles
- One roster, one set of roles, with each person's locations on their own row.
- Payments and credits
- A wire that settles three invoices at three locations has no home location, so payments, credit memos and write-offs are numbered for the business.
- Ramp work ordering
- How the queue weights departure time, waiting time and customer priority. Set once, run everywhere.
The location owns it
- Orders, ramp and boards
- The desk list, the ramp queue and the wall board each carry one location, so line crew see the work in front of them and nothing from the rest of the chain.
- The public storefront
- Its own page, hero, blurb, hours and contact. A pilot searching an ICAO lands on that airport, not on head office.
- Rates
- Every product's price, per tier, posted at the location. There is no chain default to inherit, so nothing drifts out of date behind your back.
- Fuel, supplies and equipment
- Stock is physical, so it is counted where it stands, and the low-stock email goes to the people there.
- Purchasing and receiving
- A purchase order is raised and received at the location that ordered it.
- Tax registrations
- Which taxes the location collects and under what number, on that location's Configure gear.
- Document numbering
- Orders, reservations and invoices carry the location in the number, so a document says where it came from.
- The clock and the units
- The airport's own time zone, and litres or gallons and °C or °F from the country it sits in.
Jet A-1 is one product and five prices.
Open a product and the rate card is a grid: your tiers down the side, your locations across the top. Every cell is the price that location charges that tier, with the date it took effect underneath. Future dates are allowed, so next month's increase goes in today. A tier that is not sold at a location is blank there, which keeps the grid honest about what is actually offered where.
The same fuel, at retail, is C$1.6500 in Edmonton and C$1.7325 in Halifax. The tiers are the chain's; the number is the location's.
Every location, live, on one screen.
The executive board is the chain's own board, and it is the one screen a single site does not need. A strip across the top for the whole business, then a card per location: what is active, how long the oldest untouched job has been sitting, on-time delivery, fuel out today, jobs finished today. Underneath, today's fuel pace with a line per location. It refreshes itself, and it is admin-only, so it does not turn up in the crew room.
And the slower questions
Insights carries a location control above every dashboard. Leave it on all locations for the chain's volume, on-time rate, revenue and receivables, or pick one location to see whether the problem is everywhere or somewhere. The choice follows you as you move between tabs.
The wall boards stay local
A ramp board in a crew room shows that ramp. Nobody in Calgary needs Toronto's queue on the TV, and the position numbers would stop meaning anything if they did. The roll-up is for the people who own the chain, not for the people working the line.
Stock reads the same way. Every tank, truck and bowser the chain owns in one list, with the location on each row and the last reading in that airport's own clock. Narrow to one location and the list shows only that one.
A fueller at one location should not wade through another's work.
There are three roles. Staff and managers can be pinned to named locations, and their row on the members list carries those codes. A regional manager holds the per-location settings at the locations they cover and none at the rest. Admins are always chain-wide, because chain-wide settings are what an admin is for. Records that belong to the business, such as customers, suppliers and payments, span every location regardless of who is scoped where.
If you run your own identity provider
A chain large enough to have Entra can map its groups to a role and a list of locations, so a new hire at one location signs in with their work account and lands already scoped, with nobody in head office adding them by hand. When someone leaves, the sweep that watches for unused accounts switches their access off.
Most chains keep one set of books and never think about it again.
There is exactly one reason to keep a second: a location that is a separate company. It closes its own months, files its own returns, and its numbers are not yours to add to the rest. An FBO you have acquired and not yet merged is the usual case. A location that is just another airport of the same company belongs in the same book. Two books for one entity gives you two partial pictures and nothing that reconciles.
The close follows the book
Locking a period locks that book's month. Your bookkeeper closing June cannot freeze an acquired FBO's June, and each book keeps its own financial year start.
So does QuickBooks
Each book connects to its own company in your accounting software, which is the whole point when they really are two companies.
History stays where it was booked
Move a location to another book and only its future documents follow. A location changing hands must not restate a month somebody has already closed and filed.
One wire, three locations
A remittance that settles three invoices at three locations has no home location, so payments, credit memos and write-offs are numbered for the business. Orders, reservations and invoices are numbered for the location that raised them, and carry its code in the number. So a document tells you where it came from before you open it.
Four airports means four clocks.
A chain across four states is a chain on four zones, and the honest answer to "what time is this row?" is the airport's own. So every row is stamped, and when the list can span zones the header reads Local rather than naming one of them, with a flip to UTC for anyone who would rather work in it. Volume and temperature follow the same rule: a US airport quotes gallons and reads Fahrenheit because of where it is, not because somebody remembered to set it.
MDT, CDT, PDT, EDT: in the switcher and again on every row. Month end works the same way: the closing inventory reading is taken in the first hour of the 1st where you are, not at midnight UTC, which in Vancouver is still the 31st.
Bring us your whole chain.
Book a demo and tell us how many locations you run, which of them price differently, who is allowed where, and whether any of it closes its own books. We will set it up that way and you can drive it.
Screenshots are of RampRelay running on demonstration data. Chains, aircraft, customers and staff shown are fictional.