I put the following to Joe in a message and he suggested we put this in the forum.
Mar 19, 12:58
Hello Joe,
Would it be possible in airline finance to have the graph at the top reflect an airlines total value over time vs cash? I think its a better metric.
Thanks,
Adam.
Joe said:
Mar 19, 17:08
Nice idea but not sure I have enough data to show that. Cash we have, buying and selling ac we might be able to figure out. Loan balances throws everything off. If you want to discuss more, please do so on the forum, its the best place to bring up ideas for new features.
Would anyone else be interested in this? I personally find the cash overtime a bit pointless really and seeing a total value over time would be better.
Perhaps a drop down that allows people to chose which they'd prefer to see?
The graph in finances? Yeah that could be overall value as long as we leave the cash balance on the overview sheet alone.
I use that "balance" on the overview page as a quick glance indicator to see if I am flying enough to pay the monthly bills like a checkbook balance. I rarely look at the graph on the finance page myself.
One question for Joe: With all the buying and selling of aircraft the long term airlines have done, how much of a PITA will it be for you to pull all the data from years gone by?
Its not impossible. All the cash transactions are of course in the DB and is what is used to create that graph. Identifying the other transactions where aircraft are sold/purchased would not be too hard to identify. Other things that can affect airline value are the maintenance centers which is not to hard, but the loans are a bit more difficult as estimating value at any given point with interest being calculated will be a challange.
Not impossible, but a fair about of work.
I've sworn an oath of solitude until the pestilence is purged from the lands.
Cat wrote: ↑Thu Mar 20, 2025 3:24 pm
I use that "balance" on the overview page as a quick glance indicator to see if I am flying enough to pay the monthly bills like a checkbook balance. I rarely look at the graph on the finance page myself.
That's a good point - We just have so much cash and so much being generated its kind of pointless to us.
joefremont wrote: ↑Thu Mar 20, 2025 5:25 pm
Its not impossible. All the cash transactions are of course in the DB and is what is used to create that graph. Identifying the other transactions where aircraft are sold/purchased would not be too hard to identify. Other things that can affect airline value are the maintenance centers which is not to hard, but the loans are a bit more difficult as estimating value at any given point with interest being calculated will be a challange.
Not impossible, but a fair about of work.
What part of the loans is hard? Since an amount leaves and amounts return that pay the loan and some... Unless I'm missing something here sir?
ADAM-007 wrote: ↑Thu Mar 20, 2025 8:19 pm
What part of the loans is hard? Since an amount leaves and amounts return that pay the loan and some... Unless I'm missing something here sir?
Well its the balance over time that would have to be calculated. Right now we record the amount in each transaction that was paid in each payment. The entry for the loan itself contains the current balance, or at least the balance as of the last payment. But we don't store the balance over time. If you want to know what was the value of the loan in the 14th day of the last month, somewhere in the middle of when a loan was processed, you need to do the math to figure out what was the loan value on each day. its not quite rocket science but it may take some time.
I've sworn an oath of solitude until the pestilence is purged from the lands.
I spent some time looking into this. Turns out the loans are not the hardest problem, its the aircraft value.
I made a couple changes, trying to add the change in equity value of an airline based on loan payments to the transactions and it was not hard to do and the math to backfill all the numbers was not hard to do.
But aircraft values is a bit more difficult because the value of an aircraft is not constant. I actually started something along these lines some time ago, I added a column on the transaction record for the change in aircraft values based on that action, its already set when an aircraft is purchased, sold, repaired. Its even done for transferred between fleets, its why you see a transaction in your finance section with the reason 'Fleet Aircraft Transfer' with a zero dollar amount. But at some point it got very complex and I set it aside.
My initial idea was every transaction would reflect the change in the aircraft value, so if you purchase an aircraft that has a value of 1M, that +1m value would be in the transaction, if later the aircraft value dropped 950k and then you repaired to 100% the repair has +50k, same when an aircraft is transferred between fleets or sold, but we are recording the current value rather than the original value so you may have -975k for fleet A and +975k for fleet B. But we are not recording the changes in value on flight reports and there is no transaction when the aircraft value just goes down because its parked. Another headache is leases, when an aircraft is leased, the leasing aircraft has the transactions for flights and repairs, but the asset value belongs to the airline that owns the aircraft, not the leasing airline. To add to the complexity we change the prices of aircraft from time to time, its quite common for us when an aircraft goes out of production to cut the price in half.
All these changes need to be reflected in the transactions some how, so if an aircraft is currently part of a fleet then all those changes of value should add up to the aircrafts current value, and if an aircraft is no longer part of a fleet then all those changes should add up to zero, and if an aircraft has been leased, then there should be no changes in aircraft value for them, but only for the owning airline.
So if I do this, I am going to have to carefully go through the code to figure out all these changes and set the correctly and then figure out how to backfill all the past transactions so things add up.
Then making the actual graph will be easy. Originally I was not thinking about a graph but some type of income statement over some period of time, but its the same data.
I've sworn an oath of solitude until the pestilence is purged from the lands.
yikes that made me tired just reading about it, let alone not having the brains to figure it out. LOL
Why not just take the balance sheet "balance" on a daily basis, say at X:XX hours daily and build a graph from that going forward?
example: right now my "cash" is at 5,790,034,505 but my bottom line "balance total" is $6,038,314,803 after calculating aircraft, assets and liabilities in the top part of the Balance Sheet in Finances.
Airlines playing with billions in cash and assets prolly don't need or care about results down to the dollar per second, but more of a "daily snapshot" that figures in those assets and liabilities with cash on hand.
Cat wrote: ↑Fri Mar 28, 2025 2:56 am
Why not just take the balance sheet "balance" on a daily basis, say at X:XX hours daily and build a graph from that going forward?
Well going forward it could work. We have code right now we use in the Finance/Balance sheet page to calculate, we could just run that to take a snapshot at the end of each month for each fleet and save it in the database. But what about going back? We need some way to go back and figure out what it was and that is probably as much work as just storing the change on each transaction.
I've sworn an oath of solitude until the pestilence is purged from the lands.
Could you not just pinpoint the monthlies that you've already got Joe?
Sometimes simple is all you need, just a nice graph showing how the balance is doing here and there would be absolutely perfect for us. If the line went down we could investigate what happened etc...
ADAM-007 wrote: ↑Fri Mar 28, 2025 8:37 am
Could you not just pinpoint the monthlies that you've already got Joe?
Sometimes simple is all you need, just a nice graph showing how the balance is doing here and there would be absolutely perfect for us. If the line went down we could investigate what happened etc...
Well the information I have right now is not complete, I would still need to go back and figure out what the changes in aircraft value would be for each fleet. Also would this just be for the VA as a whole or would we want to do it for fleets (I think yes) and if so how does it change when two fleets are merged?
I think my earlier idea was to ambitious, I need to simplify it to what is the 100% aircraft value when its added to a fleet and remove that same amount when its removed from a fleet and don't worry about changes due to status, repairs or seat configuration changes.
I've sworn an oath of solitude until the pestilence is purged from the lands.
