Just joined the forum after spending a fair bit of time reading through the threads and think it is a good community.
I am the finance person behind Hover CFO. Not a pilot. I come at this from the other side of the business. My background is 20 plus years in industrial services finance, most recently as Group Finance Director at a wind energy services company, so I have been sitting on the client side of drone inspection contracts for a while and watching how operators price their work.
What I have noticed, from both sides of the table, is that the finance infrastructure most inspection and survey companies run on is basically held together with Xero and hope. Tax returns get filed. VAT/Sales Tax gets submitted. But nobody is tracking job level margin properly, nobody is depreciating their thermal payload by flight hours rather than straight line, and WIP on multi week survey contracts is either ignored or wrong.
That is the gap I am trying to fill. I have built a job costing model specifically for commercial drone operators. The kind that accounts for battery cycle depreciation, data processing labour per job, compliance costs spread across billable flight hours, the lot. It is free, and I am giving it away because I want to validate it against real operator numbers before I charge anything for the advisory work. Any and all feedback will be most appreciated.
If you are running an inspection or survey business and any of that sounds familiar, happy to chat. Not here to pitch. Genuinely interested in whether the model reflects how you actually work, and what I have got wrong. Thanks.
Regards,
H.
I am the finance person behind Hover CFO. Not a pilot. I come at this from the other side of the business. My background is 20 plus years in industrial services finance, most recently as Group Finance Director at a wind energy services company, so I have been sitting on the client side of drone inspection contracts for a while and watching how operators price their work.
What I have noticed, from both sides of the table, is that the finance infrastructure most inspection and survey companies run on is basically held together with Xero and hope. Tax returns get filed. VAT/Sales Tax gets submitted. But nobody is tracking job level margin properly, nobody is depreciating their thermal payload by flight hours rather than straight line, and WIP on multi week survey contracts is either ignored or wrong.
That is the gap I am trying to fill. I have built a job costing model specifically for commercial drone operators. The kind that accounts for battery cycle depreciation, data processing labour per job, compliance costs spread across billable flight hours, the lot. It is free, and I am giving it away because I want to validate it against real operator numbers before I charge anything for the advisory work. Any and all feedback will be most appreciated.
If you are running an inspection or survey business and any of that sounds familiar, happy to chat. Not here to pitch. Genuinely interested in whether the model reflects how you actually work, and what I have got wrong. Thanks.
Regards,
H.
