lasergrade vs. cats

[cheater1239]

any one have pros and cons for flight schools, as far as what is best for a small flight school?

 

[Berkut]

I've never used Lasergrade, but did use CATS where I used to work. I think it would work well for a small flight school. It's easy to set up and maintain. We charged $90 per test and gave CATS half.

 

[Way2Broke]

Lasergrade gets more business because of the AOPA discount.

 

[epic!]

I thought CATS had the discount too.

 

[sqwkvfr]

The school where I worked had CATS...it was a PITA becasue the test-taker would have to call CATS and register and pay over the phone.....when I went to another place that used Lasergrade, you didn't have to go through this whole production...one could just register and pay at the FBO.

It just seemed that Lasergrade was a lot more user-friendly.

 

[Mr Wu]

Don't know about CATS, but with lasergrade you have to have 3 testing stations to do FAA tests. Each station has to administer one test a month to stay "current." Each proctor has to administer a test once a month to stay current. A plus for the lasergrade is that it does not just do FAA, but FCC, food service, and a bunch of other crap that will make you a nice chunk of change on top of the FAA. Lasergrade are nazis with the compliance stuff. They hand out fines for everything. One of the guys in the flight school had never registered a walk up candidate before so I showed him how to do it by registering him for a test. He never took it and it dropped out of the system after 2 days with no charge until lasergrade fined us $50 for allowing an employee to take a test. They didn't want to hear about the fact that he didn't take it, registering him was enough.

 

[Berkut]

The school where I worked had CATS...it was a PITA becasue the test-taker would have to call CATS and register and pay over the phone.

Our CATS site handled the registration and payment. I guess some sites have different arrangements.

 

[sqwkvfr]

Our CATS site handled the registration and payment. I guess some sites have different arrangements.

That could very well be....I guess I really didn't think about this, but the guy that was in charge when it was set up was a real twit so it's possible that the arrangement was screwed up on our end.

 

[VW Pilot]

I took CATS testing for my PPL.....The only thing I didn't like was that I had to give my CC number to someone way out in California........I'd ratther pay at the FBO Next time