Sales workflows and automation

Sales Workflows and Automation in Leon

Leon supports seven distinct sales workflows: ad-hoc charter on your own fleet, requests received through Avinode, mixed offers combining own aircraft with subcharter, buying and selling through Leon Marketplace, low-touch repeat selling for contracted clients, owner flights, and empty-leg sales. Across all of them Leon automates the same underlying work — building the routing and positioning legs, calculating flight times, pricing the quote from configured pricelists, applying VAT and passenger taxes, selecting documents in the client's language, creating the trip in operations, and keeping the quote and the trip in sync afterwards.

What remains for a person is the commercial judgement: which aircraft to offer, at what margin, and whether the schedule is worth pursuing.

This article describes each workflow and states plainly what the system does and what a seller still does. It is an overview; the detailed reference for each function is linked from the relevant section.

1. What happens before anyone opens the request

An enquiry arrives from Avinode at 02:40 for a Citation XLS, Nice to Ibiza, four passengers. By the time a seller opens Leon in the morning, without anyone having touched it:

• the request exists, tagged with its source and the requesting broker

• if only an aircraft type was specified, a separate quote has been created for every aircraft of that type in the fleet

• the routing has been completed with positioning legs, built according to each aircraft's base policy

• rotation times have been inserted before the first passenger leg and after the last

• each quote carries a full price breakdown calculated from the pricelists assigned to that aircraft — or a single agreed line, if the routing matches a fixed route

• country VAT has been applied at the correct rate, proportionally across domestic and international legs if configured that way

• passenger taxes have been added

• the client's preferred handling agents, exclusion zones and document language are attached

• the enquiry has been routed to the base that handles that client

• feasibility warnings are visible, including whether minimum crew hold a duty on the departure day

The same applies to an enquiry typed in by hand — everything from the routing down happens the moment the aircraft is selected.

2. The automation catalogue

Every automation in the module is a trigger and an action. This is the inventory, grouped by where it sits in the sale. The third column is what you configure to turn it on or change it.

Intake and pricing

Quoting and documents

Booking and operations

Passengers, compliance and closing

3. How Leon models a sale

The request carries the source it came from — Avinode, HelloJet, Victor, Leon Marketplace, or manual entry — plus a requester, an optional representative, an assignee, and a base.

Status buttons are actions, not labels

The set of statuses shown to your sellers is configurable, so an operator that does not use options or contracts removes those buttons — and with them the steps. Full reference: Requests/Quotes.

4. Defaults that cascade

Most of what looks like automation in Leon is a default resolving down a chain. The chains are what configuration buys you.

Trip type, when a quote is booked, resolves: requester → Sales module setting → aircraft → operator default. Set Flight for owner on one client and every booking from them lands in OPS correctly typed, without anyone choosing.

Pricelists resolve from the aircraft's assigned lists, narrowed by client restriction — a contracted client's rates load by default because the pricelist is visible only to them.

Airport fees resolve per airport, then per country group via wildcards such as EG*, then fall back to a Default row.

Documents and emails resolve by the requester's language, falling back to English; email templates additionally default per aircraft.

Exclusion zones accumulate from operator, aircraft and client level.

Handling agents resolve from the client's preferred agent for that airport, one per airport.

Bases resolve from the client, then from the editing user's own base.

The implication: nearly every per-quote decision can be pre-decided where it is actually stable — the fleet, the client, or the operator — rather than being asked again on every enquiry.

5. Where requests come from

6. Workflow A — Ad-hoc charter on own fleet

The baseline, and the flow most others vary from.

Automation profile. Leon builds the routing, the price, the taxes and the documents. You choose the aircraft, the margin, and whether to hold an option. Manual data entry happens once, at step 1.

7. Workflow B — Request received through Avinode

Automation profile. The request arrives already priced. You decide whether to answer it, and at what number. Non-answers and rejections can be handled without you touching them.

Same spine as Workflow A, with intake and response automated at both ends: requests are pushed automatically or pulled by ID; a request naming only a type produces a quote per matching tail; pricing comes from your own pricelists while any Avinode price stays visible alongside; QUOTE is the accept action in Avinode and can answer several quotes with one message; quotes never sent can be auto-declined; and accept or decline actions performed in Avinode flow back into Leon, updating the request and each quote.

Two constraints to plan around: on an Avinode request only the quotation and rejection messages exist unless the Mailboxes panel is configured, and empty-leg requests are rejected outright if the aircraft named does not exist in your Leon fleet.

Full reference: Avinode Integration.

8. Workflow C — Mixed offer: own fleet plus subcharter

For operators who quote their own aircraft alongside third-party lift in one offer.

Automation profile. Own-fleet tabs price themselves. Subcharter tabs do not — cost comes from the supplier, and Leon automates the margin, the commission and the presentation.

Within one request you add tabs: one per own tail, plus one per subcharter. Subcharters arrive either from a known supplier, entered directly, or sourced through FIND SUBCHARTER / COMPARE PRICE, which searches Avinode and returns accepted responses as subcharter quotes carrying aircraft details and photos. Each subcharter tab holds aircraft and operator details, a message thread, amenities and cabin dimensions, service suppliers, and uploaded documents — with amenities and photos flowing into the sales documents automatically.

Pricing is supplier cost plus your margin plus any third-party commission, so the client compares one number per option regardless of whose aircraft it is. Preferred handling agents apply to subcharter requests automatically by default.

Two constraints: a subcharter may be confirmed without a registration, leaving aircraft characteristics empty; and the automated flight-time calculation methods do not run on subcharter legs, so those times come from the supplier.

9. Workflow D — Leon Marketplace, buying and selling

A Leon-to-Leon channel: operators expose selected aircraft to other Leon operators and brokers.

Automation profile. The heaviest automation here is not pricing but data exchange — passenger lists and trip data move between two operators' systems without email, attachments or re-keying.

As a buyer, FIND CHARTER searches by end customer, trip type, minimum category and itinerary; FIND EMPTY LEG searches sellers' booked trips automatically against seven criteria including seat capacity, category and date range, pricing from the seller's ferry-flight rates. As a seller, the request arrives prefixed M-, while buyer-side requests keep L-.

When the end client accepts, the buyer sets READY TO BOOK, which is transmitted to the seller; booking ahead of the seller triggers a warning. After booking, two mechanisms replace attachments: the buyer publishes the passenger list and the seller pulls it into their own flights with one action, and the seller can share selected trip data — OPS checklist statuses, ferry flights, crew details — to the buyer's quote and to the Customer Portal.

Full reference: Leon Marketplace.

10. Workflow E — Frequent flyer and contracted clients

Leon has no separate programme module for repeat clients. What it has is a set of per-client settings that together produce the lowest-touch workflow in the module.

Automation profile. A repeat enquiry can reach a sent quotation with no input beyond dates and passenger count. Nothing is decided per enquiry because everything was decided on the client profile.

Configured on the client: a restricted pricelist so contracted rates are the ones that load; fixed routes giving agreed all-in prices per routing, which on a match become the only line in the quote; trip type, first in the resolution chain, so bookings land in OPS correctly typed; preferred handling agents, one per airport; exclusion zones; document language; and a base that routes the enquiry to the right office. Plus Clone Request, which duplicates a previous itinerary rather than retyping it.

11. Workflow F — Owner flights

Three distinct paths, and operators typically run all three.

Automation profile. The first path deliberately has none — it bypasses Sales entirely.

Straight into OPS. For flights that are not quoted, the trip is created directly in OPS with an owner trip type. No RFQ, no quotation, no invoice from the Sales module. The owner's visibility comes from the Owner Board — a calendar view granted through privileges, showing flights on their aircraft with schedule, flight watch, crew, handling, permits and slot statuses.

Through Sales. The owner submits a request in the Owner mobile app; it appears in Requests/Quotes like any other enquiry and can be priced using owner-specific fee items — owner fee, owner block hour fee, owner flight hour fee — before booking. Change requests made in the app surface on the request.

Owner approval on charter flights. An aircraft can be flagged as requiring owner consent, after which an APPROVAL button appears on requests for that tail and sends the owner an approval email with its document.

Note the two levels at work. The requirement is configured once, on the aircraft. The approval itself is granted per aircraft per request — at the level of the individual quote — so each new request on that tail needs its own consent, and in a request holding several aircraft only the flagged ones carry the step. This suits managed fleets where the owner signs off on each piece of third-party charter rather than granting blanket permission.

12. Workflow G — Selling empty legs

Automation profile. Empty legs are generated by your own bookings, priced by rule, and exposed to buyers continuously. Inbound empty-leg enquiries arrive as complete priced quotes.

A price per ferry leg is set in Ferry flights; without one, the default pricelists apply. Legs become visible to Marketplace buyers without further action, and whether ferry legs are transmitted to Avinode and Marketplace at all — and at gross or net price — is a setting. Inbound empty-leg requests from Avinode are turned into a complete routing including positioning legs and priced from that aircraft's pricelists, with a separate routing and quotation produced for each aircraft in a multi-leg request. Dedicated fee items cover ferry economics.

13. Pricing: two calculation models

Selected per aircraft, with a default margin, in Fleet → SALES.

In price based mode a concession is a line item: the seller adds a discount or additional fee and the total follows.

In cost & margin mode the seller simply types the price they want to sell at, and Leon adjusts the margin to match. Discounting is a single edit to one number — no discount item to add, no separate calculation. What the seller sees immediately is the consequence: the margin percentage moves, so the cost of the concession is on screen at the moment of granting it. Behind that edit, which side Leon adjusts is configurable — the margin absorbs the change (the default), or the margin is held and an adjustment line is inserted instead, or Leon asks each time. Either way a minimum acceptable margin can be set, with a warning when a quote falls below it.

Pricelists. Aircraft fees are a large library of parameterised items, most of which calculate their own units from the itinerary — block hours, sectors, overnights, days outside home base, passenger counts, distance — with thresholds available for minimum day charges, short sectors, catering and volume discounts. Airport fees are set per airport or per country group with a Default fallback, and can be exported and re-imported in bulk. Fixed routes override everything on a routing match. See Fees, Fixed Routes and Airport Fees Query Language.

Taxes. Country VAT applies by default to domestic passenger flights, optionally including ferry legs, and can be calculated proportionally across mixed domestic and international trips. Passenger taxes are added automatically when enabled. See Sales Module settings and Passenger Tax Calculations.

Airport charges. With the Airport Charges (RDC Aviation) integration active, published charges are pulled per route and loaded into the quote, removing the need to maintain airport pricelists by hand for the airports it covers. A separate commercial arrangement with the provider. See Add-ons.

14. Flight time calculation

Seven methods, one control, and applying any of them re-prices the quote. Comparing two on the same routing is a legitimate use.

All of them honour exclusion zones set at operator, aircraft or client level. None of them run on subcharter legs. Calls to external providers may be billable, which is worth considering if your team calculates times on enquiries it never quotes.

Full reference: Flight Time Calculations Methods.

15. Positioning, and how the base policy changes the numbers

Positioning is where quoting logic differs most between operators, so Leon makes it a per-aircraft choice that then drives every automatic calculation.

Fixed base. The aircraft belongs to its home base. Quotes include the ferry out and the ferry back. Conservative, and produces higher prices far from base.

Floating base. The aircraft is treated as being where it is. Above a configured threshold in hours the return ferry is omitted from the quote; below it, the aircraft is offered from home base with the ferry included. Competitive for aircraft already near the client, at the cost of a less predictable pricing basis.

Supporting this: a nominal ferry allowance can be charged where no positioning leg exists; default positioning and repositioning rotation times set ground time around the passenger legs, though they do not apply to fuel stops, feasibility checks or manually added legs; and fuel stops are flagged automatically when distance exceeds the aircraft's configured range. See Fleet Setup.

16. Feasibility checks

Feasibility runs against the quote itinerary, not only the booked trip, so problems surface before an offer leaves.

Warnings, cautions and notices are reported in three categories, each filterable and remembered per user. Beyond airport and schedule validation the check includes operational signals with commercial consequences: no minimum crew holding a duty on the departure day, and FTL cautions including FDP length exceeded.

Feasibility state appears on the request list, inside the itinerary, in the FIND AIRCRAFT window while choosing a tail, and as a warning beside the SEND button when despatching a document.

17. Documents, signatures and languages

Templates are built in the Documents Manager and can be customised with HTML and CSS or used as delivered.

What runs automatically: language selection, where a language on the template and on the client profile together pick the right document and email without being asked, defaulting to English; default notes, a legal note and cancellation policy defined once and pre-filled into every quote; email templates per document type with defaults per aircraft; CO2 figures calculated from block time and fuel consumption; and invoicing that derives due dates, applies per-issuer numbering sequences, and includes the configured fee items. The Flight Brief can be sent in stages for long itineraries, and the Charter Agreement can include or exclude ferry legs.

DocuSign. Contracts generated in Sales can be sent for electronic signature, requiring a DocuSign account, activation by Leon, and a per-user connection. See Docusign Integration and Defining Default Language For Documents.

18. Passengers and compliance

Passengers come either from the phonebook — split into the requesting company's own contacts and everyone else — or as free text where names are not yet known.

Passport and ID scanning is the main automation: upload the photo page, and Leon reads the details, assigns the person to the legs you select, and saves the profile for reuse. Where the requester is a company, the passenger is filed under that company's contacts, so a client's passenger list builds itself over time. Travel document validity is checked against the flight's departure time.

Sanctions screening runs through the PAXFILES integration, reporting the result as a checklist item. A separate arrangement with the provider.

See Adding PAX to quotes and Checklist.

19. Routing enquiries inside a multi-base organisation

Bases are defined at operator level and assigned to clients, client representatives and users. An enquiry from a client with a base is assigned to that base on arrival; when a user with a base edits it, it is reassigned to the user's base; and the base can be set directly on the request without assigning a person. Changing the assignee or the client afterwards does not retroactively change the base. The feature is inert for single-base operators.

Access to requests, the Sales panel, the Sales app and the Owner Board is governed by privileges, so a broker desk, an owner and an operations controller can each hold a different view of the same request.

20. The sales checklist

A configurable checklist on quotations and booked trips, tracking commercial steps — contract out, deposit received, brief sent, and whatever else the operator defines. Its overall state is a column on the request list, with per-item detail on hover, and only items relevant to that trip are shown. Defaults for subcharter quotes are configured separately.

Access to the two checklists is asymmetric: from OPS both the OPS checklist and the sales checklist can be edited, so operations sees and can act on the commercial steps, while from the Sales panel only the sales checklist is available.

21. Keeping Sales and OPS in sync

Once a quote is booked, the quote and the trip are two views of one sale that can drift apart. Leon's answer is explicit policy rather than a single fixed behaviour — which is what makes this automation safe to switch on.

When a recalculation happens, a second policy decides how far it reaches: either restore default units and prices, or keep all prices and adjust only the units that calculate themselves. Neither mode reinstates a line the seller deliberately deleted.

Alongside this, EDIT REQUEST changes what the client originally asked for and propagates it to the request list, while RECALCULATE re-prices what is already there. Every change is written to the request's change history. Options can carry a due time after which the non-confirmed trip is cancelled automatically.

See Sales Module settings and Connecting Request To The Trip In Ops.

22. Closing the loop: rejections, cancellations and reporting

Lost business is captured as structured data rather than free text. When a request is rejected or cancelled — from the list, from the quote, or from Avinode — Leon records who cancelled and why:

• Seller reasons: no availability, inoperable airport, aircraft performance, out of company range, other.

• Buyer reasons: buyer reasons, force majeure, other.

Rejection can be scoped: reject in Leon only, leaving the status untouched in Avinode and the Owner app, or reject and propagate.

Because party and reason are fields rather than notes, they are reportable. The Report Wizard exposes a Quotation scope — requester, assignee, statuses, prices, flight and block times split between passenger and ferry legs, cancellation reason, cancelling party — and a Subcharter Flights scope, alongside ready-made sales reports. With per-request tags and per-client statistics, conversion analysis by requester, aircraft, route or loss reason is available without exporting to a spreadsheet.

23. Constraints and things to watch

• Recalculation can undo manual work. In update units and prices mode, a schedule change in OPS reverts manually adjusted unit counts to their calculated values. Manually added lines survive; deliberately deleted default lines are not restored in either mode.

• The airport-fee Default row applies wherever a value is blank. To charge nothing at a specific airport, enter 0.

• Fixed routes override everything. On a routing match the entire breakdown becomes one line, including for Avinode requests, so an outdated fixed route quietly bypasses every other pricing rule.

• External flight-time calls may be billable. Every calculation against Aviapages, Avinode or ForeFlight is a request to a paid service.

• Automated flight-time calculation does not run on subcharter legs.

• On Avinode requests, only the quotation and rejection messages are available unless the Mailboxes panel is configured.

• Journey Log-driven quote updates do not handle passenger-number changes.

• The OPS checklist cannot be serviced from the Sales panel.

• Base routing does nothing for single-base operators.

• Several capabilities depend on third-party contracts you hold yourself: Avinode, Aviapages, ForeFlight, Airport Charges (RDC Aviation), PAXFILES, DocuSign.

24. What you configure once, and what you stop doing

Where each of these lives:

Glossary

RFQ — request for quote; the enquiry.
Quote — a priced offer on one aircraft within an RFQ.
Subcharter — third-party lift sold under your own offer.
Empty leg / ferry leg — a flight without passengers, either positioning or repositioning.
Fixed base / floating base — whether an aircraft is quoted from its home base or from its current position.
Fixed route — an agreed all-in price for a specific routing.
Option — a non-confirmed booking with an automatic expiry.
Owner approval — owner consent for a specific request on a specific managed aircraft, where the aircraft is configured to require it.

Related: Requests/Quotes reference · Getting Started for Operators · Enhance Sales with Leon Software (webinar) · Fast Quotation with Airportcharges (webinar)