Reading the Ledger

Every cent in PlaneSim is a ledger entry you can audit, and the three finance pages are three views of the same record. How to read the journal, the chart of accounts, and the weekly income statement.

Most management sims settle the argument about money by not letting you have it. You get a weekly summary, a few category totals, and no way to check any of it. PlaneSim takes the opposite bet: every cent that moves in the game is a ledger entry, categorized, time-stamped, and carrying a memo with the operational detail behind it. The litres a departure burned. The passenger count that priced its revenue. The maintenance ratio that priced a bill. The three finance pages are three views of that single record, and once you learn to move between them, no number on any screen is beyond audit.

Start at the Bank Account

The Bank Account page is the raw transaction journal, newest first, each row carrying the server's running balance at that moment. Category chips filter it down to passenger revenue, fuel, salaries, leasing, or any other account. The habit worth building early: click into a flight's rows. That opens the full cost cluster of one departure, fuel, landing fee, ATC, handling and service set against its revenue, which is the closest thing this genre has to a per-flight P&L you can actually trust. When a number on any other page looks wrong, this journal is where you prove it.

The chart of accounts

The Accounts page rolls the same ledger up into lifetime balances over a numbered chart of accounts: 5xxx for earnings, 6xxx for expenses, 7xxx for financial items, two columns footing to a lifetime profit or loss. Airline accounting has looked like this in the real world for decades, and the page behaves the way a controller would expect. Any account drills into the postings behind it.

The weekly ladder

Books close every period, weekly by default (your world may differ), and the Income Statement presents the classic airline ladder:

Each line shows the current, last and previous period, a change percentage, and a lifetime total; the aggregate rows carry margin percentages. A small design decision that pays off: exceptional lines stay visible even at zero, so the gap between Adjusted EBITDA and EBITDA always explains itself. The period picker pages back through history, and every line drills into the ledger postings that produced it.

Where timing bites

Three rules decide when money shows up, and all three have caught experienced players.

Revenue lands on arrival. Booked revenue is recognized when the flight completes, not when the seat sells. A cancelled flight recognizes nothing and instead books passenger compensation, at a premium over the fares that were paid.

Depreciation is weekly and owner-side. Owned airframes lose book value each period on a declining balance, by default 6% per year (your world may differ), and the charge sits on the owner's books even when the tail is leased out to someone else.

Not everything is profit or loss. Security deposits, loan principal, aircraft purchases and capital injections move cash but never touch the income statement. They live on the balance sheet, which holds the accounting identity exactly: assets equal liabilities plus equity.

Why the discipline pays

Your financial rating, the grade lenders look at, is computed from these same numbers: margins, cash runway, leverage, interest cover. There is no separate scoring system to game, and no summary screen standing between you and the postings. A practical exercise for your next session: pick one departure and walk its cost cluster line by line, then find the same week on the income statement and watch the lines roll up. The full mechanics are in the wiki's Ledger & income statement article, and the two biggest recurring lines, debt service and lease rent, each have reference articles of their own.