Hi everyone! Here’s a list of what’s new this week in My Music Staff:
Calendar Features
My Music Staff can now set alerts on your iPhone/iPad through your synced calendar. This is a great way to keep lessons from running long; by setting the alert to 5 minutes, your phone will let you know 5 minutes before your next student is due to arrive at your studio so you can wrap up with the current student.
This feature can be enabled from the “My Preferences” page on the Calendar tab. Alerts can be enabled/disabled on a per category basis.
Unfortunately Google ignores the alert information that we provide in the feed, so this does not (yet) work with Google Calendar. 🙁 We’re working on a solution for Google/Android users.
We’ve also added a whole bunch of new colors for Event Categories! This has a 2-fold benefit:
- If you have a lot of category types you can pick a unique color for each one.
- If you have a large multi-teacher studio, each teacher will now get a unique color when using the “Color by Teacher” option.
Next up: The Cancellation Policy settings have been updated! Now lessons that your students cancel through the Student Portal can automatically be converted into make-up lesson slots. It means that another student who is owed a make-up lesson can take this time-slot using the Student Portal. This is a huge time-saver: You can better utilize your teaching time and it’s all automatic.
This feature can be enabled in the “Studio Settings” page on the “Policies” tab.
Reports & Invoices
We’ve made a handful of changes to the reports and invoices:
- Invoice/report logos are now justified to the top-left of your invoices which makes them display nicely if the size is irregular.
- There’s a new logo setting that allows you to position your logo above the invoice title (instead of to the left). This setting is great if you have a long horizontal logo. This feature is located on the “Studio Settings” page on the “Accounts & Invoices” tab.
- There’s a new Family Balance report that includes all the family balances as of a particular date (the same way the “Families & Invoices” page shows the family balance).
- The “Sales Tax” report now includes pre-tax gross sales for each sales tax.
- We’re redesigned the Report Center page to make it load more quickly.
- We fixed the Agenda and Attendance Sheets report so that the date is repeated for each teacher when printing a single day’s report (this issue only affected multi-teacher studios)
Other Changes
- The Income & Expense Category used for recording payments from families can now be changed. By default it was set to “Lesson”, but you can now edit it and give it your preferred name (i.e. “Income from Lessons”).
- When you change a student’s default billing type, My Music Staff will now prompt and ask if you’d like to make the change retroactive.
Have a great week!
– The My Music Staff Team
Hi! I see that you added a stat record for student logins. I’d say 98% of my studio are very young students so this does not work for me. Would you at some point in time add the parent logins to a stat. They claim they login and check calendar and account as I ask but I want to know for sure. Thanks so much. I really enjoy using My Music Staff. It’s up front, no nonsense, easy to use. Keep up the great work!!
Hi Kathy, the “Last Login” column in the Student List is the most recent login of either a parent or the student. So if a parent logs into the Student Portal, the date of their last login will be shown on the Student List.
Thanks for all of your hard work! My parents love what the website allows them to do. My students are also starting to check the site more often and use the practice logs. You know this generation: if it’s not easy from a smart phone or a tablet, they won’t do it. It’s baby-steps for my studio, but they’re taking them, so I’m happy. 😉
Love the change to make cancelled lesson open automatically. Thanks!
How can I change the color on an event category that I am already using? When I go to edit an event I don’t see an option to do that. I only see an option for choosing colors on new events.
Hello Michelle,
Thanks so much for the kind words. In order to change the color on an event category please see below:
1. Click on the Calendar tab
2. Click on – Edit Event Category
3. Click on the blue “Edit” icon to the left of the category name
4. Select the new color from the color drop down menu
Hi!
Cannot thank you enough as My Music Staff has helped our studio so much in every way 🙂
Is there a way to email students who are schedule for an event from the event page?
ie. We have a band program and from time to time we have to reschedule the date or time as some students may have conflict with other activities and would like to let all participants of the schedule change by email?
Thanks
Lonnie
Hello Lonnie,
Thanks so much, we work very hard to make My Music Staff the best it can be everyday. Emailing students who are scheduled for an event directly from the calendar is possible.
The first thing you want to do is click on “All Categories” in the calendar, and select just the event type that corresponds with the Band Program event. Now, hopefully only band event is visible on the calendar. Next, on the day the event is happening click on the small arrow to the left. Select Email Student + Parents. That will allow you to email just the students attending the visible band event on the calendar.
Thank you so much for all of your hard work and the wonderful improvements! I actually DO usually get alerts from my Google calendar on my Samsung Galaxy 5. 🙂