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:

1. If you have a lot of category types you can pick a unique color for each one.
2. 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