Happy New Year everyone!

Today we’re excited to introduce a new feature to your My Music Staff account called « Auto-Pay ». If you’re using Stripe or PayPal Pro to accept online payments, Auto-Pay allows you to automatically charge credit cards as soon as you email invoices to your families. Best of all, Auto-Pay works with both manual and automatic invoicing.

To get started all you need to do is add a credit card to a family and turn on « Auto-Pay ». If a credit card is on file already and you have permission to charge that card automatically, you can edit the card to turn this feature on. (Parents can also enable/disable this feature in their « My Preferences » page in the Student Portal.)

If a family has multiple credit cards on file, we’ll automatically try them all in order until we find one that works.

We’ve also added a new « Payment Failed » email template that notifies the parent(s) if all of their credit cards were declined. This lets the parent know to pay you the old fashioned way (or to log in, update their credit card and complete the payment manually).

This feature is NOT available if you are using PayPal Standard.

Other changes this week include:

• Everyone has been upgraded to the new « Calendar 2.0 » interface. Thanks to everyone who provided feedback during the beta testing period.
• Annual memberships are now available. If you’d prefer to pay annually instead of monthly, please contact support@mymusicstaff.com and we can enable this feature in your account. (Our philosophy is that everyone gets the same great price, so the annual price is just 12x the monthly price.)
• When editing a calendar event, the « Back » button at the top of the page now returns you to the previous calendar view as expected.
• The number of « Studio News » posts displayed in the student portal can now be configured from your « Studio Settings » page. It’s now also possible to scroll back through old Studio News from within the « Student Portal ».
• Birthdays and Performances can now be filtered on the calendar.
• In multi-teacher studios, teachers can now have individual default lesson categories (used when new students are assigned to them).
• Changing a student’s default lesson category now triggers to « Apply Changes » popup window to make the change retroactive.
• There is now an option to hide the « Account & Invoices » page within the « Parent Portal » for studios who only use My Music Staff for scheduling and not billing.
• We’ve updated the calendar scheduling conflict detection so that lessons where all students are absent do not trigger a conflict notification.
• On the calendar, if you hover your mouse over the green attendance check-mark (or red « X ») the actual attendance status is now displayed.
• If you use My Music Staff on a phone or tablet, we fixed the « Add to Homescreen » popup that’s probably been annoying you for the last few weeks. Now you’ll only see it at most twice before it hides itself forever.
• The « Daily Agenda » on the home page now includes the day name in the title.

We hope you enjoy this week’s updates. Have a great week!

– The My Music Staff Team

Did you know? My Music Staff can send out overdue invoice reminder automatically. See the FAQ here.