Good Monday everyone! Today we’re rolling out a number of exciting changes. Here’s what’s new for the week of September 8th:

My Preferences

There are now so many calendar related options in My Music Staff that we’ve split the « My Preferences » page into two tabs: Personal Settings and Calendar Settings. As you’d expect, all the calendar related preference settings are located on the Calendar Settings tab.

We’ve added two new calendar options:

1. Event Visibility – This setting controls the default event visibility when you create new events (public/private). If you usually create private events, turn this setting off.
2. Show Open Slot Count – If turned on, My Music Staff will display the number of students/slots on the calendar (i.e. 2/5 to show you that 2 of 5 student slots are taken).  This makes it possible to tell at a glance if an event has room for more students or not. This change ONLY affects events that students can register for.

The iOS/Android calendar feed will now include « (Absent) » on the event title if the attendance is set to « Teacher Absent ». Previously this was only displayed if the attendance was « Student Absent ».

Calendar Changes

For multi-teacher studios we have two exciting changes that will make it easier to manage your schedules:

1. The Calendar « Day » view now displays the individual teacher schedules side by side. Now it’s easy to see who’s free and who’s not at a specific time.
2. There is a new option located below the calendar to change the coloring so that it’s colored by teacher instead of by event category.

On the calendar drop-down menus there is a new « Switch to Day View » option that lets you jump to that specific date in the « Day » calendar view. This makes it easier to get a close look at a specific date without scrolling through each individual day.

Sign-up Widget Improvements

We’ve improved the sign-up widget so that you can now collect a number of optional fields:

• Instrument
• Student Birthday (Age)
• Skill Level
• Preferred Teacher (Multi-teacher studios only)

These new fields are disabled by default. If you’d like to collect this information and you’re already using the sign-up form or widget, you can enable these in your My Music Staff account now. (Edit your sign-up page or widget settings respectively.)

There’s also an additional option to set the default selection for the « Adult/Child » buttons on the sign-up form. Previously « Adult » student was selected by default, but if your students are mostly children, you may wish to preselect the « Child » option.

Student Repertoire Tracker

The student repertoire tracker now has a new optional « Book/Source » field that allows you to keep track of where a piece of music is located. If you use this feature, My Music Staff will display the book name on your homepage Agenda with the student rep list.

We’ve also added a free-form « Notes » field for including any rep notes that you’d like, and we’ve added a column chooser so you can select which rep columns are visible by default.

Miscellaneous Changes

• We’ve updated the Login Widget so that there’s no more blank space below it when embedded on an external site.
• We’ve moved the buttons that were located below the Student List to the new « Tools » menu for better accessibility.
• We’ve added a new button to the Student List « Tools » menu to Apply the Default Price to existing events on the calendar. This makes it easy to update prices set on the calendar if you change the student default prices AFTER you’ve already scheduled some lessons/events.
• Pages hosted with My Music Staff now display friendly 404 – Page Not Found error messages.
• The Sale Tax feature is now available for everyone. Refer to the sales tax FAQ for information and instructions on how to use this feature.
• The multi-select drop-down lists used throughout My Music Staff will now stay open by default, making it easier to select multiple families or email recipients.
• We’ve fixed some formatting issues in the invoice PDF’s.
• We’ve fixed the « Email Students + Parents » shortcut on the calendar. It was not always correctly selecting the parents.
• On your daily agenda, you can now click directly on the student name to jump to the Student Details.
• We’ve added a « Delete » button to the top of the invoice page so that you can delete multiple invoices at once.

We hope you enjoy these improvements. Have a great week!