This week we’re introducing a number of smaller changes to My Music Staff that we think will make it easier to use than ever!

Student Portal Changes

A new school year is fast approaching (at least here in North America), and a number of you have asked us to make it easier for students to join recurring lessons. So as of today, we’ve changed the calendar in the Student Portal to make it really easy for students to register for recurring lessons. Take a look at this screenshot (click to enlarge):

When students register for a recurring event, they’ll now see a list of check boxes so they can quickly sign up for multiple (or all) events/lessons in the series. This is great for teachers who prefer to create recurring open lesson slots and have students schedule themselves.

Event Details Changes

In an effort to make it easier to understand which events are visible to students (public), and which are only visible to you (private), we’ve redesigned the Event Details page. Now it explicitly states if you’d like the event to be public or private, and for public events it asks if you’d like students to be able to signup through the student portal. My Music Staff has always had these options, but we think this layout change will make it easier to understand.

New « No Charges » Option

For teachers who don’t wish to take advantage of My Music Staff’s billing/invoicing features, we’ve added a new option to the Student Details page disables the automatic creation of charges from the calendar. If you select this new option, My Music Staff won’t create any charges when scheduling lessons or events. (Keep in mind that if you change a student’s default Billing Type, any events/lessons that are already scheduled will maintain the old price.)

 

Other Changes

• Past lesson notes are now included on the « Attendance » report (downloaded from the Calendar page)
• There is a new option to hide the balance forwarded when creating a new invoice. This will prevent any previous outstanding balance from showing on the invoice (and it will NOT be included in the amount due calculation)
• We’ve updated the Family & Accounts page so that payments can now be deleted directly from the Recent Payments tab
• You can now click the « calendar » and « clock » icons on the date and time pickers respectively (previously you had to click on the text area to activate the popup)
• The Teacher Summary report now includes a « Segment » option to break down the number of lessons/hours taught by Event Category (this change applies to multi-teacher studios only)
• We’ve optimized the calendar page so that it loads quicker for members using older version of Internet Explorer (i.e. IE8 on XP), and reduced the number of calendar refreshes that occur when setting attendance from the calendar.
• There is a new option under « Studio Settings » which allows you to display the number of make-up credits available in the Student Portal. If this option is turned on, the student can see this information on their Profile page when logged into the Student Portal.

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