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