Hello everyone,

This week we’re introducing the ability to use your phone (or tablet) GPS to track your teaching mileage. Starting right now, if you log into your My Music Staff account from your mobile device, you’ll see a new “Start GPS Trip” button on the mileage page if your device has GPS. To track your trip, click this button before you start driving and then click it again when you arrive at your destination.

My Music Staff will automatically determine the distance driven and add it to your mileage log. (Don’t worry, you get to review the distance before it’s added to your driving log.) If you forget or don’t wish to use this feature, you can still manually enter mileage the way you always have.

You don’t need to leave My Music Staff open to use this feature, so you can use your phone for navigation or other things during your trip, and it doesn’t use any extra data on your device. In fact, you can even turn your phone off. Just click the button once when you start your trip, then once when you get there, and My Music Staff will do the rest.

Here’s a list of other changes and improvements this week:

• We’ve added a new email template for cancelled events. Now when you delete an event from the calendar My Music Staff allows you to send an email notification to the affected parents and/or students.
• We’ve added a new attendance option called “Absent, Use Make-Up” that will deduct a make-up credit if the student is a no-show to a make-up lesson. We’ve also revamped the way the attendance drop-down list appears to make the visible options more clear (that list is getting long…).
• We fixed a minor layout issue on the teacher websites that would cause radio buttons and check boxes to appear too far to the left. (This was visible on the sign-up page if your site has one.)
• We fixed a minor layout issue on the Repertoire list that would appear if you used the “Visible Columns” button to show/hide columns.
• When you take attendance from the Agenda, the attendance icon and the family balance now changes immediately.
• The “Loading…” popup no longer displays on the Student Download Library unnecessarily.
• You can now select the starting date on the “Attendance & Notes” tab in the Student Details page. This allows you to see all the upcoming lessons for a student in list format if you require it. (The default is still to only display lessons that have past.)

We hope you find this week’s list of updates and changes as helpful as we do. Have a great week!

– The My Music Staff Team

Did you know? You can add My Music Staff to your iPhone, iPad and/or Android home screen for one-click access. Just log into My Music Staff from your device’s browser (Safari or Chrome), then click the share or bookmark button on your browser and select “Add to Home Screen“.