Me and MyMusicStaff go way back. It’s hard to believe it’s been nine years since I first clicked that Free Trial button in the living room of my two-bedroom upstairs apartment in a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Once I added the very few students I already had into the MyMusicStaff portal, I really felt official as a pianopreneur–a piano teaching business owner.
Since that fateful day, I have never considered using anything else to manage my piano lesson studio. MyMusicStaff has served me well as a single-teacher business for many years, and now as a multi-teacher studio owner.
In this post I’ll break down some of the features of MyMusicStaff to help you decide if it’s a good fit for your piano studio.
MyMusicStaff for Keeping Track of Student Data
Contact Info All in One Place
The more students you add, the happier you will be knowing all student data is living in one place. One place that is easily accessible and searchable.
MyMusicStaff’s student page allows you to save their family contact info as well as special needs, important files, and categories to help you track student groups. (More on student tracking later on.)
Personally, I love the Export feature on the Students Page that allows me to create an Excel document of all my students with one click. I use this to keep track of recital preparation or to make a checklist for various purposes.
Easy Messaging
Need to contact one student? A group of students? All students? With a quick search and one click you can email or text whoever you want!
No more searching through a computer document or your phone’s contact list to find all of the right numbers!
One of my favorite features is the ability to message from the Calendar. Let’s say I need to cancel all of my Tuesday students. I simply right-click on a Tuesday on the Calendar, and choose Email or Text all students and parents. I type one quick message and everybody is contacted–just like that!
Sort & Track Student Groups
In my studio, many of my students participate in the National Federation of Music Clubs annual festival. I end up sending out special correspondence about the event several times leading up to the big day. I also need to invoice fees to just these participants.
The ability to tag and group students in MyMusicStaff saves me so much time.
Attendance Tracking
It’s nice to have easy access to any student’s attendance records. If you offer make-up lessons or re-scheduling options, MyMusicStaff makes it easy to set up those options for seamless tracking and scheduling.
MyMusicStaff for Lesson Scheduling
Calendar Designed for Music Studio Teachers
MyMusicStaff designed a full scheduling feature that specifically caters to the needs of a private lesson studio teacher.
Some of the features that help a studio owner stay organized are…
- Options for color-coding private lessons vs group lessons
- Options for color-coding by teacher or location
- Custom categories (such as partner lessons)
- Recital and workshop scheduling
- Flexible pricing for each event
- Flexible scheduling for weekly, biweekly, or other recurrence
- Set default lesson settings to save you time in adding new events to the calendar
- Warning message to help avoid double-booking a teacher or space
Copy & Paste Calendar Management
By creating recurring events on the MyMusicStaff calendar, you can schedule a student once and duplicate all settings for each weekly (or biweekly, etc).
Easy editing with:
- Drag and drop schedule changes
- Copy and paste a single event
- Or duplicate an entire day
Calendar Syncing
MyMusicStaff Calendar syncs with all major calendar apps including:
- iPhone, iPad, or Mac
- Google Calendar
- Outlook.com
- Microsoft Outlook
- BlackBerry
I love that I can quickly glance at my phone’s calendar app to see my teaching schedule for the day without even needing to open the MyMusicStaff app.
Parent Access for Make-up Lessons
Perhaps the best part of the Calendar feature on MyMusicStaff is the fact that students and parents can also view and use the Calendar through the Student Portal and Parent Portal.
Parents can mark themselves absent on the Calendar triggering an email to the teacher and a make-up credit (if set up by the administrator).
Do you offer make-up lessons to your students? You’ll save hours of back-and-forth by letting students and parents sign up for an open slot on your schedule!
Parents can also sign up for email or text reminders for upcoming lessons making no-shows a thing of the past.
MyMusicStaff for Invoicing & Payments
Auto-invoicing Saves Hours
The Old Way of Invoicing
True confession time: I am old enough to remember handwritten invoices for piano lessons. Okay, if I’m being completely honest, I’ve handwritten invoices years ago!
Whether handwritten or emailed, invoicing is a major headache for any small business owner. MyMusicStaff makes it so easy to automate this process.
MyMusicStaff Invoicing: Set It & Forget It
Set up invoicing settings for a new student once and never worry about it! Well, almost…I’ll talk about some glitches I’ve run into in a moment. Would a tutorial on how to set up billing in MyMusicStaff be helpful? Let me know in the comments.
Oh, and I should mention the invoices themselves–super professional and, dare I say, beautiful.
The Billing Process
But for the most part, this process runs very smoothly. For my studio, it goes something like this:
- I get paid and I didn’t spend a second of my precious time making it happen!
- A week before the end of the month, invoices are automatically emailed to all families with a due date of the 7th of the month.
- Families click the button on the invoice attachment and pay by credit card or PayPal. Or if they are set-up for automatic payments, the payment is immediately processed.
- A receipt is automatically emailed to the customer.
- The family is marked as paid in MyMusicStaff.
Auto-pay
Auto-pay is easily set up by the customer in the Parent Portal of MyMusicStaff. Some of my families choose this option and some choose to pay manually each month.
Reminders & Late Fees
I know what you’re thinking–yeah, in a perfect world. But, what if a customer doesn’t pay?
MyMusicStaff allows automatic reminder emails and automatic late fees. And you set up exactly how much and when this happens.
Payment Integrations
Payments can be processed through PayPal Pro or Stripe.
You can set up automatic fees by dollar amount or percentage to cover PayPal or Stripe processing fees.
Some Glitches
If I have to complain about something, I would say that there is the occasional hiccup in the billing and payment processes on MyMusicStaff.
In my years of using MyMusicStaff, these have been few and far between. And they have been fairly easy to resolve. And I have found customer service to be friendly and helpful.
MyMusicStaff for Tax Preparation
Track Expenses
MyMusicStaff makes it easy to categorize and track all business expenses for your studio. I personally love that I can:
- Upload receipt images
- Record new purchases
- Set up recurring expenses
- Instantly see net profit and projected profit
I recommend tracking all business purchases immediately in MyMusicStaff to make tax time a stress-free experience.
MyMusicStaff also has a feature to keep track of mileage if you are a traveling teacher.
Tax Time Reports in a Click
When tax time does roll around, IF you’ve diligently entered all of your purchases and recurring expenses, MyMusicStaff makes it super simple and painless to generate a report for your tax preparer.
In my personal experience, I first generate the year’s income in an Excel document.
Next, I generate the year’s expenses, categorized by expense type.
And–BAM–my tax preparer has all of the totals she needs to enter into my Schedule C. In fact, every year she raves about my organization! And, yes, I am an organized person. But the lovely reports created in MyMusicStaff are mostly to thank for that praise.
MyMusicStaff for Payroll
Adding Additional Teachers on MyMusicStaff
After years of using MyMusicStaff as a single-teacher studio, it was time to add two new teachers to my studio. MyMusicStaff makes it easy to add additional teachers to your account.
At only about $5 per month, adding another teacher to your account is also very affordable.
And the communication and calendar syncing make it well worth the investment.
Payroll Made Easy
Time to pay your new hired teacher!
I was nervous about getting this right when I first hired a teacher. But MyMusicStaff takes all of the guesswork out of the payroll process.
MyMusicStaff allows you to set up payroll as either commission-based (a percentage of tuition costs) or hourly.
Again, the beautiful report-generating function! Each month, I click once to generate a payroll report. It tells me (and the teacher) exactly where their money is coming from (number of lessons taught or students, etc) and a total due. I write the check and it’s done in minutes!
Payroll amounts are also automatically integrated into the income report (both the monthly dollar amount on-screen and the printed tax-time report).
MyMusicStaff for Studio Community
Student Portal
Text at 10:35pm: Hi, it’s Jacob. What time is my lesson tomorrow again?
Ah, yes, the teen students. Gotta love ‘em!
Prevent the late-night text with the MyMusicStaff Student Portal. Students can log on 24/7 to…
- Check the schedule
- See upcoming events [they should be practicing for]
- Cancel or reschedule a lesson
- See their Lesson Notes [again, what they should be practicing]
- Record their practice time
Parent Portal
The moment you send that log-in link to a new parent, they will be impressed with the professional and easy-to-use platform. By offering your customers a polished and intuitive experience interacting with you on the Parent Portal you are offering more value [at very little cost to you].
Let new parents know what they can do on the Parent Portal, and you will save so much time emailing back-and-forth about every aspect of piano lessons.
Parents can…
- See when the next lesson is
- Check the date and time of upcoming events, and register if applicable
- Mark the student absent
- Sign up for a make-up lesson
- See Lesson Notes from the teacher
- See past or current invoices
- Pay their invoice online
- Read news updates about the studio
Birthday & Anniversary Reminders
MyMusicStaff keeps track of every student’s birthday and first lesson date.
Birthdays and First Lesson Anniversaries are automatically shown on the calendar and a reminder pops up on my daily schedule dashboard.
MyMusicStaff will even automatically email a birthday message to students if you’d like!
These features help you painlessly keep track of all.the.things. Students will love the extra bit of attention the week of their birthday. And you’ll look like a total rockstar of a teacher (with no additional stress or effort on your part).
MyMusicStaff for Lesson Assignments
Let’s talk about MyMusicStaff’s Lesson Notes feature. Okay, have you been in this scenario:
A student shows up for their lesson. Empty-handed. No books. No assignment books. You run to the bookshelf to grab their books and ask which pages they were working on. They don’t remember. Ten minutes of the lesson are spent fumbling around to try to piece together what you wrote down for them last week.
These days, when a student walks in the door, the first thing I do is click on Take Attendance on my daily schedule dashboard.
I mark them as “Present” and instantly their Lesson Notes from the previous lesson auto-populate the notes field.
I see all of my notes auto-emailed to the student (or parent) last week. And I see any Private Notes I added.
We’re off and running! Parents of young students love receiving the weekly Lesson Notes in their inbox. And I can also include practice tips or reminders about upcoming events.
For some students, I print off their Notes and put them in their binder.
And for teen students, I email the Notes directly to their inbox.
MyMusicStaff Features I Don’t Use
MyMusicStaff-Generated Website
If you don’t have a website of your own, MyMusicStaff can generate a website for you. I’ve never tried this feature so I can’t say too much about it.
If you do have a website, you can integrate MyMusicStaff into your site. Students and parents can log in to the MyMusicStaff Portal from your website.
New Student Registration
MyMusicStaff also integrates with your website to offer a registration form. In other words, potential customers can register for lessons 24/7 and you’ll receive notification to contact the family to set up a lesson time and assign them to a teacher (if applicable).
Again, I’ve never used this feature so I can’t speak much about it. Personally, I have a separate contact form on my website for receiving lesson inquiries.
Repertoire Tracking
MyMusicStaff offers a feature to keep track of and assign repertoire.
Teachers can set up a piece of repertoire or book once and then assign it over and over.
This feature allows teachers and students to see current and past repertoire.
While I can see the value in this, I find it too cumbersome to create an entry for each and every piece/method book. Personally, I use the Lesson Notes feature to keep track of students’ repertoire. For example, if I need to remember what a student played at the last recital, I’ll simply go back to the Lesson Notes for that week and see what was assigned.
Lending Log
MyMusicStaff also offers a way for teachers to track books lent to a student.
Teachers can lend a piece of “repertoire” and mark it as on loan to a specific student. When the student returns it, the teacher marks it as “Checked In.”
I tried using this briefly, but quickly abandoned the process as it didn’t seem worth the time and effort. However, for a teacher who has an extensive library of valuable resources and does not want to lose track of anything, this may be useful.
Practice Log
MyMusicStaff offers a way to track practice time.
In theory, I think this is a fabulous idea! If literally ANY of my students would bother to use it, I would be able to see how much practice they were able to achieve from week to week.
If you are a piano teacher and come up with a strategy for talking students into using this feature, please do share in the comments.
MyMusicStaff Drawbacks
Pros & Cons
Since this entire post is basically a list of pros, I won’t show a direct comparison of pros and cons. The pros are many. The cons are few. But, in my personal experience, here are the few negative aspects of MyMusicStaff that I have encountered.
Auto- Glitches
I already mentioned this one. I have had a few glitches, let’s say, in the automatic functions at various times. Nothing too major and nothing permament.
At times, I’ve had an issue with…
- Auto-pay
- Auto-emails
- Automatic late charges
- Pages slow to load
- Website not available
Mobile App [or lack thereof]
MyMusicStaff does not officially have an app.
They have a mobile-friendly website that can be bookmarked on a phone or device.
But the mobile-friendly website is not…well, terribly mobile-friendly in my personal experience. It works fairly well for parents and students trying to access the calendar so feel free to sing its praises to your students. The administrative functions are not as intuitive on mobile.
MyMusicStaff, if you’re reading this, pretty please develop an app for your wonderful platform. Please and thank you.
MyMusicStaff Pricing
Free Trial
If I’ve convinced you that MyMusicStaff is worth a try, use my code to receive a 30-day free trial (no credit card required):
https://app.mymusicstaff.com/r/share/4040519071
That’s a whole month risk-free to try it out with your students!
Single-user Account
If you are a one-person show, a single-user account will cost:
$14.95 per month
Multiple-user Account
If you hire on additional staff or teachers later on, you’ll pay an additional:
$4.95 per month
for each user.
Commitment to Value
In the nine years I have been a paying customer of MyMusicStaff, they have only raised their prices once. And, honestly I was happy to pay the extra couple bucks per month to continue what I consider to be the best money I spend on my business!
Do I Recommend MyMusicStaff?
Absolutely!
While no platform is 100% glitch-free, MyMusicStaff has been darn-near perfect for my business and its needs for nearly a decade.
Heck yeah, I recommend it!
Start Your Free MyMusicStaff Trial
So, what are you waiting for? Grab that 30-day free trial:
https://app.mymusicstaff.com/r/share/4040519071
Set Up Your MyMusicStaff Studio Portal
Would a tutorial on how to set up billing in MyMusicStaff be helpful? Let me know in the comments.
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