We’d like to thank everyone for all the great feedback you’ve given on the invoicing system. We’re pleased to announce that we’ll be launching the new system this Friday, October 12, between 9-10am MDT. You will still be able to access your account during this time, but the invoicing features may not be available until after 10am.

In addition to the changes on the manual invoicing system discussed in our previous post, we have made some great improvements to the automatic invoicing system, including the ability to create several invoicing schedules, allowing you to invoice different students at different times, automatically.

We have created some video tutorials that will be available from the Help menu after you login, to walk you through the entire billing and invoicing system.

We hope you enjoy these improvements to Music Teacher’s Helper.

Thank you for your continued support and feedback!

It’s ironic that beginners in music often have to weigh their budgets, and their sometimes insecure hopes of learning to play music decently, against the quality of their musical equipment, their choice of teacher, and their commitment to lesson time.

Beginners (or parents of beginners) are legitimately hesitant to invest unless they feel their musical interest will stick, or until they understand why the investments are needed. The teacher can make demands but it’s important to respect the dilemma the beginners feel.

And yet, if they have an instrument that is difficult to play, or has a bad sound, or if they have a beginning method book with music of limited quality, or insufficient lesson time, how can they get a fair exposure to the joys of making music?

Have you ever dealt with the equivalent in your field of a cheap, wire-strung violin that even I can’t make good sound on, a small plastic chin rest with a huge uncomfortable ridge in it, a cheap unadjustable shoulder rest, or tuning pegs made of softwood that can even break off in your aching hand?!

Sometimes you have to wait until the student has come along a bit, and then encourage them to make a few investments in better strings, a good shoulder rest, even to spend a few dollars more per month to rent a good quality instrument.

But apart from equipment, there are musical decisions about quality that we can certainly make. (more…)

I hope you’ll join some of the discussions going on about blog posts here. No post is too old to read and comment about.

Thanks for recent interesting comments and suggestions from Michelle, Kenneth, Ann, Nancy, Eva, and Bob about Presenting Recitals. Also, ideas and questions from Ron, Nick and Craig on Lesson Scheduling, and More on Lesson Scheduling.

Jerene shared a good experience with online teacher/student matching services (comment on Finding Students for You), while Bob shares a story about a fraudulent check (comment on Finding Students Online).

Mean time, Alfred joined in with some interesting reflections about the post on Memorizing vs Learning music.

All you have to do is add a comment at the end of any post. The form includes a space for your email address–this is not made public. Optionally you can enter a URL for people to link to off of your name. Hope to hear from you soon!