Music Teacher's Helper Blog

This month, we finished our native iPhone app, but discovered a few new requirements from Apple that we need to have in place before they’ll approve it. We hope to wrap everything up and submit it to the App store this week. Keep watching our blog, Facebook, and Twitter accounts for the announcement about when it’s approved and available in the iTunes store.

Music Teacher’s Helper continues to grow as more teachers hear about how easy it is to manage your studio schedules, finances, and more through our software. Be a part of spreading the word and earn some extra income on the side by joining our affiliate program today. We pay you 20% recurring commission for any teachers you refer to us.

Here are the latest updates we’ve made to Music Teacher’s Helper:

• The mobile site was closing the reconcile screen prematurely. This is now fixed.
• If you recently Read more…

Happy New Year! We hope your year is off to a great start. We’re continuing to work hard to make your music teaching studio even easier to manage with Music Teacher’s Helper.

The native iPhone app is almost finished and we plan to submit it to the Apple iTunes store by the end of January. Please see below for our the latest updates and changes.

• We improved the Daily Summary report. It now gives a detailed view of each lesson’s participants and it includes global/studio-wide events.
• The social buttons on the footer caused Internet Explorer to popup a security question too often. We decided to remove them for your convenience.
• Good news to all affiliates! We’ve increased the cookie retention time from 60 to 180 days. This will give new referrals more time to decide if they want to sign up for a free trial. Remember that if there is no time limit on how long they take to upgrade to a paying account after that point.
• Fixed a rare bug when calendar events were not showing up when viewing day view.
• On the studio website’s contact form, parents needed to Read more…

There’s just one more month to go in 2011. We’ve been working hard all year long to continue improving Music Teacher’s Helper and adding new features to make your life easier. And we don’t plan to stop.

Right now, we’re working on a native iPhone app and are making good progress. We’ll keep you posted and let you know when it’s ready (no launch date yet). In the mean time, remember to check out our mobile app at http://www.musicteachershelper.com/mobile

Give the Gift of an Organized and Automated Studio

Also, now is the time of year when many people start thinking about gifts for their friends and loved ones. If you know a music teacher who could benefit from Music Teacher’s Helper, what greater gift could you give them than paying for a month or two of their Music Teacher’s Helper subscription? It’s easy! Take 30 seconds and send a Music Teacher’s Helper gift certificate today! It’s the perfect gift for any music teacher.

Latest Updates

Here is a list of the updates we launched in November, 2011.

• The Top Practicers section of the Practice Log now filters the list by date range. It also no longer shows inactive students.
• Parent email addresses were not showing up for child students on the Manage Students page. This is now fixed.
• When Automatic Invoices were set to repeat weekly, the schedule Read more…

This month, we’ve added some great new features to Music Teacher’s Helper, and have also fixed several bugs. Take a look at what’s changed below.

New “Running Balance” Column on Billing History

When you click the “Billing” menu, then click a family’s name, you’ll see all of that family’s transactions, including all payments, lesson charges, and more. Now, you’ll also see a “Balance” column, showing the running total balance of that family’s account. This will make it much easier to find discrepancies and to know how much a family owed at a given time.

Restore Email Templates to Default

Sometimes, after making a lot of changes to an email template, or importing from Word, it’s possible to find changes to your template that you’re not sure how to fix. Now you can restore an email template to its original message by simply clicking ‘Reset System Template’ on the sidebar.

Bug Fixes

• Default email notifications were double-spaced Read more…

We’re pleased to announce two awesome new feature this month, and several small bug fixes. One of these has been our most requested feature ever since we launched our Feedback site. So thank you for your feedback and we hope you enjoy it.

Block Holidays and Other Events on Your Calendar

You now have the ability to block holidays and other events on your calendar! When you block a day, it will prevent any events from being created on that day, so you no longer have to worry about accidentally scheduling lessons over holidays or when you’re on vacation. To setup Blocked Dates, simply click the red “block” icon in the corner of any day on the calendar. Click it again to unblock. Or go to Calendar -> Blocked Dates to setup a recurring blocked date.

Foreign Language Support

We’re also pleased to announce that Music Teacher’s Helper is now available in Portuguese! Select your language from the top-right corner of the page before logging in, or from the Settings page after you login.

We’re now ready to begin translation into other languages as Read more…

We’re continuing to work hard at Music Teacher’s Helper to bring you the best software possible for managing your private music studio. This month, we added a few new features and fixed several bugs. We’re also getting close to finishing some other great features, including the ability to block dates on the calendar (such as holidays) which is the number one requested item on our feedback site. If you have a feature you’d like to request, please submit your idea here.

Thank you for using Music Teacher’s Helper and for continuing to spread the word!

New Features

• We’ve changed the Google Sync method to use an iCal feed, allowing you to instantly sync your Music Teacher’s Helper calendar to iCal, Outlook, Google calendar, and other. See Settings > Calendar Sync for more info.
• Swiss Franc currency added.

• Cancelled lessons weren’t shown as cancelled on the mobile app. We’ve fixed this.
• On the mobile app, phone number did not show if the home phone was blank. This is now fixed.
• On the new iCal feed, lessons were moved 1 hr after November 1st which for the end of daylight savings. This is now fixed.
• The layout on the mobile version was too wide and too small to read. This is now fixed.
• PDF Invoices were printing codes when the studio title has an apostrophe. e.g. “Joe’s Studio.” This is now fixed.
• On the Transaction Log, when you clicked a fee, it went to the list of fees rather than the edit fee page. This is now fixed.

Music teachers love Music Teacher’s Helper! We know this because the vast majority of our new customers come from referrals, and we want to thank you for telling your friends and colleagues about our software.

If you know teachers who may be interested in Music Teacher’s Helper, then you’ll be pleased to hear that we are re-launching our Affiliate program on August 1st, with some major changes. The most exciting news is that you we will now pay you 20% recurring monthly commission for every teacher you refer to Music Teacher’s Helper! This is a great way to earn some extra money for simply telling others about MTH. (Existing affiliates, please note that this commission only applies to new referrals who sign up after August 1. Old referrals will earn you the same commission as before.)

We’ve also completely redesigned our affiliate interface, improved the reports, and created a way for you to offer promotional discounts to teachers as an incentive to sign up. You can either send teachers to your affiliate link, or you can give them your promotion code, which you’ll receive after you become an affiliate. When teachers use your affiliate link or promotion code Read more…

Here is a list of our recent updates to Music Teacher’s Helper. Most of these are smaller bugs, but we’re also working on some new features that have been requested in our feedback system. If you have suggestions for how we can improve, please vote on the ideas or submit your own by clicking here.

• Good news to all UK Teachers! we’ve added a ‘Language’ option in ‘Settings’ that changes ‘check’ to ‘cheque’ in the system.
• Welcome emails and lesson note emails are now recorded in the email history.
• When using Safari, some buttons appeared doubled. We’ve fixed this.
• Lending Library wouldn’t let you lend an Library item with an apostrophe. This is now fixed.
• The website address overlapped on the pdf version of invoices. We’ve fixed this.
• We’ve made the ‘Create Invoices’ page more clear by changing the ‘View / Save Options’ section to ‘Save in History’ & ‘Save and Email.’
• Invoice printing/emailing were generating error messages. This is now fixed.
• Photo captions were disorderly when the sentences were too long. We’ve fixed this so you can put longer photo captions now.
• We’ve fixed a rare bug in the Edit Parent form where usernames and passwords were not being updated.