Thank you to all who participated in the Testimonial Contest this week. I was overwhelmed with the great number of responses and fabulous testimonials we received. I’m glad you love Music Teacher’s Helper so much!

I read testimonial after testimonial that stated how MTH is helping you run a more organized and professional studio, saving you time, money, and even helping you be a better teacher. Many of you also commented on our fantastic support team. They really do a great job, don’t they?

Because of the number of responses and the high quality of all of the testimonials, in both text and video, I decided that a random drawing would be the most fair way to pick a winner. So after running a random query in our database, the winner came back as… More…

Here are the updates we’ve made to Music Teacher’s Helper this month (see below). We’re also are getting closer to launching our new website, which includes a brand new design, both on our home page, and in the “logged in” area. So stay tuned for some exciting improvements there!

Also, we’re hosting a Testimonial Contest, where you can win a free year subscription to Music Teacher’s Helper! Simply tell us what you love about Music Teacher’s Helper, along with a photo of yourself, and you may be the lucky winner! We’ll also be selecting several of these testimonials to showcase on our new website. To enter, please submit your testimonial before this Friday, March 5, at the link below:

www.MusicTeachersHelper.com/testimonial-contest

Okay, here are the recent updates:

• Feature: You can now change the date input format to day/month/year or month/day/year from Home -> Preferences.
• Feature: Invoice Notification E-mail Template now has a variable options for “Amount Due” and “Paypal Link”, so students can see the amount and pay for their invoice without opening the PDF attachment.
• BugFix: Teachers who have been having trouble with automatic invoices not sending the past few days – the problem is now fixed.
• BugFix: Issues with event cost changing after being invoiced should now be fixed.
• BugFix: Make-up lessons now go to next page properly, if more than 10 make-ups showing.

As we announced a few weeks ago, we will soon be launching a new version of Music Teacher’s Helper, with a fresh new look, a simplified interface, and some awesome improvements! We’ll also be launching a new home page design.

To go along with this new design, we’d like to showcase some of your stories, and share how Music Teacher’s Helper has helped you in your studio. So we’re hosting a contest!

Tell us why you love Music Teacher’s Helper, along with your photo or a video, and we’ll enter you for a chance to win a free year of Music Teacher’s Helper! We will also select several of the entries to showcase on our new website.

How to Enter

To submit your testimonial, please visit: www.MusicTeachersHelper.com/testimonial-contest More…

It’s an exciting time at Music Teacher’s Helper. We hope your year is off to a good start and that your studio is running well.

We’re working hard right now to bring you some awesome improvements to Music Teacher’s Helper, including a brand new graphics design, and several features that we know you’ll love. The new design will look more more up to date than our current site, and will also make the program easier to use, especially for those just starting out.

We’re also giving you a brand new calendar, with a week and day view that actually show the duration of tevents visually (like Google calendar or Outlook), along with the ability to e-mail all students on a given day. These improvements and much more aren’t quite ready yet, but we’re getting closer and will keep you posted to let you know when they’re done.

Here are the recent changes More…

As we’re now moving into the holiday season, we hope you’ll enjoy some of our latest updates to Music Teacher’s Helper. Over the next few months, we will be introducing some major improvements that will make Music Teacher’s Helper look more professional, be more intuitive, and be easier to use, especially for those just starting out. We’re sure you’re going to love them!

We may have to take the site down for an hour or two during off-peak times to make some of these changes, so we appreciate your patience as we do so in the months ahead. We’ll keep you posted.

Remember that to get live updates about what’s happening on our website and blog, you can follow us on twitter at www.twitter.com/musicteachers.

Here are the updates we launched in November:

• Lending Library is now a real library! Store your entire inventory with quantities, and lend out items from there. You can now also search the library and the lent items.
• Payment Categories! You can now specify payment categories when adding a payment (ie. Lesson Income, Book Fees, etc.). This helps you categorize your income better. These categories also show up on the Income/Expense Report.
• Custom E-mail Templates! Create your own e-mail templates that you can send over and over again to students.
• Invoices now generate PDF’s! Improved the invoice look and feel, and added an Invoice Notification e-mail template, so you can customize the invoice e-mails your students receive. More…

One of the ongoing challenges of using Music Teacher’s Helper is getting students and parents to regularly login to their teacher’s site and make use of the student-only features. The solution: create a regularly updated stream of cool content so that they’ll get hooked. Just below the Upcoming Events section is a list of Announcements, which can be created and tweaked using the Studio Announcements feature.

More…

Hello music teachers!

We’re happy to announce several new updates this month, as well as some announcements. Thank you for your great feedback. We get so many comments about how much you love the site and we’re glad that you do. Here are the latest updates to Music Teacher’s Helper in October.

New Features

• Birthday Greetings! MTH can now automatically e-mail your students a birthday greeting. Enable the option in Home -> Preferences and customize your birthday greeting under Home -> Email Templates.
• The Student Registration Form now allows you to choose which fields are “Required”.
• Parents and adult students now see the Amount Due on their home page. The amount pulls from the Student Account Summary Report.
• You can now see a history of your payments to Music Teacher’s Helper from the “My Account” page. (Just click “Payment History” in the sidebar.)
• Students can now change their username and password when they login, and parents can change their students’ logins as well. More…

Alright, if you follow us on Twitter you probably stay pretty up to date on the latest improvements we’re making to Music Teacher’s Helper. But it’s still nice to see a list of everything that’s been done recently, right here, isn’t it? Take a look at what we’ve been working on this month.

• New Feature: Email History Search! You can now see a history of all the e-mails you’ve sent via MTH, and search through them.
• New Feature: Contact List Report can now export former students.
• New Feature: Student List now shows the alternate phone number if no home phone number was entered.
• New Feature: Invoice history sent date now adjusted according to time zone.
• New Feature: Added date of last lesson to Daily Summary report, and More…

It’s been a good month for Music Teacher’s Helper. With the school year starting, music teachers everywhere are thinking about the best way to run their studio for the coming year.  And more than ever, music teachers are turning to Music Teacher’s Helper. We are pleased to have had a record number of new subscribers this month – over 100 new paying subscribers in August alone! Thank you for using Music Teacher’s Helper!

The recent updates to allow syncing with Google Calendar are working great, and we hope to soon remove the feature from “Beta” status. In the weeks and months ahead, we’ll also be expanding the feature to allow you to create events in Google and having them updated on your MTH calendar. Stay tuned for that and more.

We did fix an important bug this month related to recurring transactions. If you created a recurring transaction without an end date, it may not have been creating the transactions properly before this month. Look at your Billing -> “My Expenses and Other Income” transactions to make sure. You may need to manually add transactions that weren’t added by the system. We apologize for the inconvenience here. Recurring transactions now work fine with or without an end date. (Note: Recurring Calendar Events still require an end date.)

For those who are promoting Music Teachers Helper through our Affiliate program, we also added several awesome new banner ads to the affiliate area. If you are interested in earning a little extra money by referring other teachers to Music Teacher’s Helper, check out our Affiliate program. It’s free to join, and you can earn recurring commission.

Thank you for your great feedback and support of Music Teacher’s Helper. We receive so many positive comments about how much you like the program, and we’re so glad you’re finding it useful. As always, if you have questions or suggestions, we’re always here to help.

I wish you all the best in your studios!

If you have a Google account, you can now sync your Music Teacher’s Helper calendar to your Google Calendar! This allows you to take advantage of some of the great options that Google provides, such as:

• See your personal, studio, and other events on the same calendar.
• Sync your calendar with other calendars such as Outlook or iCal.
• Sync your calendar with mobile devices, such as the iPhone or Blackberry.
• Place your calendar on a remote website, such as your Music Teacher’s Helper website.

To setup Google Calendar Syncing, log into your Music Teacher’s Helper account, and go to Calendar -> Calendar Sync. More…