Here is the monthly list of the improvements we’ve made to Music Teacher’s Helper since January 14, 2008.

- Send to multiple email addresses per person. This feature has been requested so frequently, I know many of you will be happy about this. Some families have situations where there is a divorce, or even where each parent has their own email address they both want email reminders and invoices. Now Music Teacher’s Helper will allow you to enter multiple email addresses for a parent. In the Email field in the student (or parent) profile, just separate the email addresses with a semicolon. For example: john@google.com; jane@google.com. Then when email reminders, or invoices, or any email is sent to that person, the message will go to both addresses. More…

Here are the updates and improvements we’ve made to Music Teacher’s Helper since December 10, 2007. These include bug fixes, new features, and usability enhancements.

• Added a Mileage Tracker so you can track how far you’ve traveled in your music business. This is great for tax purposes. You can access the Mileage Tracker from Billing -> Mileage Tracker.
• The cost of a lesson or event will now show in event details when hovering over events on the calendar (if the cost is greater than 0)
• Made lending library items become overdue the day AFTER they are due, rather than the same day. They will also be marked overdue at the appropriate time according to your time zone, now, rather than the server time. Lent items now also show in order with the longest overdue items first. (or the ones that will be due back the soonest)
• You can now delete auto invoicing schedules, rather than just deactivate them
• Added a new drop down calendar for the date picker, so it will work better with Internet Explorer 7
• Your email history now shows the content of the message you sent, not just the subject and who you sent to.

More…

Here is a list of the updates and improvements we’ve made to Music Teacher’s Helper since November 12, 2007.

• When updating repeating events on the calendar, we made a change that solves two issues. One is if you deleted an event in the future, say, for a holiday, it used to add the lesson on that day back in when you updated all the events in that repeat group. Now it will leave your deleted events as deleted so you don’t have to put the holidays in again. The second thing this improves is if you’re updating events that have already been invoiced, it used to make the event appear as if it hadn’t been invoiced (kind of like “Un-invoicing” the event), if you were updating multiple events at once (future or all). This has now been fixed, so that once an event has been invoiced, it will always appear invoiced. (unless you delete and recreate it).
• Fixed calendar updating repeat events bug caused by above change. If you changed the time of an event back to the past, there were a few days when this caused the event to be saved at the wrong time. This was quickly fixed as soon as it was discovered.
• Made auto event reminders only send notice to teacher if there were reminders sent out (rather than daily regardless of whether any were sent). We’re trying to cut down on your junk mail.
• Fixed print link on invoice creation screen.
• Now you can view daily summaries for past dates. It will show all events except cancelled events.
• Made automatic lesson reminder emails notification to the teacher show the lessons in chronological order.
• The cost of a lesson or event will now show in event details when hovering over events on the calendar (if the cost is greater than 0)

We have a lot more great features and improvements planned that we’re sure you’re going to love (since we’ve had so many requests for them). So stay tuned!

We’ve recently had several talented individuals join the team at Music Teacher’s Helper blog. We thought it would be a good time to introduce everybody to them, so you can put a face with the posts you read. Here we are - the old faces as well as the new (and some without faces because don’t have pictures yet).

Brandon Pearce

Brandon Pearce is a piano teacher, choral director, computer programmer, and entrepreneur from Murray, Utah, and is also the creator of Music Teacher’s Helper. As his teaching studio grew, he found it increasingly difficult to keep track of how much each student owed. Having recently received a B.S. in Computer Science from Weber State University, he decided to write a web-based computer program to manage billing and scheduling in his studio. Realizing that he wasn’t alone in his studio management frustrations, he soon made the service available to other teachers. And they loved it! Since 2003, several additional programmers, and hundreds of teachers from around the world have participated in creating the world-class studio management software you know today as Music Teacher’s Helper.

Brandon currently spends his time managing and improving Music Teacher’s Helper, as well as doing freelance web design for other individuals and businesses. He has cut his studio down to 1 student (his wife), but still enjoys playing the piano, singing, and arranging/composing when he gets the chance. He is also the assistant director of the Oratorio Society of Utah, a 90+ year old choral organization that performs Handle’s Messiah each year, as well as other choral masterworks.

Ed Pearlman

Ed Pearlman studied with members of the Chicago Symphony, the Boston Symphony, and performed in the Yale Symphony and the Boston Philharmonic (a quality but nonprofessional orchestra). He continued his interest More…

Here are some more things we’ve improved in Music Teacher’s Helper so far this November.

• Send Automatic Event Reminders for specific categories! We improved the automatic event reminder functionality so that now you can specify which categories you want reminders to be sent for. For example, if you only want to have students emailed about group lessons or parties, but you don’t want them to receive an email reminding them of every single lesson, then you can just check those groups. (You can set this option from the “Calendar” -> “Event Reminders” menu)
• Create logins for all of your students at once! If your students register from your studio website, they can create their own login (username and password). But if you add the student yourself, you’re responsible for giving them a username and password. To make this easier for you, we created a page that allows you to check the names of the students you want to give a login to, and Music Teacher’s Helper will email them an auto-generated username and password so they can login. You can create a login for all of your students at once, or for individual students. To access this feature, go to “Students” -> “Student List” -> “Reset Student Logins”
• You can now upload .avi and .wmv movie files to your File Area.
• The Music Teacher’s Helper Blog now has a search feature so you can search through past posts, and find articles related to a certain topic.

More…

We’re always working to improve Music Teacher’s Helper, thanks to feedback from teachers like you. We haven’t always posted our updates in the past, but we’d like to start doing so more frequently. Some changes are very small but it may be helpful for you to know.

First, we have added two new video tutorials. One shows you how to setup your studio website, including changing your theme/layout, editing your teaching policy, uploading photos, and more. The other shows you what a student sees when they log in to their Music Teacher’s Helper account.

Other recent small changes:

• You can now upload .mus and .sib files to your File Area (Finale and Sibelius music notation files)
• Added “start date” to repertoire tracker and added it to show on the list of pieces for a student
• Fixed an event cancellation and registration bug that wasn’t adding/removing the students as a participant in the event properly
• Added a “notes” field to the parent info page

More…

Do you have a passion for music, teaching, or writing? Do you have experience and insight you’d like to share with other music teachers across the world? Do you want to make yourself known in the music teaching community? Or would you like to be the catalyst for interesting musical, educational, technological, or business discussion?

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then send us an email! We are looking for additional bloggers to write articles or posts that will be of interest to music teachers. Our goal is to provide an even more valuable resource and community for music teachers here on our blog.

How often you want to write is up to you. Anywhere from one article per month, to several per week will be fine. If you’re a current Music Teacher’s Helper subscriber, compensation will most likely entail all or part of your monthly subscription fee being waived (yes, you get a free Music Teacher’s Helper account!), and possibly more depending on the frequency and quality of your posts.

To apply, just send us an email explaining your writing experience (none required, we’d just like to know) , how frequently you’d like to post (ie. once a week), and some ideas you have for interesting post topics. We may bring on several individuals, so if you’re at all interested, don’t hesitate to send us an email.
We look forward to hearing from you!

To help new users learn how to use Music Teacher’s Helper, and to help everyone learn the capabilities of the new invoicing system, we’ve added six video tutorials, which walk you through step-by-step how to perform all the major functions in Music Teacher’s Helper.

Here are the tutorials we’ve added:

• Overview of Music Teacher’s Helper
• Adding students to Your Account
• Using the Calendar
• Billing and Transactions
• Invoicing System

The videos are each between 5 and 11 minutes in length.

To watch the video tutorials, login to your account, and click the “Help” menu, then “Video Tutorials”.

Enjoy!

Hooray! The new invoicing system is up and going. Both manual invoicing and automatic invoicing have been greatly improved, giving you a lot more control over how invoices are generated. Thanks again for everyone’s feedback that made these changes possible.

Important Note: If you use automatic invoicing, you’ll need to create a new invoicing schedule in order for automatic invoices to be sent out, since we couldn’t migrate the old automatic invoicing settings to the new system. We were able to migrate all of the invoices in your history to the new format, however, so it’s just the schedule you’ll need to create.

We have also added several video tutorials, one of which covers the invoicing system. These walk you through step-by-step how to use the different parts of Music Teacher’s Helper. You can watch them by going to Help -> Video Tutorials (after you login, of course).

Let us know what you think of the improvements!

Thanks and have a great day!

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!