Brandon Pearce

New Features & Fixes in October 2010

October 25th, 2010 by

Music Teacher’s Helper continues to improve based on feedback from our users. We’ve added some great new features this month as well as fixed a few small bugs.

If you have feedback, feel free to send it to our Support Team, or share your thoughts on our public Music Teacher Forum.

New Features

  • You can edit now photo captions of exiting photos, and change the sort order.

Latest Bug Fixes

  • Fixed a bug some were with experiencing with calculating available file area space.
  • Fixed a bug with the automatic invoicing system that caused some invoices not to generate.

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Posted in Site Announcements

Brandon Pearce

New Features and Fixes in September, 2010

September 29th, 2010 by

Another month goes by, and Music Teacher’s Helper continues to improve based on feedback from our users. We’ve added some features this month that have been requested several times, and have also fixed a few small, but annoying bugs. We hope you enjoy the improvements.

If you have feedback, feel free to send it to our Support Team, or share your thoughts on our public Music Teacher Forum.

New Features

  • Child students now have a field for their own phone number. Many teachers requested this as more children have their own phones these days.
  • Added navigation to the bottom of the calendar so you don’t have to scroll up to the top to page between periods.
  • Added CAPTCHA to your studio website contact form to help prevent spam.

Latest Bug Fixes

  • On the mobile app, flat fee lessons are now reconciling properly with a $0 cost.
  • Fixed an issue with Read more…

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Posted in Site Announcements

Brandon Pearce

Prices Changing on October 1st

September 21st, 2010 by

As we recently announced, Music Teacher’s Helper’s pricing plans will be changing on October 1st, 2010. That’s just over a week away! If you’re currently a Free plan user of Music Teacher’s Helper, now is the perfect time to upgrade to a paying account, since it will lock in today’s rates forever. If you’re currently a paying subscriber, you may also want to consider upgrading to the Platinum plan, which offers Unlimited students for only $24.95/month. This way, even after the prices change, you’ll still be at today’s low rates.

To upgrade your account, login to Music Teacher’s Helper, and go to the “My Account” page in the upper-right hand corner. Simply choose the plan you want, your preferred payment method (credit card or Paypal) and enter the details.

We’ve got a lot of great improvements in the works for the months ahead, so stay tuned through our Blog, Facebook, or Twitter account.

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Brandon Pearce

Announcing New Pricing Plans

August 25th, 2010 by

Having been in business now for over 5 years, Music Teacher’s Helper has grown significantly both in number of customers and in quality and quantity of services we provide. Just a glance at our Twitter account or the Announcements category of our blog will show that we’ve added a lot of new features and an increasing amount of value over the years – yet we’ve kept our prices the same.

Taking all of this extra value into account, and after a good, hard look at the imbalance between how many teachers are signed up for the different plans, we think it’s time to offer some new pricing plans for Music Teacher’s Helper.

What’s Changing?

The major differences in these new plans are:

  • We’ve simplified from 5 plans down to 4 and changed their names.
  • We’ve increased the number of students on each plan (to 5, 20, 40, and unlimited)
  • We’ve included more storage space for the file/photo area (now from 100mb to 10GB), which is something that’s been requested several times over the years.

The prices are also different, obviously, corresponding to what’s offered in the plan. All plans still include a Free studio website (a huge value in itself), Unlimited students on your Waiting List and Former Students list, secure SSL encryption (except for the Free plan), and full access to all the other features of Music Teacher’s Helper. All plans (except Free, of course) also include a 30-day free trial. We think you’ll find the prices a great value for Read more…

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Posted in Site Announcements

Brandon Pearce

Mobile App for Music Teacher’s Helper is Live!

August 24th, 2010 by

MTH-iphone-screenshot-paymentsWe are pleased to announce that we have launched the mobile app for Music Teacher’s Helper! This app will allow you to quickly access important information on your Music Teacher’s Helper account through your mobile phone. The app will work on the iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and other smart phones with web-kit enabled browsers.

To access the mobile app, open up your cell phone browser and go to: http://www.musicteachershelper.com/mobile

We’ve kept the mobile app clean and simple. It’s not meant to be a fully-fledged version of Music Teacher’s Helper, or a replacement for it, but it should give you the information about your studio you’ll need to access while on the road. (Actually, don’t use it while driving, okay?)

On the Music Teacher’s Helper mobile app, you can review your student lists and their contact information, see a list of your upcoming (and past) lessons, reconcile your lessons, view a summary of each student’s billing status, and see your studio’s financial transactions, payments, and invoices. Currently, the mobile app only supports teacher logins – students and parents cannot login. We’ll be adding more functionality to it as time goes on.

We hope you enjoy this new way to access your studio. It’s been our number one request for quite a while, so we’re happy to finally be able to give it to you. Check out the mobile app today and let us know what you think!

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Posted in Site Announcements

Brandon Pearce

Music Teacher’s Helper has 1,000 paying customers

August 8th, 2010 by

Last week, Music Teacher’s Helper reached a significant milestone: there are now over 1,000 music teachers worldwide who have paying subscriptions to Music Teacher’s Helper! This is in addition to the thousands more who are using the Free Forever plan, enjoying their own studio website, and even more who visit our Music Teachers Blog each month. Our brand new Music Teacher Forum looks like it will be quite popular as well.

As the creator and president of Music Teacher’s Helper, I’d like to thank each of you for your help in making Music Teacher’s Helper the powerful, time-saving tool that it is. It would not be what it is today without your feedback, both in useful suggestions and in expressing how much you love it with your words and your wallets. Thank you!

You may not know that I originally wrote Music Teacher’s Helper back in 2005 to manage Read more…

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Posted in Site Announcements

Brandon Pearce

New Forum and System E-mail History. Mobile app coming soon!

July 27th, 2010 by

It’s been an exciting month at Music Teacher’s Helper, with the launch of our new Music Teachers Forum, and a number of other features (see below).

We’re also pleased to announce that we’re working on a mobile version of Music Teacher’s Helper, which will work on the iPhone, Android, and other web-kit enabled smartphones. We plan to make the initial version available within the next few weeks. It won’t do everything that the main site can do, but in this first version, you’ll be able to do basic things like list students, transactions, and events. We’ll also be releasing a public API, which will allow web developers to more easily integrate Music Teacher’s into other programs and websites. Stay tuned for more details.

Latest Updates

Here is a list of the latest additions to Music Teacher’s Helper.

  • Music Teacher Community Forum – Join with other teachers worldwide to share ideas and collaborate on topics ranging from method books and dealing with students, to music theory and songwriting, to running and marketing your studio. It’s free! (Read original forum announcement.)
  • System E-mail History! See what lesson notes, birthday reminders, daily summaries, and other system e-mails were sent by the Read more…

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Brandon Pearce

Announcing the Music Teacher Forum!

July 25th, 2010 by

Today, Music Teacher’s Helper is unveiling our new public Music Teacher Forum, where teachers can share ideas, ask questions and collaborate about topics related to teaching, music, lesson ideas, dealing with students, songwriting and composition, running your business, and more! We also have a place for the community to discuss using Music Teacher’s Helper, as well as make feature requests.

Please visit the forum today and join in the fun at:

http://www.MusicTeachersHelper.com/forum

Note: Anyone can browse through the forum topics, but in order to post on the forum, you will need a forum account, which you can get here. This is separate from your Music Teacher’s Helper login. Read more…

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Posted in Site Announcements

Brandon Pearce

Automatic Overdue Invoice Reminders and More

June 29th, 2010 by

This month we have launched a new feature on Music Teacher’s Helper to make it easier to remind students to pay for invoices. If you’ve ever sent your students an invoice from Music Teacher’s Helper’s, or used our options to receive on-line payments from your students, you’ve probably noticed that students pay a lot more regularly and on time. But occasionally, you might run across a student that needs a bit more prodding. That’s why we’ve added Automatic Overdue Invoice Notifications. If you enable this option under Settings -> E-mail Notifications, then your students will get a reminder if they don’t make a payment after a certain number of days past the due date. (You can set how long after the due date you want the reminder sent.)

Keep in mind that since Music Teacher’s Helper doesn’t apply payments directly to invoices, but to the student’s account, the system assumes that it’s the last invoice that’s due. So a reminder Read more…

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Posted in Site Announcements

Brandon Pearce

Updates from May 2010

May 25th, 2010 by

Here is a list of the latest new features, enhancements, and bug fixes we’ve added to Music Teacher’s Helper. Thank you for your feedback and support.

New Features

  • Reconcile All Events for one Day. You can now reconcile all events for a specific day. To do this, click the down down arrow on any day of the calendar and choose “Reconcile All”.
  • Repertoire Columns Split. In the Repertoire Tracker, the title and composer fields are now showing in separate columns.
  • Day of Week. Added the name of the day of the week at the top of the calendar in Day View.

Recent Bug Fixes

  • When e-mailing all students on a day, it now e-mails the parents as well.
  • Manage Student Logins page was not always resetting the logins properly or showing all the parents. This is fixed.
  • Current day highlighted on the calendar is now taking time zone into account.
  • Added warning message before recurring events are deleted. Also disabled Google Calendar->MTH sync temporarily. MTH->Google is fine.
  • European date format now saving properly on the Reconcile Events page.
  • Photos page now shows the correct amount of space left for uploading photos.
  • When parents login, if they have a credit, the “Amount Due” now shows zero, rather than a negative amount due.

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Posted in Site Announcements, Using Music Teacher's Helper

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