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!

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!

Those of you who use Music Teacher’s Helper regularly probably noticed the announcement after logging in, about the possible updates to the invoicing system. There was also a link to take a survey and let us know your thoughts.

A big THANK YOU to everyone who participated in the invoicing survey! We had a lot of great response, and some wonderfully insightful comments. Below, I will list some of the results of the survey, along with what we propose to change with the invoicing system (yes, according to many of you, something does have to change). I’ll post a screenshot as well so you can see what we’re thinking. And we’d like to know what you think about these changes as well, so post your comments below.

More…

If you ever have students who cancel lessons, or if you want to issue credits to your students for any reason, you’re going to love these recent changes!

First, if you charge “per lesson”, marking a lesson as cancelled used to make it “not charged”, or it waived the fee. This is no longer the case. Marking the attendance alone no longer effects the student’s amount due. Now you get to decide whether or not you want to issue a credit (refund) for that lesson.

When you reconcile the lesson, there is now an option to “Issue a credit”. You can specify the amount you want to credit back for that lesson, enter any notes, and the credit is created automatically. But we’ve also added an item under the “Billing” -> “Fees & Credits” menu (formerly “Fees Charged” menu) to make it easier for you to issue a credit to your students at any time. You can still create a “negative fee” like before, but we thought the new “Issue Credit” option was a bit more intuitive.

Now, it gets even more exciting. Before, when a student logged in and wanted to cancel their lesson, in order for it to actually be cancelled, you had to login also and “accept” or “deny” the cancellation. Now, the lesson is simply cancelled as soon as the student says they can’t make it, you get an instant email about it, and no further action is required on your part! If you do want to issue a refund for that lesson you can do so from the Fees & Credits menu mentioned above. This is so much simpler!

Note that you can also now reconcile an event at any time - you don’t need to wait until you teach it.

We hope you like the new improvements. Keep sending us your ideas and feedback!

Thanks and have a great day!

We are constantly making changes to Music Teacher’s Helper - just about every week - even though we don’t always post a blog entry about it. The reason we don’t always mention it is because some changes are fairly insignificant. But today we made some improvements that will hopefully ease some of the frustration that’s been going around because of the invoicing system.

Back in May we launched a completely new invoicing system that has received both positive and negative reviews from our customers. Teachers have loved the Invoice History, and the ability to resend or reprint past invoices.

Some of the recent problems people have been experiencing with the invoicing system are: More…

We would like to congratulate Michelle Mastin from San Carlos, California, who won our August 2007 Referral Contest! She referred the most teachers who signed up for either a free plan or free trial membership by August 31, and has won a one-year free subscription to Music Teacher’s Helper!

But the contest isn’t over! Remember that for every person you refer who signs up for a paying membership by September 30th (and begins paying for their subscription), you will receive one month free! So if you refer five teachers who sign up for a paying plan by September 30th, you get the next five months free!

In order for us to track your referrals, make sure you are sending them your special referral link by clicking the “Referral Contest” link at the top, after you login.

We would like to thank everyone who has been participating in this referral contest, and for the great feedback we are constantly receiving from you.

Happy teaching!