Many teachers who charge “per lesson” have requested the ability to schedule an event on the calendar that will be charged differently from a students regular lesson rate.

Before, you had to wait until the lesson was reconciled to change the cost. This caused problems when invoicing, for those who invoiced in advance, since the invoice was created before the cost could be changed.

Now you can set the cost of an event from the start! When creating a new event, there is now a “Cost” option that overrides any default costs for a student’s lesson.

This will make it much easier to create group events that aren’t charged, or to charge a recital fee to only those students who will attend the recital.

Thank you for all your feedback. You’re helping making Music Teacher’s Helper better all the time!

I just got back from the Texas Music Teacher’s Association Conference and enjoyed meeting the many teachers there. As I was showing them Music Teacher’s Helper, a question I heard asked many times was, “I charge a [$100] fee to my students at the beginning of the year to cover all their books and materials for the whole year, and then deduct whatever I buy in books for them, from that amount.”

The reason some teachers do this is so they don’t have to charge parents a different amount every month if new books are needed, since they’ve already been paid for. If the teachers had used Music Teacher’s Helper from the start, this probably wouldn’t have been such a burden, since it calculates and sends invoices to the student automatically, and if they owe more for a book that month, it already knows that, and adjusts the invoices accordingly. But to make it easier for the parent, some teachers like the simplicity of charging a materials fee.

So, how do you handle this in Music Teacher’s Helper? It’s easy! (Although I did have to do some thinking to figure out the best way to handle this from an accounting standpoint).

1. First - at the beginning of the year, charge the student your normal materials fee. (Click Billing -> Fees -> Add Fee(s))
2. Then, when you buy a book for that student, since it is a business expense to you, it will go in your expenses. (Click Billing -> My Expenses. Add a transaction, and for the category, put something like “John Doe Materials”, where John Doe is the student’s name.
3. Then, when you run your Income & Expense report, you’ll see a categorized list in your expenses for how much you’ve spent on John’s materials. If you want to keep a total of how much you’ve spent on each student, then you’ll create a category for each student you buy materials for, and it will break these out into separate categories in the report.

That’s it! Now you can know if you’re keeping within budget on the materials you purchase for your students. One other thought: If you don’t want to charge the materials fee upfront but just want to charge students for books as you buy them, you’ll want to create two transactions. The first is an “Expense” for when you buy the book, the second is the “Fee” where you charge the student for the book. Just add those two transactions in there, and Music Teacher’s Helper will take care of the rest!

Some teachers and students have mentioned that when accessing their studio website in Internet Explorer for the first time, a security warning appears telling them that the secure certificate may not be valid.

This can happen when you’re accessing your studio website incorrectly. Remember that your studio website does not have any www’s in it.

To access your studio website, go to:

http://[studio-name].musicteachershelper.com

NOT

http://www.[studio-name].musicteachershelper.com
(where [studio-name] is the name you chose for your studio website).

The SSL Certificate on the server doesn’t secure 2nd-level subdomains (having two sections with dots (.) before the domain name). So that’s why the warnings appear when you access the site using www’s. Therefore, make sure that when you tell others your studio website address, that you give them the correct address (without the www’s).

Update [Sep 13, 2007]: This problem has now been completely resolved. We have made it  redirect visitors coming to your page through www to the non-www subdomain. This eliminates the certificate warning.

Over time, we’ve had a few requests from teachers who want to be able to keep track of make-up lessons in Music Teacher’s Helper. We’ve also had requests from teachers who want to setup available lesson times, and let students pick from available slots on a first-come, first-serve basis.

One of our most active members came up with a brilliant idea that will let you do both of these right now. Here is what he said: More…

There are two new features in Music Teacher’s Helper that have made it much more useful in my teaching. Well, they’re not really new, technically, but they have been recently improved by Support so that they work better for me, and hopefully for you as well.

One is the Daily Summary, and the other is the ability to not only reconcile all lessons at once but also to choose to email lesson notes to students from the same window.

These two features play off each other. The reconcile-all window lets me come home from teaching and enter notes about all my lessons at the same time. The daily summary uses those lesson notes the next time each student has a lesson scheduled, and reminds me what each person was working on.

New for Reconciling Lessons

What’s new is that the reconcile-all window allows us to check off whether we wish to email lessons notes to each student. I have found out that my students really like this feature. They receive by email More…

A couple teachers recently wrote me saying they couldn’t export their student data to Excel. After researching the problem I found that this was happening only in Internet Explorer 6, on accounts with SSL data encryption. So those using Firefox, Safari, or those on accounts without SSL were able to export fine. Since so many of our teachers use IE, I thought I would post the solution here in case it might help someone else out.

As it turns out that this is yet another Internet Explorer bug, but fortunately it’s one that Microsoft has a fix for. You can read about it here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/812935.

Or if you don’t want to bother with fixing IE, you could use the much more robust and powerful browser, Mozilla Firefox.

Originally I discovered Music Teacher’s Helper (MTH) because I was looking for a way to track student payments. After teaching for a while in a music school which collected student tuition, I added a day of teaching at a place where I needed to collect lesson payments directly, and I wanted these transactions to run smoothly for everyone involved. Having payments show up online, having receipts emailed, and even allowing students to pay online with a credit card, are great benefits for those who accept payments directly from students.

But then I discovered that MTH was a big help regardless of how students paid for lessons. Soon I began using MTH for all my students, including those who pay tuition to the music school office instead of to me.

Here are 6 reasons I like to use MTH for everyone, including my music school students:

1. Scheduling. Students and parents can go online 24/7 to check on the date and time of an upcoming lesson. If they realize they are going out of town at some point, they can go online and submit a cancellation request, instead of hoping to remember to mention something at the next lesson, when things could well be too rushed to talk about it.

At the music school where I teach, students pay for a certain number of lessons in advance, but as we come to the end of the term, they need to know when their last paid lesson is. There have, on rare occasions, been disputes at our school, between teachers and students, as to how many lessons have been taught and how many remain. With MTH, students can see at any time when they’ve taken lessons, and how many they’ve paid for. With everything laid out online, there’s not much chance for misunderstanding.

With some students, especially parents of students, their support for the MTH system is palpable. Our school office system can sometimes be hard to understand, but the MTH calendar is transparent and accessible.  I’ve seen a few students (or parents) change from having a dark cloud over them, as if they feared they were being taken advantage of, to practically beaming with confidence about how their lesson payments are being handled–even though I’m not even handling those payments. I’m just making the information accessible.  (I don’t list their payments; that’s the school’s job.  They just like seeing a listing of lessons completed and futures lessons which have been paid for.  I tell them to ignore the MTH account info on their home page.)

It’s also helpful to list special events such as must-see concerts, sessions, recitals, and my performances on the online calendar for all students to see.

2. Lesson notes for students. Entering lesson notes is a huge help to me in teaching, but it’s also a boon to students. This is done when “reconciling” a lesson or class after it’s over, either from your home page, or from the calendar where you click on a lesson and select Reconcile. I like to check off the box that offers to email the notes to students as well. It’s great for them to be reminded of what I thought was most important in the lesson, what they should focus on for next time, and what they accomplished.

Whether or not the notes are emailed, students can also log in and see what was done in any past lesson by hovering the mouse over the lesson in the online calendar.

These notes are of special benefit for parents, since at least one, and often both parents, do not attend their kids’ lessons. With MTH they can get an email, or see online, information about what is being done in lessons. Even if a parent attended, it can be very helpful for them to see what the teacher thought the key points of the lesson were.

3. Lesson notes for me. My systems for keeping track of what I’ve taught have ranged from creating a small looseleaf notebook alphabetized by student, to using a Palm Pilot. But there have always been lessons and classes where I just had to wing it, find out where the students were at and go from there, sometimes realizing later (by checking my notes) that I had meant to follow up on a certain idea or exercise but forgot. The problem was I sometimes couldn’t put my hands on the notes fast enough.

With MTH, I get my Daily Summaries emailed to me (in the reports section, the last choice at the bottom is Daily Summaries, and on the report page is a box you can check, to have the summaries emailed to you). I can easily print out notes from each student’s last lesson.

This keeps me more on top of what I’m doing with each student or class; a printed daily summary page also gives me a place to jot current notes down to enter when I reconcile the lesson.

I can also review all the notes for a particular student by going to the Lesson tab and clicking on Lesson History, where I can search for that student.

4. Student emails. With Outlook or Outlook Express, I found it cumbersome to keep creating and shifting between group emails for my students, and it was hard to avoid emailing duplicate messages to students who were in two of my classes. With MTH, I can email all my students by checking “Select All”, or I can filter by entering a few letters in the “school” or “instrument” boxes.

Since I teach only one instrument, I happen to use the “instrument” box for the name of a class if that student is taking one. Then I can enter a keyword in the email filter and the list of students will instantly narrow to the members of that class. I can check off “Select All” and email a message to a whole class.

It’s also very friendly to be able to select a variable, such as the student’s first name, to enter into the greeting of the email. This allows students to get a personal email, instead of a generic greeting. I was happy to discover that emails sent from MTH are sent from my own email address, so that replies come directly to me and not via the MTH site.

I’ve mentioned checking off boxes to have messages emailed. The only reason I’m comfortable doing this is because MTH lets me customize the email messages to better represent the way I like to come across to my students.

The only down sides to the emailing in MTH are that it won’t keep track of the emails I’ve sent, although I can check a box to have a copy of the emails sent to my address. Also, only one attachment can be added to each message. Brandon Pearce of MTH is always working to improve the system, and I understand these are being worked on.

5. Lending Library. Although I’ve only used the lending library feature twice, I found myself much more relaxed about lending something to a student when I knew I could enter it into MTH and not forget what I loaned out and to whom.

6. Reminders and receipts. I don’t currently use the reminders myself, but I can understand how they could work well for some teachers. Students can automatically be emailed reminders of lessons and of cancellations by checking off the Event Reminders boxes (see Calendar tab).  Paying students can be reminded of amounts due with emailed invoices.

If a student pays you for anything, whether for a lesson, a CD, music book, or concert ticket, you can enter a payment and check off the box to have a receipt emailed to the student. This gives the student confidence that the money is being kept track of, and gives them a record of the payment, which they can find at any time in their emails.

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The transparency of scheduling, lesson note reminders, emails and online calendar are just some reasons I’m happy to use MTH for music school students as well as those who pay me directly. 

Educationally speaking, the system encourages in my students more commitment and involvement.  And financially speaking, if MTH encourages even one student to hang in there who might otherwise have been on the fence about lessons, it will have easily paid for itself.