Music Teachers Blog

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.

Survey Results

If we were to make a change to the invoicing system, which of the following would you prefer?
(figures are rounded):

• 33% Keep invoicing the way it is now (Don’t change a thing)
• 22% Go back to how we were last May (Statements only. No invoice history)
• 37% Follow “true accounting” more closely by having invoices and statements
• 8% None of these

How do you generally charge your students for lessons?

• 55% “per lesson” - only attended lessons are charged
• 45% “flat fee” - meaning they charge the same each month regardless of the number of weeks in the month or lessons taught

And my favorite: How satisfied are you overall Music Teacher’s Helper?

• 0% - very dissatisfied
• 0% - somewhat dissatisfied
• 9% - somewhat satisfied
• 48% - very satisfied
• 43% - I couldn’t live without it!

Yay! We’re glad you like the service so much! Thanks again for your responses!

Our Invoicing Solution

So, back to invoicing. From the survey, you can see that every teacher wants something different. We really want to please all of you. We heard some requests over and over again, and some were mentioned just once or twice. Of course the features we’ll be adding the soonest are the ones that the majority seem to want. But if about 1/3 want to keep invoicing the same, 1/3 want to go back to statements only, and 1/3 want to move forward to invoices and statements, what are we to do? Here is our proposed solution in a nutshell:

• Static Invoice History - once an invoice or statement is in the history, it will never change
• Lots of options - we’ll give you options to create your invoice or statement however you want (read below for details)
• Optional Saving - email or print an invoice without saving it to your history, and vice versa
• Video Tutorial - we’ll make a video tutorial to walk you through the entire billing/invoicing system

The Details

To those who want to keep everything the same, we’re really glad the system works well for you now, and we want to keep it that way. But we do need to add some additional functionality to make it work better for other teachers. This shouldn’t take away from what you already have, but will only improve it.

To those who want to go back to statements, here’s what we’ll do. Since you’re not interested in invoicing, or in keeping a history of invoices sent to students, we’ll make way for you to create billing statements for your students that have nothing to do with what’s been “invoiced”. They’ll just pull everything right from the transaction log, listing everything that’s happened within a date range, just like before. Although we will give you the option to save it in your history if you want to, so your students can view it when they login.

To those who want to move ahead with invoices and statements, you got it! (You were the majority after all, even if only by a small margin). Although unlike “true accounting”, the statements won’t be showing outstanding invoices, but will be showing actual transactions in the student’s account. You’ll be able to create an invoice where no previous balance is shown, and the amount due is just the sum total of the transactions on that particular invoice. So invoicing for October won’t have anything from September in it (unless you choose to include past uninvoiced items, which you’ll now have the option to do). And you’ll be able to create statements if you just want to show all the activity in the student’s account.

Billing In Advance

Several teachers mentioned that when invoicing in advance, they sometimes had charged fees in the previous month that they wanted to show as line items on the next month’s invoice, rather than being totaled up with the previous balance. To help with this, we added an option to show transactions within x number of days prior to the start date of the invoice/statement.

What will it look like?

Now, we debated whether to have invoices and statements created from separate pages, or to do it all on the same screen. We don’t want the form to be cluttered or confusing. But we also understand that we’re music teachers, not accountants. A lot of us don’t know the difference between an invoice and a statement (I sure didn’t when I started teaching), and if we have an option to create an “invoice” or a “statement” a lot of teachers aren’t going to know the different or know what they want, really.

And because a lot of you want kind of a mix between a statement and an invoice, we opted to put everything on the same form, and let you create whatever type of invoice or statement you want. We have given you a lot of control in the options available, which may make the form look overwhelming to you. But we’ll also make it remember your settings so you don’t have to check the same boxes over and over again each time you create an invoice or statement.

Here is a screenshot of what we we’re thinking (click to see it larger):

What do you think? Yes, it’s full of options. Is it too complicated? Does it make sense to you? The little question marks give a lot of help, although you can’t see those in the screenshot, unfortunately. We’re also considering another checkbox to “Create invoices/statements even if amount due is zero” since several teachers mentioned they didn’t want to send an empty invoice to their students. Let us know what you think of these possible changes by posting your comments below. We wanted your feedback before we just “went ahead with it”.

Note: We haven’t covered automatic invoicing here much. There’s a lot we’d like to do with that as well, including the ability to let you create different invoicing schedules for different students, but this post has become long enough! Thanks for reading this far! We really appreciate you!

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