Music Teachers Blog

Wow! What a month for new features and improvements! We have added a lot of really important and frequently requested features this month, so be sure to check over this list thoroughly. Some of these improvements have been in the works for quite a while, and have been requested over and over again, so we’re very excited to announce these.

Here are the recent new features we have added:

• Feature: Customizable student registration forms. You can now choose which fields to show on your student registration form on your studio website. You can also add up to four custom fields of your own! To update your registration form, go to Home -> My Studio Website -> Website Pages, and click “Edit” next to the Registration page.
• Feature: You can now remove the Login box and Announcements from the sidebar of your studio website. You can choose this option under Home -> My Studio Website -> Website Preferences.
• Feature: Students can now opt out of e-mail reminders. (Or you can opt them out from within their profile.)
• Feature: We have created a video tutorial for students and parents that walks them through the basics of Music Teacher’s Helper. They can access this video by logging in and going to the Help menu.
• Feature: Let parents edit their students’ info. When parents login, they now have a Student List under the Home menu where they can see their students and edit their contact information, birthday, etc.
• Feature: Added a studio website theme for Drummers.
• Feature: You can now send multiple attachments when you send an e-mail.
• Feature: There is now an optional “Date Deposited” field when adding a payment, if you want to keep track of which payments you’ve deposited in your bank.
• Feature: Many of the new themes had placeholder photos of people’s faces if you didn’t have a logo. We had several requests to remove these since they were unknown faces, so we have removed them.
• Feature: Limited the “Reconcile All” page to only show 100 events at a time by default (you can change it at the top). This speeds up the load time of the page if you have a lot of unreconciled events.
• Feature: On the daily summary report, if an event has only one participant, we now show the participants name in case it is different than the event title.

And here are the latest bug fixes or other improvements that aren’t “big” enough to be considered a “feature”.

• BugFix: When reconciling events while issuing a credit, the credits were often saving with an incorrect date. We fixed the dates, and fixed the bug.
• BugFix: On some of the new themes, the “Forgot Password?” link was sometimes not taking you to the right page. This is now fixed.
• BugFix: The Last Login Date on the Manage Student Logins list now shows according to the teacher’s time zone rather than the server time.
• BugFix: Recurring Expenses were not being created if the end date was not set.
• BugFix: On the Leaves and Music, and the Clouds themes, bullited lists are now more properly indented.
• BugFix: In Google Chrome, when reconciling a single event, the credit and payment boxes were opened rather than closed by default.
• BugFix: Removed forward slashes that appeared before quotes in the daily summary report lesson notes.
• BugFix: When exporting the Lesson History report, it wasn’t including multi-line note entries.
• BugFix: When saving an e-mail template, it often continued to show the previous version.
• BugFix: In the student list, if a student does not have a home phone, but does have an alternate phone, it will now show the alternate phone number in the student list.
• BugFix: Fixed a rare validation error when saving a form that has multiple time input boxes.
• BugFix: When reconciling a single event for a flat-fee student, the Credit Amount field was required in order to submit. This is no longer the case. (It was only a bug for a few hours)
• BugFix: When exporting calendar events, if no events existed within the date range selected, it was giving a confusing error message. Now it lets you know that the date range contains no events.

Posted in Site Announcements |

About the Author

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 thousands 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, traveling with his family, and writing hymn arrangements for piano. 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.