Here is the list of our latest improvements to Music Teacher’s Helper, since mid-July, 2008. Thank you for all your feedback and comments.
- Now only active students will show up in the repertoire tracker. This helps remove clutter from former students repertoire.
- Made invoices send using Studio Name in the “From” field, rather than simply the teacher’s email address.
- When sending email event reminders/notes while editing an event, if you made changes to the event at the same time, the reminder/notes contained the details of the event before it was saved. Now it will contain the new details you are changing it to.
- Fixed a small bug in the reports that wasn’t making it not run properly if the first student in the list didn’t exist.
- Fixed upcoming lesson list on student and parent homepages to show events that are open for registration, even if participants have already registered.
- Students can now register for open events from the home page, rather than just the calendar.
- Lesson history search now lets you search on specific fields. Also optimized a query which was making the page load slowly.
- Students who’s names have apostrophes in them will now save without adding a forward slash before the apostrophe. If you have students with apostrophes in their name, please open up the student profile and resave it, and the apostrophe will be removed from the other parts of the program.
- Made announcement area on student/parent home pages remove the large gap that sometimes existed between announcements when using html in the announcement.
- Fixed bug on manual invoices when creating fees with forward slashes before apostrophes.
- For students or parents with multiple email addresses, you can now separate the email addresses with a comma as well as a semicolon. Before, you could only use a semicolon, but now either one will work.
- Changed the wording on help screen of Reconcile All page so that teachers know that cancelling a lesson doesn’t waive the charge for the student, and that you must issue a credit if you don’t want to charge the student.
- Updated invoices to say “Fees & Credits” instead of just “Fees” since both were being listed under that section. The heading is now more accurate.
- You can now upload files with a .txt extension to your file area.
- Changed the “Resources” page to list popular articles from our blog, and moved external links to the Friends of Music Teacher’s Helper page.
- When reconciling an individual lesson, it will now show the default lesson cost in the amount field.
- Bug fix: You can now delete files uploaded to the file area if they have double quotes in the title.
- You can now send email to parents and students at the same time. You can also filter by name.
- Your studio website logo and studio invoice logo are now separate logos managed from the Home -> My Studio Website -> Studio Logo page.
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.
