Music Teacher's Helper - Your music studio manager

Simplifying Lesson Cancellations and Credits

Thu September 13th, 2007 by Brandon Pearce (Support)

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!

Posted in Site Announcements |

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5 Comments (Add Comment)

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  1. Thank you so much for the changes to lesson credits. Those are really great!

    by Amy Gould — Mon Sep 17, 2007 @ 5:18 pm

  2. Thanks for the change to the cancellation request--very much more useful. I do seem to remember that previously a notice of the cancellation also appeared on the teacher home page. If you could keep that it would help to remind of rescheduling and possibly billing that need to be changed while we are logged in to MTH.

    by Margaret Hawn — Wed Sep 19, 2007 @ 2:28 pm

  3. Yes, we removed the "Cancellation Request" list from the home page since there are no more "requests", they're just already cancelled. If we left them there now, we thought it might get kind of cluttered since most of the time you won't need to do anything with the cancellations. You will still get an email reminder, though, with every cancellation request. If we get enough requests for a list of events cancelled by students, we can put it back on, though.
    Thanks for your comments.

    by Brandon Pearce (Support) — Thu Sep 20, 2007 @ 11:20 am

  4. Thanks for changing the cancellation feature to give me the flexibility to issue or not issue the credit! My students were taking advantage of me and now I can just limit the number of cancellations in a session that receive a credit-actually enforce my studio policy.

    by Mary Anne Block — Tue Sep 25, 2007 @ 10:38 am

  5. I told ya Brandon (wink)!

    Great job man.
    Ron

    by Ron Cross — Wed Sep 26, 2007 @ 8:52 am

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