Music Teachers Blog

Reconciling lessons is an important part of using Music Teachers Helper. Here are some tips on ways to do it.

Reconciling can be as simple as checking off that something happened. It can also be the moment you adjust something for the record, such as date, time, or how much you charged for a particular lesson. You can even issue a credit or partial credit, and at the end of this post, I’ll discuss how I’m using this for a new lesson cancellation policy I’m trying out.

But the most useful part of reconciling a lesson is to add lesson notes. These can be very simple or whole chapters in the saga of one of your students! It depends on how much time you want to spend, and on how you plan to use the notes.

When I started using MTH, I was concerned with how much time I would spend on lesson notes. But not only have I found them helpful for my own teaching, they are also very effective and supportive of students, to the point where I think they help keep students learning, enjoying, and continuing their lessons more. If this helps students learn better and helps you keep them longer as students, it certainly pays for your time in writing them.

I still try to be efficient with lesson notes, though, and one of the best ways to do this is by reconciling a day’s lessons from the Home page. Here you can choose to reconcile all unreconciled events at one time. This lays out a screen where you can make all the notes and changes you want before clicking on the Reconcile Now button. You can copy and paste notes from one to another student if you did similar things, or after jotting notes down about one student you might remember something to add to a previous one, etc.

The effect of lesson notes depends on whether you check off the box to email them to your student. This is a great and easy-to-use feature, although I have a few students who don’t use email much or don’t want notes sent (rarely). For most, these notes provide a reminder of what we did in the lesson, or can be a reminder of assignments for next time. They can receive the notes in the quiet of their home or office, away from the lesson, and reinforce lesson ideas.

Since the student can read these notes, it’s nice sometimes to make special reminder notes for myself in the Private Notes section, which students can’t see. All these notes show up on the Daily Summary Report, which I print out when I teach so I can see what was done the last time I taught each student. I use the printout to jot down lesson notes to enter later. I can also jot down payments or other reminders there. See my post about the Daily Summary Report for some more thoughts on this.

Lesson notes also show up when students roll the mouse over a past lesson, or when they look up their lesson history. From speaking with my students, I don’t think too many take advantage of this feature, but they certainly read the notes when they are emailed to them. Just today, though, I did a lesson report for a student, exported it to Excel and compiled a list for her of all the music she’s learned. She could have looked it up but wasn’t sure about it and it wasn’t hard for me to do.

Passing the mouse over the question mark on the reconcile form explains each item, but it’s worth keeping in mind that “Ignore/Reschedule” leaves the lesson unreconciled. The other choices, “Attended”, “Missed”, and “Cancelled”, all charge the student for the lesson, but as discussed below, you can issue a credit for the lesson if your cancellation policy leads you to do so. Also note that if you charge a flat rate for lessons, reconciling a lesson does not charge a student. [I’ve corrected this paragraph thanks to Brandon’s comments below.]

There are a couple of differences between reconciling individual events from the calendar and reconciling all at once from the Home page. One is that the Reconcile All screen lists who the participants are in the lesson or class; individual reconciling assumes you know which lesson you clicked on.

The most important difference is that only on the individual reconciling screen can you offer a lesson credit. Mostly you’ll ignore this, but as mentioned above, you may have a policy of crediting a student for a lesson if it’s cancelled with enough lead time. I’ve been toying with a new cancellation policy with regards to same-day cancellations. This idea is to charge half price when a student cancels the same day as their lesson. The reconcile feature lets you credit half the lesson cost back to the student, and you can keep track in reports of these credits.

The reason I’m trying this new policy is because it acknowledges that the student alerted me to the cancellation, and wasn’t simply a no-show. Meanwhile it acknowledges my inconvenience in reserving a lesson slot and scheduling my day to include that student. Having a policy like this relieves me of the need to know why they cancelled–could be an illness, car problem, or just not wanting to come–in some of these I’d want to be lenient and in others not, but with this policy it’s fair across the board. They don’t get away with canceling at the last minute for free, but at the same time they don’t pay full price for a lesson they didn’t have. The good will is hard to quantify but is important in a teacher/student relationship. The lesson credit feature in reconciling individual lessons makes this easy to do and to keep track of.

Posted in Using Music Teacher's Helper |