Hello music teachers!
We’re happy to announce several new updates this month, as well as some announcements. Thank you for your great feedback. We get so many comments about how much you love the site and we’re glad that you do. Here are the latest updates to Music Teacher’s Helper in October.
New Features
- Birthday Greetings! MTH can now automatically e-mail your students a birthday greeting. Enable the option in Home -> Preferences and customize your birthday greeting under Home -> Email Templates.
- The Student Registration Form now allows you to choose which fields are “Required”.
- Parents and adult students now see the Amount Due on their home page. The amount pulls from the Student Account Summary Report.
- You can now see a history of your payments to Music Teacher’s Helper from the “My Account” page. (Just click “Payment History” in the sidebar.)
- Students can now change their username and password when they login, and parents can change their students’ logins as well.
New Bug Fixes
- Fixed an Internet Explorer bug that didn’t allow students to download some files from the File Area. Now works in all browsers.
- Manage Student Logins page will now only reset the student’s username if they don’t already have a username.
- Fixed bug not allowing files over 10MB to be uploaded to the File Area.
- Reconcile All page no longer shows an amount for flat fee students, since “flat fee” lessons aren’t charged individually.
- Fixed e-mail template double spacing issues.
- Fixed bug with changing the day of the week for repeating events. Note that it will still delete any future events in the series
- Birthdays before 1970 now show correctly on home page.
For those teachers paying by check, we also announced this month that Music Teacher’s Helper will no longer accept check payments after Dec 31, 2009. We apologize for the inconvenience, but it no longer makes sense for us to do this, as less than 1% of our customers were taking advantage of that option.
Also, just so you know, we are working on a new graphics design for the main Music Teacher’s Helper website, as well as the “logged in” area. We want to make the user-interface more consistent, more intuitive, more simple, and more beautiful. We’ll be fixing a number of little annoyances during this process as well, so stay tuned for some great improvements within the next month or two!
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.
by Natalie Wickham — Wed Oct 28, 2009 @ 5:10 pm
by Jean Kroll — Mon Nov 2, 2009 @ 11:17 am
by Dorothy Smith — Mon Nov 2, 2009 @ 7:25 pm
@Dorothy - We'll add the option for a surcharge to our features list to consider in the future. Thanks for your suggestion.
by Brandon Pearce — Tue Nov 3, 2009 @ 4:39 pm