Here we are again with another month of updates and improvements to make your life easier. We have received so many great requests for new features and improvements, and many of them will take several weeks or months to complete. But we want to thank you for your great feedback. We know you love the site and appreciate hearing from you. At the bottom of this post, I’ve listed the top 5 most commonly requested features so you can see what is in the works.
But first, here is a list of the updates we have made in the last 30 days:
- You can now pay for your MTH Subscription with a credit card directly through our website, without having to go through Paypal. You can still pay by check or money order, or with your bank account by using Paypal. For now, customers outside the United States must use Paypal. Please don’t confuse this with the option to receive payments from your students, which has not changed in that you use your Paypal Business or Premier account to receive on-line or automated payments from your students.
- We have made it easier to upgrade, downgrade, sign up, and cancel your subscription from the “My Account” page after you login. You can now login and access this page even if your account has expired. Note that this page was not working properly in Internet Explorer 7 for a few days, but has now been fixed.
- When exporting students to Excel, the report now also includes the secondary phone number
- Fixed a bug when saving contact information, where it would add a slash before an apostrophe
- On the Repertoire Tracker, when showing the list of pieces for a student, it now shows “Duration” in the list, so you can see it without clicking for more details.
- When you email the the Student Account Summary report to your students, it will now address the email using the parent or student’s name, and will show as coming from your studio with the your email address as the reply-to address.
- Success, warning, and error messages are now indicated graphically with a checkmark, exclamation point, and red x, respectively
What’s Up Next?
We get so many feature requests at Music Teacher’s Helper, that it’s impossible for us to implement everything right away. There are many small, useful items or bug fixes like some of the ones above that will be completed each month, regardless of how many people request it. But here are the top 5 “bigger” feature requests that we are considering adding next. Please give us your feedback on what you’d like to see.
- Practice charts for students - Allow students to log their practice time. See charts and reports showing how much each student is practicing, and when.
- Printable Contact List - You can already export all your student and parent information to Excel from the Student List, but this would allow you to choose with fields you wanted to show in the report, and be able to print the list right from the website.
- Import Data - Be able to import student and payment information from other programs or a spreadsheet to save on data entry
- Calendar Sync - Sync the calendar with Outlook, iCal, or other 3rd party calendars. Or at least be able to export and import some of the data from them (such as date, time, and title).
- To-Do List - Be able to create “to-do” items or “tasks” to complete in your studio. Prioritize them, and mark them as “completed” when finished.
Which of these would be most useful to you in your studio? Or is there something else you’d like to add to the list?
by Linda Pitcher — Wed May 14, 2008 @ 3:33 pm
by Chris — Wed May 14, 2008 @ 5:16 pm
by Amy Gould — Wed May 14, 2008 @ 5:32 pm
by Tiffanie Scarborough — Wed May 14, 2008 @ 8:46 pm
First, let me say that I have found your service to be a wonderful asset in managing my studio. This may be a little too complicated to ask but I'd love to have the ability to make a repertoire library list of my music. I have an extensive collection and I would like to be able to list the song titles in each book, then cross reference those titles as they appear in other books. Is this something that you might be able to add to your services?
Thank you so much.
by Peggy Schaaf — Thu May 15, 2008 @ 3:35 pm
by Genny Rafferty — Fri May 16, 2008 @ 3:00 pm
@Peggy: Yes, having a place to store a list of all the music and books you have in your studio that you want to lend out is something we can do, and has also been requested quite a bit. It's a great idea.
@Amy: Good suggestion. In the mean time, check out Speed Typing - it's lets you type things you find yourself typing over and over again, in just a few keystrokes. Saves a lot of time.
@Linda: Yes, the import feature would most likely allow you to import payment or expense information from a program like Quicken. Although we will probably start with a student import functionality, to make it easier to get all of your students into the system.
by Brandon Pearce (Support) — Fri May 16, 2008 @ 4:26 pm
by Chris Foley — Sat May 17, 2008 @ 6:23 am
by Brandon Pearce — Tue May 27, 2008 @ 10:59 am