My Music Staff Features

I like the amount of customisation. The calendar Sync. The website functionality and the Families & Invoicing section.

It is not user friendly for the public. It is far too complicated for my business. For example if someone wants to sign up for a course they have to go through Student Portals. Log In. Emails. Setting it up. Saving it to the Homepage. Then they cant pay immediately they have to wait for an invoice and then log in again and finally enter their bank details. I am im discussions of discontinuing with this software. While it has great benefits for Admin it really is too complicated for the public and inviting new customers in. Therefore it is not for us in the long term.

It's (almost) everything in one program. Calendar/scheduling, student management, teacher payroll, business expenses tracking, & even student logins for their accounts & calendars. Reliable, easy to learn. It's fantastic.

I have a hard time coming up with a valid complaint about this program. My only hope is that we can receive communications through the platform in the future, so we don't need phones & emails outside of MMS.

Manages all aspects of my music school including scheduling and invoicing! I couldn’t carry 50+ students without My Music Staff!

Some things are tricky to find or figure out. But the customer service is so good, it doesn’t take long before my problem is solved!

It really helps me run my business. From collecting waitlist information, scheduling classes, collecting payments, and keeping track of business expenses for tax time, it has been easy to use and helps take a lot of the busy work of running a music school off my plate. I also really like the make-up credit option for my piano students.

It is confusing to start. The learning curve is steep. I also don't like that the website has to be encrypted onto my current website, because my current website is through Canva, which doesn't allow encryption.

For years I kept track of scheduling on one sheet of paper from a weekly calender that I photo-copied and kept in a binder. Used a pencil so I could easily make changes. Attendance and income/expenses separate book. While it does take a little time to enter things manually, everything is streamlined and simpler than other software I have tried. I have looked at a few systems for teachers and this...

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Webpage templates are pretty limited. More options would be fabulous! Text operations seem to be somewhat limited and quirky within the software on my iPad Pro. I rarely use a computer these days so a little more functionality there would be terrific. Line spacing and text options seem to be very limited within the templates and I have been very frustrated with the limitations. I make it work, but more in this area would be better.

First of all, the price is fantastic for a small business - you pay per teacher you're managing and the base subscription price is outstanding! Any equivalent scheduling software charges as though you are a large company and was many times the price for just me and my partner! The scheduling interface is easy and pretty intuitive, and I love that I can opt to allow people to change their own times...

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1. Most of my students pay on an automated monthly tuition model, and I would love to be able to set the month beginning/end dates for something other than the 1st. (mid month starts, 2nd pay period, etc) 2. While it is great to be able to message parents with notes, notifications of uploads, etc, it would be great if there were a way to group all those messages together instead of spamming them the day after the lesson. 3. Sometimes changes I make from my mobile device don't save properly (attendance is bad for this)

Hard to choose! I depend on so many facets of MyMusicStaff every day. Perhaps Scheduling is the best aspect, but Accounting is near the top. The calendar is super easy for ongoing daily lesson scheduling and is accessible to parents for canceling and rescheduling, with no attention from me required. I even schedule available make-up slots and parents make us of them. Accounting is a huge time-saver! Every detail is there and doesn't take much time to comprehend. Ongoing lesson rates, special rates for certain families, automatic or nonautomatic billing, make-up credits--they really know what a music teacher needs!

Not much of a minus, but I'd like a little more flexibility with attendance reports. But I have worked out a way to get what I need.

Hey Cynthia! Thank you for trusting your business to My Music Staff. We're happy that you decided to make the switch. The flexibility you were hoping to add to the reporting had to do with knowing the number of lessons a student had in a given period. You can actually already do this by creating a "Lessons Taught" report from the "Studio Reports" menu.

The best features are the automatic invoicing based on the calendar, the reminder texts and emails, the registration form and how I can put it on my website through Weebly, and the student management.

There is no way for two parents to each pay half of a bill for a student. I have worked around this by making a second "student" for the second parent to pay for. I also don't like how the invoices are specific enough and will just say "balance forward" instead of what the charge was. I wish I could customize the left sidebar to take out the features I don't use.

Easy to use, works well with multiple users, gives the students and families online access to their account, provides an auto-pay option, manages billing easily, great customer service - so much more I could add.

Wish the online registration widget could be a bit more attractive for new student registrants.

This app is very easy to use. You can sign up and then begin setting your studio up immediately. I teach out of my home and typically have 25-35 students each year. I was able to add all of my student and family accounts and set-up my schedule very quickly. The best thing about this package is what it has done for my invoicing process. It has cut down 75% of my work time for processing invoicing,...

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One of my studio parents also does administrative work for me. She has two separate accounts, her admin account to do business and her personal account for her children's lessons. It would be nice if there was a way to compact that into one account for her.

Intelligent thinking has gone into this platfrom - invoicing + payment reminders, calandar managment, waitlist management, CRM for students and families, integrates with credit card payments if you want to do this, lending library (which you can set a date for return and that goes out with the reminder to the student/parent). Love the automation with emailing invoices - so easy!So well priced!

Future development wishlist possibility - would love to integrate with Rockoutloudlive for online lessons if possible and with MYOB.

Before, I was planning everything through Google Calendar which was fine with a small studio. As I grew, I needed to juggle more students and this was a shift necessary to look more professional. I felt so organized once moving to MMS. I love there is a login system for the parents to use, whenever they do use it, which makes me seem professional. My most used features are student management, calendar, attendance, and invoicing.

A direct way for parents to register for specific events. I don't like needing to direct them to login, go to calendar, find the event, then click to register. Seems too much work for them and they'll never do it.

Where to start? I think the Number 1 reason I love MMS is because of its features. They have truly thought of everything a teacher would need to track schedule and communicate with their students. Anything I personally wanted to try or change in regards to my lessons that I teach was somehow already available for me to utilize. Its as if music teachers themselves designed it. Next is the ease of...

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Nothing. Truly. I even expected a small learning curve and even that didn't happen as I was able to use this product efficiently from day one.

The schedule is easy to set up and manage. Tracking attendance and sending lesson notes is straightforward and easy. Communicating with families is also easy. Invoicing is straightforward, but doesn't allow me to set up a percentage per student for the ach fees I have to charge for those students whose lessons are paid for under a state education program.

Bank fees for those students who pay online are easy. Other fees, especially those that are percentages of the invoice are not accommodated, subsequently, I literally have to manual create invoices for 85% of my students every month.

I have been using MMS since 2020 when my whole studio went online. Their customer support is fantastic and their team is always available to talk over the phone. Emails are responded to quickly and they always have a solution for my issues.My favorite feature is the auto-invoicing and auto-payment. The website has saved me countless hours of invoice logging, tracking down payments, and scheduling since I can automate everything.I schedule all my lessons through MMS and It's nice that my students can launch their Zoom lesson right from the portal.

I really want to make MMS my ultimate hub for my students to access all their materials and video lessons, as well as send me videos and track their practice. However, I think this is where MMS is really lacking. The last couple of updates have been great but the system still feels like it is stuck in the early 2000's. I'm fairly techy so I haven't had a problem figuring out how to navigate MMS, but...

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Ease of set it and forget it weekly lesson management and invoicing for clients.Calendar is user friendly

Not responsive to feedback, input. No feed or alert for user changes in any way makes it extremely difficult to track if a teacher makes a change or someone has changed something that will impact your client's billing.The adjustments they do make seem to glitch the system at times.

Hi Jill, we're sorry to hear you're feeling that way but appreciate you taking the time to share your feedback to help us improve! Over the past few years we've actually been rebuilding the entire platform on upgraded technology to address concerns like loading speed and modernize the layout. It's still being rolled out to our existing members, but if you don't see the banner on your homepage to upgrade...

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MMS promises to handle all of your music studio needs, from scheduling to billing to communications, and indeed, it has modules for all of those plus repertory records, lending library management, downloadable/playable resources, and even mileage. So if you want software that LOOKS like it does everything, you've found it!

None of these modules seem actually to have been tested by actual music teachers. Scheduling is ridiculously complicated, especially when students want to cancel or reschedule. Billing leads to a minimum of five confused emails from parents each month because of MMS's bizarre policies regarding past-due payments and account balances. Emails cannot be sent to students and parents simultaneously—they're automatically BCC'ed, leading to confusing message threads and miscommunications. Even the lesson notes and blog features are poorly handled—they don't auto-save, so an accidental tab closure can lead to the loss of an entire lesson's worth of notes, and formatting is bizarrely non-standard. (Don't even think about cutting and pasting.)

It’s really kind of hard to pinpoint what specifically I like because there’s a lot of features that I do like such as being able to schedule, pull reports, upload videos for our students, upload link sent of the learning material for our students, payroll etc

I don’t like that I’m not able to use PayPal and stripe at the same time to except payments. I do have parents who like to pay through PayPal as well but I have to utilize a different source to receive those payments because only stripe or PayPal can be used one at a time. I wish that it was also a lot easier to understand how to utilize the invoice an account features. I have gotten pretty confused and had to call in and ask questions several times in order to really get the hang of it. It can be a bit confusing without that additional coaching to understand how to bill clients. I’ve had moments where my numbers were off because I gave an additional discount or I build them incorrectly and didn’t understand how I did it or why.

Hi Irma, thanks for a great review! We actually do have a number of tutorial videos already, including ones that go over various parts of invoicing. We also have a Getting Started Guide on our website that goes over how all of the features work together :)

After trying a number of other systems which felt like a real pain, I must say I can't find a system anywhere near as good for even double the price. There's a learning curve but it's really nothing like many others out there. TOP PROS: - Invoice for a period for all students in one hit and then email in one more. - Calendar view is powerful: attendance, great filtering by student/teacher/and many...

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SMS INTEGRATION IS PATCHY - Fantastic for e.g. deleting a day. Except to send SMS messages needs to be activated in each profile manually which is slow - can't be turned on by default either - If the student doesn't have SMS turned on they don't get sent - Deleting lessons obscures the account: there is no longer record of that lesson even if it was previously included on an upfront invoice. - Marking...

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Hey Isaac! So glad to hear you've been enjoying My Music Staff. We've recently added the "¿Trial Student¿ status. A trialing student is functionally the same as an Active student but provides a way to segment your student list so you can easily identify which students haven¿t yet committed to lessons for the long term. You'll want to use this status rather than "Lead". This will allow you to schedule the students on the calendar. Parents and students do need to opt-in to receive SMS messages. This is to help studios comply with SMS marketing laws. This is why it's not enabled by default. We do agree that after receiving permission, you should be able to enable the feature in bulk so we've added this item to our to-do list. Thanks again for the great review!

I like that I don't have to have my home website named something strange like "teacher's helper"--instead I can have my own domain name and a super easy to use website creator (and nice templates to choose from). The "portal" for parents is automatically added to the website. This way, I can use my own domain name in marketing materials. I have been in business for 20 years and grew exhausted checking out different software packages, none of which were specifically for the music teaching business. As for functionality, I like the bulk attendance.

Most of it is great. Would like to see continued addition of reports, or the ability to select more options for report content. More uploads--for example, when I put together my schedule for a new semester, it's time consuming to add each lesson in one by one. Being able to type everything in on a spreadsheet and upload it would be great. I find it confusing the way the lesson rates and duration and categories work together. Perhaps this could be simplified somehow--I have to remember which screens to go in to change the students time and category. It gets more confusing when you have siblings at different rates, or when you are discounting lessons for other reasons.

Hey Sheila! Thanks for taking the time to provide just fantastic feedback :) Our development is community driven. We depend on the awesome suggestions and feedback that we receive from our members. If there's something more you'd like to see in the reporting, let us know! You can always send your feedback and suggestions to support@mymusicstaff.com

I have used My Music Staff for several years (four, I think). Implementing this software has revolutionized my work flow in big ways. I can manage multiple calendars, create invoices, and receive payments in simple steps. I have used two other studio management softwares and by far, I love the ease of My Music Staff the best. The developing team at My Music Staff has done a great job of making this...

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There are a few more advanced features I would love, such as allowing different policies for different kinds of events. But this is a very minor issue that I don't feel I'm entitle to for the money I pay to use this software.

We have cut our time spent tracking attendance and therefore invoicing by 75% It’s really easy to use and customer service has been impeccable. They are quick to respond and helpful when they do. Plus there is a Facebook group available for community - other users of MMS where often answers are found with a quick search in the group

I do wish there was an app currently available, but the website functions great on my mobile device in the meantime.

It has features that I didn’t realise I would need. It’s the best blends of resources for music teachers and management software.

The experience on phones feels clunky and difficult to navigate. All my staff use it on their phones and would prefer an app that is more condensed for just their day of teaching.

Very user friendly for both parents and employees (we are a multi teacher school) Love how responsive the MMS team is, both with constant updates to the program (and often based on client requests) to attentive support when there are issues. Price point can't compare to some of the alternatives. I love that it is based on the number of teachers, so doesn't penalize us for getting more students (ie. being a successful business!) like a per/student rate.

It has a lot of functionality with reports that is not so intuitive. Accessing the data in ways that may be useful to a business can often mean trying lots of different reports and tweaking the settings slightly to get the right report. We accept payments in studio via Payd and have to enter these manually into MMS. Would love some way to connect these, or to be able to accept canadian debit cards (require chip readers).

Hey Amy! We're all ears :) You can send your suggestions and feedback to the team at support@mymusicstaff.com. We'd really like to hear more from you about how we can improve the reporting for your studio. Glad to hear you've been loving My Music Staff!