My Music Staff Features

Through My Music Staff, I have been able to manage a non-profit professional music organization that houses 10 choral ensembles, 8 group classes, full musical theater workshops, half a dozen teachers and hundreds of students of all ages in one seamless portal. The ease of media streaming, billing, and schedule management through the "Portal" has helped elevate our communication among our members.

While groups are quite useful and automatically updated in the media area, it would be useful for the groups to update in the calendar when a new member registers (or at least to have the ability to turn on that feature)

I have tried many types of music studio management software; online, offline, big, little and in-between. My Music Staff is the best, hands down. The price is extremely reasonable, with no increases for larger studios. I can communicate with my students and parents easily, and put together invoices with just a few clicks. I find it intuitive, and their customer support is very helpful and responsive. I can access it on multiple devices, so my students' needs are taken care of no matter where I am. I recommend it to all music studios, large and small.

I wish there were more default choices, and I would like to see it a bit easier to create invoices for semester/yearly based tuition.

I like the look and feel of it - it is modern and sleek unlike other software I have tried. It is easy to use and customize. The features are great and it saves on time and money. My customers can cancel and reschedule their own lessons which is a lifesaver. I can keep on top of invoicing, receipts and expenses. I can keep a record of book lending and can share files easily with customers as individuals or in groups. At the moment I am expanding my business and I would not even be able to consider this without My Music Staff.

It doesn't have an android app - which I think customers would use more as it would be quicker than on the web, plus push notifications would be really useful for being reliable and on time for me and for my customers. I hope they consider implementing it, although I do find the mobile site incredibly good.

Everything organized! I have a lot of downloads and this has been a big plus for me and my studio community. And Can I Just Tell You That Collecting Payment IS Accomplished Almost By Magic! I think this is my biggest take away from this program. My bookkeeping headaches are no more!

No ability to text communique. I would love to have text option in a dropdown menu to easily text multiple families at once.

Hey Barbara! Glad to hear we could help make collecting payment easy and keep things organized! You can actually text your students and parents. Reach out to support@mymusicstaff.com and we can show you how :)

I haven't used the software for very long, but I love the Customer Service. I often need help with learning different aspects of the software I haven't used before. When I call, they answer the phone almost immediately and I don't feel rushed as we work together to find a solution. The person helping me has always been very knowledgeable and extremely patient and kind. It's so refreshing to get help from a human who speaks English and not trying to text or message a computer to find my solution. I highly recommend this service.

The billing has been confusing. I'm still trying to figure out the best way to handle it, but that's the main reason I wanted to use the software. I'm sure I will figure it out and make my business much easier to handle.

It makes scheduling and keeping track of payments a breeze. Everything is all in one place and generating reports is also simple. For the most part, it does more than I had expected/hoped.

For people who prefer having support via the phone, this is not a good option. There are many times that I wish I could just dial a number to get an answer. That being said, they respond quickly via email. There is also a learning curve with this software that might be a barrier to some.

Hi Anamarie. Thank you for the lovely review. I do just want to point out that we do have phone support as well! You can reach our team toll-free at 1-888-732-6134 :)

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 :)

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.

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!

As a piano teacher, My Music Staff saves me countless hours. I used to try to stay organized by myself! I didn't send reminders for weekly appointments and as a result, I often had no-shows. I also didn't have a great system of tracking payments. Now, My Music Staff keeps track of my calendar, clients and their information, invoices, payments, late fees, and annual tax information. At the end of the year, I can simply click a button and see how much money I have earned. It also tells me how much money I have spent on piano books and fees. It sends reminders through email, text or both to my clients. I can also keep a running database for all of my students and have a list of former students. It is essential for any kind of music teacher!

I don't love paying $12.95 per month for this software. It is worth it so I have been a customer for years. At first, it was difficult to set up the automatic invoices and autopay for interested clients. I did need to contact their customer service and they were extremely helpful.

I was able to reduce 3 platforms into one and cover attendance, email, and student content management

sometimes it's clunky, the attendance function can be unnecessarily long because you have to click multiple times instead of having a checkbox. The embeded website form isn't trackable by google analitics

The software was well explained and it was easy to try the basics out from the beginning. It is best to explore a little at a time initially, and gradually knowledge of optimising your system will build up, organising timetable/billing/etc concerts and parents are welcome. It is clear that help is easily at hand if you need assistance with questions.

I have run a website before and I was looking forward to doing it again with MMS. I’m still learning how to use all things available on MMS……and I have had some snags setting up parental access ..however I haven’t tried out all the ‘help’ yet. I have learnt to love the ‘video music”.. just

I LOVE the ease and simplicity of My Music Staff. I love how customizable it is and that I can adjust it to meet all my needs as a teacher. My favorite thing about it is that it has created so much freedom and peace in my life because of how smoothly it keeps track of all my scheduling, student lists, and payments — hello to a super easy, stress-free admin-task solution!

I don’t think I have any cons. My Music Staff has been overwhelmingly worth it to me and has been delightfully helpful and wonderful every step of the way!

automatic billing feature!!!!! this saves me countless hours and headache each month when billing time comes around plus it guarantees that I will get paid on time

n/a They are constantly improving the program and this program meets all of my business needs. Only one suggestion would be to create a way to list waiting list and leads by the date they inquired or were added to the wait list. That way when a student drops I can easily locate students in the order of their inquiry or in the order of the wait list

Hey Sharon! You can actually add a date for your waiting list and lead list. Once the dates are added you can sort them by date added. Reach out to support@mymusicstaff.com and we'll help you get that setup.

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.)

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)

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.