As I wrote above, all the administration and accounting is taken care of, leaving me time to teach more students and more hours. I also appreciate the responsive staff, who have always taken care of any wrinkles in the system or any of the problems I might be having within a very short space of time.

It covers every single part of running a successful teaching practice. It takes care of my scheduling, it streamlines weekly practice assignments, it has a practice log for students, it lists repertoire completed and ongoing with performance dates, it keeps my accounting in order, it makes my income tax return easy, it gives out student tax receipts, it lists student names and addresses so families can contact each other if they need to exchange lessons, it handles lesson cancellation and make-up lesson registration without my having to be involved, it makes emailing notices a piece of cake, and......... I could go on and on. It even has features that I hadn't thought of to make my life as a piano teacher easier and also better organized. Unlike any other online service I've ever used, whenever there's a question or problem, the support staff answer and solve it within 2 or 3 days. They have even redesigned parts of the program when I've raised a problem. The staff at My Music Staff are dedicated to providing us with the best program possible, and review and update features on an ongoing basis. Without My Music Staff, I couldn't possible have taken on the high number of hours of teaching I now enjoy. Time spent on administration is now minimal, and I can spend my time doing what I really love - teaching!

Very small little things that I haven't even bothered to message in. One is that the assignment notes are linked to the name of the event, so when for example Lucy comes for an extra lesson, which is ID'd as an extra lesson, the practice notes will transfer from Lucy's last extra lesson, not from her last regular lesson. Similar thing happens when the student comes for a make up lesson - the notes that come up are from their last make up lesson, which might have been six months ago. I have to go in to the last regular lesson, copy, then back to the make up lesson and paste. Then do the same thing again to transfer the notes from the make up lesson to the NEXT regular lesson. The second thing that comes to mind is that students cannot enter their repertoire themselves, unless it's already on the studio list of repertoire. But I can see that it's probably been changed this way to rule out mistakes the student might make (spelling, opus number, length of piece etc.) I can't think of anything else. Oh yes - I don't really like having to go to Facebook if I have a question. I preferred getting an answer from the support staff, rather than multiple suggestions as to how I might.......... from other users.

Overall I am happy with MMS, specially the invoicing and scheduling features. Customer support is top notch as well and this alone keeps me as a customer.

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 students and parents who are not techy at all really struggle, so these features end up being neglected by them. I really struggle to get any of my studio members to use the practice log and send me videos of their practice because it's just not intuitive or easy to access. The Online Resources is an improvement, but even then the filing system is really clunky. I would love to especially see an update of how files are delivered to students. Right now you can email students to notify them that a video or file has been added to their Online Resources. However, when they click the file link in their email they are taken to their home page and not directly to the file I have shared with them.

My music staff has been ok for us overall. There is a complete lack of data transparency. I’m most upset about their financial approach to the ledger. Support has been nearly useless. Blaming us for their software issues multiple times. My day job is software and systems design. I don’t recommend the software.

It’s easy to use for our teachers and clients. The interface is clean and straight forward. We have almost never had to teach someone the interface.

Where it counts most my music staff fails. The most critical failure is in their financial ledger. It is possible to entirely mess up a client ledger if a lesson is accidentally removed from the calendar. Or if a rate is changed. It’s a rule of finance that you NEVER make changes to a ledger after the end of the month is closed out and an invoice created. My music staff happily goes back in time and makes changes to billing that are nearly impossible to find. Zero stars in that category. Also they’ve made design decisions that are absolutely backwards of what you would expect. Such as needing to edit every single lesson to change the time zone of the studio.

No complaints. I can't imagine using anything else.

Auto invoicing saves me an incalculable amount of time. The schedule layout is intuitive. Pricing is an upfront $10 per month plus $5 per staff member with zero hidden fees or costs.

I've had some very minor quality of life complaints that the support team has added to their list. I'd really like to be able to accept Venmo, which they say is on the horizon. No complaints that would actually make me stop using the program.

My overall experience with MMS has been excellent. It is absolutely essentially to running and maintaining my music school, and has taken away a lot of the stress of scheduling lessons.

The best part of the system, and by far the most used for us is the scheduling. Not only does in make keeping track of our lessons very simple and straightforward, we can very quickly make changes, and even provide our teachers with access so they can stay on top of their schedules. In addition, being able to synchronize the MMS calendars to Google Calendar or Apple Calendars means that I can see an updated schedule on my phone at any moment. I also love their automated payment system which has removed the need to chase down students/parents for tuition payments; everything goes through automatically at the end of the month and we can rely on a consistent stream of income to cover expense and make sure everyone is paid on time.

The only thing I don't like about MMS is the recent GUI change. I'd been using the earlier system for many years and have become quite comfortable with where everything was located. The GUI updated moved some features around which has been somewhat annoying - however I'm gradually getting used to the new layouts.

I've been using MMS for about 6 years and I love seeing it improve over time. My team and myself are always excited for each new update.

MMS is easy to use and easy to integrate into our business protocols. It helps tremendously in keeping us organized and limits the need for tons of paperwork and binders.

Missing Features:- Capability to take swiped card transaction- An easier way to track the difference between make-up lessons that were given due to teacher absence versus student absence in the student profile. Currently all issued make-up credits are grouped together in each student's profile, but since we have our studio policies set to where the students aren't penalized for teacher absences and they have a set limit of make-up credits they can receive for student absences per year it is very hard for us to track.

Overall I am super happy with MyMusicStaff. It is not an expensive tool to use and does everything I wanted it to do and a lot more.

There are a lot of things I love about MyMusicStaff but the one thing that is the best is the ability to automatically bill families in the beginning of the month. It is the greatest thing. I used to do it by remembering myself or the families and I would always feel like I am undercharging or overcharging. But this way I know that it is exactly right. It is so easy to set it and forget it and see that money coming in every month.

Sometimes it seems like the software is a little glitchy. Sometimes it charges twice and you have to do some tricks to get the amount that the family owes you to be correct. When the software works, it really works well but then when it does not it is kind of a pain to get it to be correct.

Overall, I am so glad we made this shift to MMS, we have been able to focus on interacting with our employees more about teaching music and less about the business of it. It has freed our time up to work on growing our business.

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.

I started with this as a single-teacher studio, & now have a management team & 7 teachers. It can do just about everything I can think of to help run my business, manage my teachers, & support my student families.

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.

Absolutely the BEST!

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!

The tech support was great when I was trying to work with my service provider to get my own domain working with MyMusicStaff. When designing my own website with their template, they were also responsive and helpful with complex formatting on some of the pages.

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.

My Music Staff has become indispensible and almost makes life a breeze. Accounts, invoicing and lesson management, notes and plenty more are brilliant. If they can upgrade some and smooth a couple of other areas I'd gladly pay more.

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 more - Setting up lessons is a breeze with conflicts detected automatically (although I wish it picked it up conflicts before pressing save, saving me a click-and-loading cycle) - Love the ability to clone days, run indefinite recurring group lessons with blocked out dates - Account management is brilliant too with a running list of billables and balance at any particular date - Sign up form is embeddable - SMS support mostly great - Notifiations to clients are great

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 a teacher absent is ideal EXCEPT there is no option to SMS all students without activating the feature in each individual profile first. NO SECOND FORM Other than the signup form - you need another service to handle this LEAD MANAGEMENT - No real (even simple) LMS, need another system. hello double handling data - Can classify as "lead" but then they can't book an open lesson. They need to be "Active" to do that, which is confusing because then they're "current students" which they aren't. It would be nice if leads could be added to lessons, then be automatically converted (semi-workaround via Student view sorting) INVOICES - need more templates & automation for outstanding, reminder before due, overdue, overdue 7/14 days - XERO integration please! NO STOCK MANAGEMENT - No stocking books to smooth the process. To sell, a manual entry for every book sold is required. No prefill or stock - I've stopped selling books because of this ATTENDANCE - For group lessons needs optimising too many features has bloated the process & created too many loading panes

I definitely have been having a great experience with My Music Staff. Especially their actual staff members. I spoke with [SENSITIVE CONTENT] recently and she did a phenomenal job at helping me fix my accounting issues and invoicing issues. She was very easy to talk to you she listened to my concerns and questions that I had and took time to teach me how to fix my accounting problems. I had several students accounts that had it inputs put in the wrong way for discounts etc. and she was able to quickly spot what the problems were as well as allow me the time to fix them and explain why not to do what I did before and how to properly and put the information I need to moving forward and why. I told her I think it would be nice if My Music Staff will give her a bonus to make videos on how to create invoices and teaching users how to utilize accounting and how all of the features work together to help balance out the accounting page and create invoices all of the ends and outs! She would be great at that as well!

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.

It's easy and quick to email lesson notes to parents and students. No excuses for not knowing what to practice!

MMS has simplified my admin by a huge amount. There are loads of features that I use daily, and more that I haven't explored yet.

It is only set up for individual, regular students. You can add students to a group, but you can't then give individual feedback (unless things have changed since I last tried to use that). You can't bill anything unless there is a person set up in the system. I provide accompaniment services as well as tuition, but I can't use this system to bill my one off accompaniments; I have to create a profile, then add them to the calendar, and only then can I bill them. I'd like an option to create a charge/invoice without a client being attached to that. I've worked around this by creating a fictional student named "Rehearsal" who gets billed for every accompaniment, and if I need to email an invoice rather than just adding it to my income stream I go in a change the individual email.I'd also like an auto reminder system for overdue invoices so I don't have to go in manually to see who hasn't paid. I do like that there are templates for invoices and reminders.The other feature I'd use every day if it existed would be the ability to create a lesson plan for individual students that they cannot see until I publish it. I lesson plan sometimes several days in advance and like to edit it to become their lesson notes. I can review previous lesson notes but if I edit it it is immediately able to be seen by them.

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 software intuitive to the user experience and thinking through what the most important and valuable aspects for an independent teacher or a teaching studio with multiple teachers are. Every year, I have expanded the way I use the software as there are numerous features I could not implement right away. This past year, we have used the make-up credit feature to allow students to cancel their lessons to receive credit and use the credit to schedule make-up lessons when they see openings created by other cancellations. While my studio does not have a make-up policy on our official policy (no make-up lessons, period), allowing this to happen (without teacher putting effort towards it) has created added value to our offering and a more gracious atmosphere. I have contacted My Music Staff on many occasions with questions and their responses always have been super quick and competent (like they actually heard my question and answered them in the way that was helpful to me). I highly recommend it!

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.

Every aspect of my music teaching life has been made better since I discovered MMS. I hate subscription models but this one is a winner; worth every penny in professionalism, time saving and peace of mind.

I discovered MMS when covid hit. It has been a god send. The monthly fee is more than saved in the time I save and what I offer to my pupils. The calendar means I can check my day at a glance despite several teaching venues which I can colour differently. Billing pupils is so easy and keeping track of their accounts is a doddle as MMS does it all for me. I log notes during the lesson which I send to parents or pupils, or both, at the end of the lesson by clicking a box. When it comes to the end of the tax year, I press a couple of buttons and there is my income and expenditure. I appear more professional to my customers and my working life is more streamlined and efficient.

Very minor gripes like being limited as to the email I can send with an invoice. I like to customise the invoice email based on school or private teaching. Whilst I can do this by changing the invoice or invoice reminder default emails, I can’t use any others so have to change the emails repeatedly by the time I invoice everyone.

I switched to MyMusicStaff two years ago after using another software for several years. I was reluctant to switch everything over, but the other app had become unreliable. So glad I did it! The monthly rate is VERY reasonable and the learning curve easily managed. I do get good help from support and they have helped me work out a few little things that I had hung up on. I could not manage my studio of 29 private piano students without this app!

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.

MMS is a great product. I'm thrilled I found it. It's cheap, easy, visually appealing, and all-in-one program. Couldn't ask for more. Might be interesting to see if a studio sells products if something like that could be incorporated into it as well.

I like that it is an all-in-one product. In my other business, I had to have five different products to manage everything. I also enjoy that you can see the balances owed right on the home screen so that I don't have to go looking for it or forget about it when student shows up.

I wish that when you open to take attendance on a lesson that the notes of the lesson and the attendance/payment were in a horizontal space instead of vertical, so you could see it all at once, then the previous lesson notes could be in a row beneath it. The calendar could resize too to fit the screen so we don't have to scroll through the whole thing. More opportunities to try the features. There are so many features and I have no idea how to use them or even get started. I've tried looking up tutorials, but they're very generic and not sure how to fit them to my studio. It's also hard to get students to practice. On the student side, could there be an opportunity to motivate kids to practice? Like... for every 10 mins they practice they get points and they can build those up at their studio for a prize (presented by the teacher?) Or even do more of a community thing where the whole studio group of students works to get 1 big prize for the studio from MMS?

The number of families now comfortable with My music staff for information and payment has increased exponentially saving us time and money. Our families are impressed by the professional software, and I love the transparency and organization we offer to clients and employees about how the business runs.

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).

Overall, the price and functionality are right with MMS. I'm happy with my choice and out of all of the software as a services I use in my business, this is the one I'm least likely to switch out of.

Integrating MMS was incredibly easy. There are a few small features they could add to make it even easier but overall it went quickly enough. I love the transparent (and inexpensive) per teacher pricing. Uptime is fantastic; I don't think I've ever experienced the site being down.

MMS is great but not quite mature. I appreciate the really solid uptime but the site can be very slow. As an administrator, I am used to the system and I can generally make it do what I want. My teachers sometimes complain about it (navigating to the contact information for the parents of a child student can be a pain, and has to be explained to them because it's not obvious) but overall they enjoy having student and schedule info at their fingertips. None of them make use of the notes, repertoire, library, etc. so these features don't do much for us though they seem like solid features

My business runs very smoothly and professionally with the use of My Music Staff, I have the control that I need of the studio while giving my instructors the freedom to teach the way they find most effective with the students. Parents enjoy the reminders, automatic invoicing and electronic payment options. My website drives in lots of business and it is created using the templates on My Music Staff. Without this program my studio would never have grown to this point nor would it continue to grow as it is today. I will always recommend and share my love of this program.

As I began taking on more students a couple of years ago and I started to struggle with scheduling and and billing, we started looking around and found My Music Staff, it saved my studio. We are now at 32 students and we have 3 instructors, without the ease of My Music Staff I would never be able to schedule and bill families appropriately or keep track of payroll. I love the ease of looking up addresses, families inputting their own information and being able to keep track of assignments within the program. The reminder emails and texts are awesome for busy families and the automatic billing feature is amazing so that I don't have to calculate and send out invoices to families.

Nothing really, some of the setting are buried a little bit, but everything is very logical.

Scheduling with family portal; auto-invoicing and autopay; automated reminders; options for to host with MMS or embed MMS features on your website.

I’ve grown with MMS // I started using it almost right from their beginning. I was looking for something to help manage my growing student list and have stuck with them through some growing pains as they’ve vastly updated over the last 2yr (was on the beta testing team!).

MMS does most of my admin work for me, which allows me to concentrating on teaching — that’s really important to me and I really appreciate it. I also really value how reliable it is. I’ve never lost information and the website has never been down.

MMS is overall very easy to use, has an attractive, well-thought through design, and is very reliable. I use it for registering new students, tracking attendance, billing and receiving payments. The customer service team are responsive, honest, open to suggestions and overall simply very helpful. I use it every day, it is the core software of my business, and it has significantly reduced my admin work.

Just a couple of minor niggles. I’d like the lesson notes to copy through automatically to a student’s next lesson; usually they do this, but they don’t if it’s not a repeating lesson. It’s not a big deal. I don’t love the Milage function, which is a bit unwieldy to use.

I love using My Music Staff for my music education company. I cannot imagine being successful at my job without it.

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.