The most outstanding thing about The Studio Director is their customer service. They are thorough, polite, helpful, and knowledgable. I get an email response typically within just a few minutes of asking my questions and the response includes step by step instructions on how to proceed. Their advice is invaluable.

Being a performing arts studio that offers both group classes and private lessons, my main complaint would be that I have to create 2 different seasons for both. Because of this, I have to do a little extra work when I want to send a group email or offer discounts to students who take classes in both seasons.

I have worked in many corporate databases, and I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised when I started using The Studio Director. The dance studio I work for had already been using it for quite a few years when I became the studio manager. I was able to figure almost all of our daily functions in less than two days! The software is user-friendly, dynamic, and has great technical support! The staff are always friendly and prompt and have some kind of solution for most of our questions.

This software is dynamic! It lets us manager our studio store items and sales, our dance classes, seasons, and performances, our online client portal, our families, students, and communication methods - all in one program!

Setting up seasons can be a little complicated, depending on the various types of class set-ups we may want to offer - in the summer we have multiple 1-week camps, a 7-week session, grouped dance intensives, etc., and all require some real thought to make sure they are set-up correctly for the right dates, charges, and so they make sense to the client in their online registration portal. In addition, there is no good way to pick and choose clients to email out of a group - you can only email the whole group or an individual family, unless you can figure out which clients are which by their email address and delete them individually from the "to" line - which is near impossible!

It has features that many softwares dont have, like organizing shows and events, but those features are hard to use, so even though they are there, our club makes our own spreadsheets. Costumer support is great and fast, but its tedious to call in with every question, so mostly we skip over things we dont understand.

awkward formatting, some features are not easy to use, or figure out. For example, I would love to be able to use the attendance sheets for each child. It would be awesome to be able to click on a child, and then see a LIST of classes they have missed, rather than have to scroll through each month. Then, would be great if we could click on that missed class, and say "schedule a makeup class for this missed class." It is not easy or straight forward to see which missed classes have been made up.

It was the key to our growth from 1,200 to 4,500 +/-.

Very fast. Accessible by customers on PC or phone via app. Super search capability. Full accounting capability -- can support GAAP, tax, and custom reporting. Fits with QuickBooks. Support extremely responsive and new features appear every two or three months. Has many features competing programs don't have including elaborate skill tracking, inventory and event support. Price capped even with thousands of students in the system. Usage is highly customizable to speed registration work. Exhaustive standard reporting plus support can create custom reports. Most information can be exported to Excel. Can integrate with your web site, too, to show what's available. Useful for every member of the company and customers.

Can't consolidate accounts over several sites, so customers can end up enrolled in two or three places. Not as cheap as entry-level systems; this is the high end product for knowledgeable users. Doesn't allow API access to your data for customer reporting.

The program is user friendly, and keeps us organized. I am so thankful for Studio Director. I mostly use and appreciate the following: the attendance, pro-rating abilities, cancelling classes, keeping track of substitutes, being able to send quick emails is easy, keeping track of who owes, who is in the performances, making charges for fundraisers, late fees is simple, the list goes on.

I can't print labels by class 1 per family only with students name it it. or sort labels by class to help organize information to be passed out in class. Sometimes the reports are tricky.