My Music Staff Reviews

How can I possibly choose just one thing? Before My Music Staff, keeping track of missed lessons was next to impossible. I had separate notebooks and online files and word docs for attendance, lesson notes, expenses, payments for books and payments for lessons - now it's all together - neat and tidy, organised and at my fingertips (and my teachers') at the studio, at home and on the go! And that's just the beginning...

I do wish My Music Staff was setup to take Electronic Funds Transfers in Canada - as that is a new form of payment I am implementing in my school. I also would like to be able to add my business logo as a header for emails with an automatic signature. I realise I can use placeholders to do this job but it is a little laborious when you're in a rush.

I love the fact that my studio found this software. I have been given the responsibility of being the studio manager for a piano studio in California. I love the calendar feature where you can filter different teachers, studios or student lists. My organization runs three studios, one in California and two on the East coast. I love the ability of emailing straight from the application. It allows me to keep in touch with all students, parents and teachers at any time.

Sometimes, the technology does get hard sometimes and the scheduling portion can have glitches and put scheduling in the wrong place. Sometimes I have trouble organizing with the app. There are issues with scheduling conflicts at the studio when the times don’t overlap. That could stand to have some updating.

Scheduling and sending out invoices are never difficult and the organization of it all works fantastically.

I wish there were a few more options of things that I could do using the website builder, having few more customization options, but it certainly does work as a little better than just a plain placeholder website. Setting up the necessities for the website (showing studio address with a map, student/parent portal, interest forms, etc.) is very easy, but would like to see some more advanced options when it comes to the way text interacts with the page or how some pictures interact on a certain webpage.

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)

My Music Staff saves me SO much time! Automated billing and late payment reminders means I receive an income on time (and saves me hours each month when I used to manually create invoices for every student, sometimes late!), plus the central storage of notes means I don't have to rely on students bringing their music diaries along, which more often than not were forgotten at home.

Some aspects of the billing are fiddly and took a lot of trial and error to work out, such as trying to invoice for lesson books separately to lessons and not have the invoice coming out as already being paid when it wasn't.

There are quite a few things I like about MMS. The first is communication with my students. Being able to create lesson notes each week, schedule lessons on the calendar and do invoicing through the platform helps me to keep things organised. I also I like that it allows me to invoice my students and keep track of their payments easily. The library is very helpful. Now I don't lose things I loan out anymore and students (I believe) are notified when they have something that need to be returned.

I am not very happy with my website and wish there was more support on how to do this well. Being a sole proprietor I cannot afford to hire someone to do this and it isn't very intuitive (although better than many others I looked at, especially when you consider what you get with the package).

More videos that give direction, suggest and examples of this would be helpful. Maybe reach out to some of the teacher who have created exception sites and ask them to share their secrets. We're teachers, we can't help ourselves. : )

It is a little thing, however; buttons for social media (like Facebook, Instagram Linkedin, etc) would be really nice on the site as well.

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.

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.

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).

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.

My Music Staff is intuitive and easy to use. I came over from a competitor's software, and the difference is night and day. I was constantly encountering glitches and needing support with the other product, but with My Music Staff I have needed support only one time in almost a year. Customer service was incredibly responsive, friendly, and resolved my issue right away. The interface and functionality are very smooth with My Music Staff. I highly recommend this software to anyone who teaches music, regardless of the size of your studio. My Music Staff will streamline your processes and make your life so much easier!

At first I was disappointed that they don't have a dedicated app. But the mobile optimized (responsive design) website works extremely well on my Android phone, and since I am already familiar with the website it is very easy to navigate and syncs seamlessly. So I really can't point to any cons; my experience has been entirely positive so far.

I was using an Excel spreadsheet before I transitioned to MMS. Of course, that was back when I had less than 100 students. Now with 300 students (and still growing), I would've been lost without this amazing product! I love the automatic invoicing, the ACH capability (this is KEY), the easy-peasy payroll and other reports, but all of these features are just a BONUS on top of the best scheduling system I've ever used. We would be poorly organized, and I'd be out a ton of $$$ hiring staff to take care of all of these facets that MMS offers in ONE platform. Kudos, My Music Staff!

It's been buggy from time to time, but we knew that it was a new product going in. Your staff has been awesome in responding to all service requests.

Easy to set up and use, inexpensive, packed with features, does everything I need to keep my small piano studio running smoothly! I don't use all of the features, but what I do use is fantastic.

Sometimes the space to enter lesson notes freezes up or glitches out. Aside from that, I haven't found anything glaring.