This week we’ve made a slew usability improvements to My Music Staff, along with a number of smaller changes. Here’s the run down:

Calendar Improvements

• The calendar now displays the attendance status as a green check-mark (or red “X”) on a white background for better visibility.
• From the calendar it’s now possible to delete ANY event, even if the attendance has already been taken. In the past My Music Staff would not allow you to delete events with the attendance assigned because it can affect student billing. After reviewing this, we think it caused more confusion than it saved, so now any event can be deleted.
• The calendar pop-ups now only close if you click outside the pop-up area, or on the “X” in the top right hand corner. This is to improve usability on mobile devices; if you try to click the “Edit” or “Delete” buttons and the click doesn’t register, the pop-up won’t close on you accidentally any more.

Invoicing Improvements

• On the invoices list, we’ve changed the “Emailed” column to “Status” and it now includes whether or not the invoice has been paid and if a reminder email has been sent. (More on this below.)
• My Music Staff will now detect if an invoice has been paid based on the payments received from a family and the amount due on the invoice. You don’t need to explicitly mark the invoice as paid. As soon as you have payments from a family that meet or exceed the amount due, My Music Staff will consider the invoice paid.
• We’ve added the ability to send invoice reminders. When you click the Email Invoice button there is a new option to send either an original invoice email or a reminder email. When a reminder email is sent the original invoice is attached and My Music Staff will record that a reminder has been sent.
• If you issue a student a cash refund, it will now show up on the invoice as a negative payment. This makes it read a little bit easier.
• When an invoice is created, if the family has a credit, the Amount Due column will now display $0 instead of a negative value.

Multi-Teacher Studio Changes

• A teacher can now be assigned to be CCed on any lesson cancellation emails. This option is helpful if you have an administrator who should be notified anytime a lesson is cancelled through the student portal, regardless of which teacher it’s for.
• Teachers who are non-admins can now be assigned additional privileges, such as managing other teacher schedules, editing the website, etc. This provides the flexibility to provide individual accounts with certain roles. For example, now your “web guy” can be given access to only edit the website.

Other Changes

• Member sites hosted by My Music Staff can now work if you include a “www” prefix on the hostname. So both “example.mymusicstaff.com” and “www.example.mymusicstaff.com” will take your students to your site.
• We’ve updated the email templates:
  • There is a new Invoice Reminder template
  • The Invoice (and Invoice Reminder) templates now include a due-date placeholder and amount-due placeholder.
  • The Login Email template now displays the actual login URL that will be sent when you preview the email
• Inactive families are no longer displayed in the family “Account Summary” drop-down list.
• The time-picker drop-down now displays correctly on older devices running iOS6.
• We added the missing “Note” field to the Mileage and Teacher Summary reports.
• We’ve improved the way studio emails are sent so that attachments are handled more efficiently. This should dramatically improve the speed that bulk emails are sent.