We at Studio Helper are actively campaigning for your ideas on ways to increase students in your studio. With summer around the corner, and a suffering economy, we all need to be proactive in working together on this project. We look forward to your comments and success stories, and will post your comments, stories and suggestions on the Studio Helper Facebook and Twitter page as well.

Below is a new feature and a bug fix in April, 2012:

• New Feature: Added Filipino Peso (PHP) as an option in the currency list.
• BugFix: Some recently created invoices were missing the “Balance Due” amount. This is now fixed.

We at Studio Helper are working hard to bring you new improvements and make Studio Helper even better, based on the feedback we receive from you. Be sure and go to Uservoice and vote on Hot Ideas that  members have suggested.

• On People > Families, deleting a family did not delete the entire family. This is now fixed.
• When a new expense is added and the vendor is new, an error message appeared saying you must choose a vendor. This is now fixed.
• Parent and students did not receive any email confirmation when they registered online. This is now fixed.
• The mini calendar on the calendar’s sidebar did not work for parents. This is now fixed.
• On the create invoice page when automatic billing is used. The Lesson details were not sorted by date. This is now fixed.
• Lessons Taught report did not display the lesson notes. This is now fixed.

At Studio Helper, we’re always working hard to bring you new improvements and make our program even better, based on the feedback we receive from our customers. Be sure and go to Uservoice and vote on Hot Ideas that Studio Helper Members have suggested. We are also working on the Recurring Billing Feature.

Below is a list of the new features we released in February, 2012.

New Features

• You can now include the lesson costs in the Lessons Taught report. Enable the ‘Show Lesson Cost’ checkbox to make it appear.
• New Feature: You may now delete expense categories. Go to Money > Expenses > Expense Categories to clean up old records.

Bug Fixes

• Students with absent lessons were not charged automatically when creating a new invoice. This is now fixed.
• Sometimes error messages appeared on the pdf of the billing statement. This is now fixed.
• Quickbooks was not importing invoices correctly. This is now fixed.
• Outstanding Invoices list on the profile’s money tab was missing when the primary billing parent is logged in. This is now fixed.
• Permission is denied error occurred when a teacher or staff tried to save in Teacher Availability tab. This is now fixed.
• Recurring expense amount rounded off automatically after saving. This is now fixed.
• Lending Library’s navigation links did not work when returned items are viewed. This is now fixed.
• Error messages appeared when an expense without vendor is saved. This is now fixed.

We hope your year is off to a great start. Here is the list of new features and bug fixes we released in January.

New Features

• On Money > Statements, we added the link “Click here to pay for invoice <invoice number>”
• We added UAE Dirhams (AED) to the list of currencies.
• Added a total sum at the bottom of the Family Accounts report.

Bug Fixes

• Teacher view in calendar was broken in Google Chrome. This is now fixed.
• Event Locations page only displayed 20 entries with no option to go to next page. The list wasn’t sorted either. This is now fixed.
• When creating an invoice, automatic billing from calendar option was taking to long to load. This is now fixed.
• Video tutorials did not work on Internet Explorer. This is now fixed.
• When creating new Invoices, the package select pull down menu did not work in Safari. This is now fixed.
• Details were missing when importing invoices in Quickbooks. This is now fixed.
• Permission denied appeared when a Teacher tried to create an Event Category even if permissions are correct. This is now fixed. Please re-save your permissions to reset.
• On the student cancellation page, the “Never mind” button did not work. This is now fixed.
• On the Location view of the calendar, lessons did not appear if they were at the same time and location. This is now fixed.
• When exporting contact lists, the notes section did not appear for teachers and parents. This is now fixed.

Here is the list of updates we launched in December, 2011. We’re monitoring the votes on our feedback system and are looking into adding those with the most votes soon. If you haven’t voted the features you’d like to see implemented into Studio Helper, please do so now.

• The system now prevents duplicate invoices when a recurring invoice start date is later than the current date.
• We added Dominican Pesos to the currency list.
• On your studio website login form, students who typed incorrect passwords got redirected to the main Studio Helper Login page rather than your website. This is now fixed.
• The button “Save and add another” on the Receive Payment page did not work. This is now fixed.
• On the Permissions page, the checkbox always stayed checked on the question “Who should be able to delete students.” This now fixed.
• On the Invoice List, if sorted by Client, the alphabetical order was broken whenever an invoice was deleted. This is now fixed.

The year is almost over, and we’re continuing make Studio Helper even better. Your feedback directly influences the changes we make, so remember to vote on which features you’d like to see on our Feature Request page.

Here is a list of the updates we launched in November, 2011. We have some other larger items under the hood that we’re working on, too, and we’ll keep you posted as we get closer to launching. Thanks for using Studio Helper.

• Email reminders were sent by the old studio email address even when it was recently changed. This is now fixed.
• On the Register for this Event, when the event has registration fee, the student’s checkbox was missing. This is now fixed.
• On the Birthday Report page a heading “Birthdays between Nov 1, 2008 – Nov 30, 2008″ was shown. This is now fixed.
• The mini calendar was not working on student accounts. This is now fixed.
• On the settings page, if the time format of military was selected, the calendar was still showing non-military. This is now fixed.

Studio Helper now allows you to do this through a calendar feed. For instructions on syncing your Studio Helper calendar with different calendar programs, click the Calendar menu, then click the Feed icon in the sidebar. We hope you enjoy this new feature.

Recent features and updates

• The Studio Helper calendar is now running up to 6 times faster on some studios.
• Added Singapore Dollar (SGD) and Norwegian Krone (NOK) to the currency list.
• Added calendar feeds for iCal format. Go to Calendar then click the ‘Calendar Feed’ link on the sidebar for instructions.
• Note: To be able to sync faster, we’ve changed the calendar feed to only show 2 months from the past and 6 months to the future.
• Changed vertical links to horizontal icons in the calendar sidebar to give more room for teacher, category, and location filter lists.

Recent Bug Fixes

• When a student is removed from the attendance of a series, it didn’t affect the attendance of future events. We’ve fixed this.
• The mini calendar on the right side did not appear properly on student accounts. This is now fixed.
• Calendar Feed displayed all studio events on teacher’s account. We’ve fixed this and it now only shows their own lessons.
• On rare occasions, the calendar event popup didn’t appear when clicked. This is now fixed.
• Video tutorials were not working when using Google Chrome. This is now fixed.

At Studio Helper we are continuing to work hard making improvements to the software and fixing any issues that arise. We’ve been getting more votes on the ideas listed on our feedback site, and if you have an idea for a new feature or a way we can improve Studio Helper, please submit your idea and vote on it. This will help us know which features are most important to you, and which we should focus on first.

In the mean time, here are the updates we made in September. Remember that we also post these updates live on our Twitter and Facebook pages, if you’d like to stay aware of the new improvements as they happen.

• Some students were randomly being removed as participants in an event. This bug has now been fixed!
• This month, we moved Studio Helper to a new server, and have made numerous speed optimizations. As a result, many pages of the site are now running several times faster than before.
• Some studios were having trouble accessing the “Receive Payment” page. This has now been fixed.
• An error message appeared when the link in Payments > Export to Excel CSV was clicked. This is now fixed.
• On Safari, when trying to add a recurring invoice one of the options reads “Every XX month(s) on the NaNth day of the month.” Fixed.
• Note: Some students may have received duplicate reminders during the two days following the move to our new server, because the old server was still running. We apologize for the error.
• Students and parents were able to delete invoices in some studios. This is now fixed.
• Emailing directly from the People List wasn’t working for a couple days. This is now fixed.
• On rare occasions an error appeared when someone tried to print a pdf week view calendar. This is now fixed.
• A rare bug when the Cancel My Account button was pressed, it resulted to an error message. This is now fixed.
• A message is displayed “This webpage has a redirect loop” when someone tried to log-in. This is now fixed.

The problem appears to have been caused by the database getting overloaded with requests. We had a record month last month for new signups and I guess we weren’t as prepared for it as we should have been. We’re actively working to speed things up, and make sure this kind of issue doesn’t happen again. You should notice a slight speed improvement today, but we hope to have much better improvements in the days and weeks ahead.

Normally, if we take the server down for maintenance, we’ll do it during midnight hours and also notify you several days in advance. So this was definitely not a normal occurrence, and we’re sorry if this caused any disruptions in your business.

As soon as the site went down, we started getting dozens of emails about the issue, and we went to work fixing it right away. We replied to your emails as quickly as we could, but some people didn’t get an answer until almost right before the problem was resolved. However, we did post messages on Facebook and Twitter, to let you know that we were working on the problem. If you’re not currently following us on Facebook or Twitter, you may want to do this, so you can stay up to date on the latest updates, since we announce everything there before it hits our blog or newsletter, including new features and any bug fixes.

Here are the links:

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/StudioHelper?ref=ts

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/studiohelper

We hope you’re finding Studio Helper useful. We’re embarrassed about this issue and are working to make sure we won’t have any issues like it again in the future. Thank you for your continued support and for using Studio Helper.

Thank you and have a great day!

Brandon Pearce, President
Studio Helper

• On the event categories page, if you had a large number of categories, they weren’t all showing. We’ve fixed this.
• Error messages were sometimes appearing when mass email was sent. We’ve fixed this.
• On the remote registration form, the success message was not shown after a student registered. This is now fixed.
• The payment link in the pdf invoice was not secure — it started with http://. It’s is now in https.
• Teachers where able to see student details like email in the Teacher Roster report even if not permitted. This is now fixed.
• Students where able to see the Status drop down box in their profile. We’ve fixed this. It’s now hidden.
• Due days in recurring invoices were set to 7 days after the creation date. This is now fixed.