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.

The holidays are my favorite time of year, especially in the studio. I love working on festive pieces with my students and recording holiday songs for them to give as gifts. And of course, the break is refreshing not only for students, but for me as a teacher.

However, as a business owner, the holidays can be a financially tough time. In the past, I’ve closed my studio for two full weeks (in coordination with most school calendars) — which results in two full weeks of lost income. There are ways to make up for some, if not all of it, though.

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Communicating with parents can be scary and intimidating. After all, they are our bread and butter and we certainly want to keep them happy. However, they deserve to know exactly how their children are proceeding at all times in their musical studies. There are many ways to handle sharing your evaluation of a student with their parents. Phone calls, emails, letters, conferences, and weekly progress reports can be done. This year I have vowed to do an even better job of connecting with parents.

Reconciling Lessons

Music Teachers Helper has been an invaluable resource in following through with my goal. Reconciling lessons after each day of teaching helps me to reinforce assignments that were given at the lesson (Music Teachers Helper can automatically email these notes to both parent and student). I always include something positive that the student did during the lesson or as a result of good practice during the week, and constructive comments for improvement. I use the private notes to help me prepare for the next week’s lesson and to remember to follow up about something that the student told me during the lesson (like an upcoming music concert, sporting event, or special occasion). Since this takes some time, I hope that the parents read it! I think most of them do and I was especially surprised when one parent emailed me asking where the notes were (I had been a little late in getting them out)!
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Last month I wrote Part 1 of  ”how to plan for a 9-month work year”. Today I want to move on to Part 2- “saving for summer”. This is the information that I WISH someone had given me as a young teacher. I hope it is useful and welcome your comments and feedback.

Summer can be a wonderful, creative time in our careers. We have flexibility, we can attend workshops or masterclasses, we can spend more time practicing or performing. I see many of my friends, who have typical 9-5 jobs, struggling to figure out day care and summer camps. Living in a home with two professional music teacher parents and two school age children, we have the luxury of taking vacation when we want. Our children see more of us in the summer after a full school year of dinners without one parent or the other. We can choose which weeks to arrange daycare or camps, and which to spend together at home as a family.

The downside is that we have no income. Zero. Zilch. So how do we survive? The biggest change we made when we had children was to realize that we HAD TO PLAN. We couldn’t survive on pasta and peanut butter alone for 3 months. We had to take care of basic monthly expenses.

How do we do it? Year long planning.

Here are the steps we take every September.

• Create a basic monthly budget that does not include catastrophic illness or your car dying.
• Calculate your dependable monthly income (multiply your guaranteed work hours times your pay/hour)
• Calculate 15% of that monthly total or, if you receive different amounts every month, take the total you make over 9 months, calculate 15%, and divide by 9.
• First thing each month, religiously put this money into a savings account or money market that earns interest while it waits to be given to the government.
• Now comes the hard part. Calculate the total you will need to pay 100% of your bills for the 2-3 months of summer without an income source.

For most people, this is the part where we gulp, we realize that there is no way we can survive the summer, and then we bury our head in the sand while happily spending money throughout the year that we cannot afford. Is this the right solution? Of course not! So what are your options?

Most of us have some unplanned income (just like we have unplanned root canals and car repair). This unplanned income is one way to make your music teachers salary work for you.

• Do you perform in chamber music or contracted orchestra gigs?
• Do you teach extra lessons or give coaching sessions unexpectedly?
• Do you take students in the summer, even though you didn’t count on the income?

If you answered yes to these questions, then you have found a way to fund part of your summer account. Set up a separate savings account or money market and diligently put this “extra” money you earn throughout the year away for summer. Is it fun? No. Does it allow you to make being a music teacher a career that can last a lifetime? Yes.

Once you have made it through a summer or two you will have a more realistic sense of just how much you can realistically earn in the summer. Until then, I recommend that you plan your summer savings account as if you will earn NOTHING. Once you have a settled studio and a reliable number of students, you can include summer income in your budget.

Here is the breakdown for my family of two professional musicians and two school aged children:

• Monthly teaching income minus 15% into the tax account. Multiply this amount x 9 and you will have your total income for the year. It’s important to know where you are starting from.
• Multiply your monthly budget x 3 to find your total summer expenses.
• Now divide your summer total by 9 to find the monthly contribution you will have to make. Put this money aside religiously every month!

In our case we have altered this plan based on several years experience and a sense of the guaranteed income we can expect. Our summer plan looks like this.

• Extra teaching and contracted workshops throughout the year= 1 month of summer budget
• Reliable summer teaching = 1 month of summer budget
• What we have left to plan for= 1 month of summer budget
• We then divide the remaining 1 month by 9 to find our required monthly contribution. Every month, before we pay our bills, or go to dinner, or buy new shoes, we put that amount into a summer account.

I am sure there are other ways to plan for summer. But I am also sure that they have one thing in common, there is a PLAN.

I love teaching, I love my students, and I believe that what I do makes a difference in the world. In order to keep feeling this way and to be able to survive as a musician, it is incredibly important that I live realistically and within my means. It’s not always fun and it takes planning, but the payoff is a life-long career doing something I truly love.

I wish someone had held my hand and given me a realistic plan to follow as a young teacher. In those early years many of my fellow teachers either headed back to school, changed careers, or were forced to take “day jobs” to supplement their musician’s income. The key to success is to plan and to be realistic.

If you have been teaching for several years, what do you do about summer income? What were the toughest things you faced? How have you figured out how to live for 12 months on 9 months of income? I look forward to the conversation we can have.

I am not a lawyer, or an experienced business person – and I have absolutely no idea how to handle payroll, but I am a teacher who has been filling the role of teacher, bookkeeper, human relations, events coordinator, etc – so what I will address today is related only to the fact that I am feeling overwhelmed and overstretched.

How does a teacher in a private lesson situation do it all?  When we teach at our homes, we live at work… we breathe work, sleep at work, eat at work, spend time with family at work.  Separating the daily workspace and homespace is easy enough, but nearly impossible when our minds are constantly working on our next “to do” list.  Sometimes, we simply need help.

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Most readers of this blog–like me–have probably gone to a lot of trouble to advertise your studio.  When I first moved to Wisconsin, I paid for a huge ad in the paper, stuffed mailboxes with coupons, and hung flyers at every business in town that allowed them.  No one called.  After a few months of this, I put an ad on craigslist.  In a few short weeks, my studio was full and I had to begin a wait list.  

We are definitely living in the digital age.

Studio owners today must learn to use the tools we have available to us online if we’re to be successful in marketing our business and communicating with our clients.

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This month, we’ve added a number of new features to Studio Helper, and fixed several bugs that have been reported. One of the most oft-requested features is the option to sync your Studio Helper calendar with Google Calendar, iCal, Outlook, and other popular calendar programs. In turn, through these programs, you can also sync your calendar with your iPhone or other mobile device to take with you on the go, and can have multiple copies of your calendar in different places for your records.

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.

When I first opened my studio several years ago, I knew I was going to need a lot of help. Teaching would be the easy part; it was running a business that overwhelmed me.

Having never taken a business course in my life, I dove into blogs and books that could help fill in the missing pieces of the puzzle.

Many of the books I’ve read have had a profound influence on the way I run my business, but there are a few that have positively affected not only my studio operation, but also my teaching. Here are three that I’d recommend to any teacher and studio owner.

1. Read the rest of this entry »

When I mentioned to my husband that this month’s blog would be about balance, he laughed and suggested that I first start to make some changes, and then write and article in six months to share how I achieved a more balanced lifestyle. I have to admit that he is right. I have not done well with balance over the last two months. Most of us start the year with high expectations, good intentions, high energy and a long list of goals. That was how I began September – full of energy, many students, a waiting list, and lots of projects. By the second week of lessons, I had already suffered from illness due to stress. I was out of balance – I had fallen off the beam.

Instead of sharing my own ideas, I will summarize a session from the 2011 Music Teachers National Conference in Milwaukee entitled “A life in balance.” This was one of the last sessions presented at the conference and even though I was there, I was not able to attend so I purchased the MP3 DVD and listened to it. Meg Gray, a professor of music at Lincoln University of Missouri, and Ellen McQuie, family medicine physician, gave an insightful and helpful session in which they concentrated on the following five different areas to assist in creating a balanced lifestyle.
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As music teachers we face a constant challenge. How do we live for 12 months when our regular, guaranteed income is only 9 or 10 months? Unlike school teachers, we are usually independent studio teachers or work for a music school that is unlikely to spread out our income over 12 months. Summer is wonderful, don’t get me wrong. But financially it can be a stressful, difficult time for music teachers.

After 23 years as a music teacher, I have learned a few tricks. The most important advice I would give a new teacher is CONSULT WITH A TAX ADVISOR! Even if you think your taxes are simple enough to do yourself, or you just don’t have the money to hire a CPA every year, meet for a planning session with someone knowledgeable and familiar with the self-employed. The advice you will get setting up a planning system is well worth the money. Having a monthly plan for money that you need to set aside to accomodate your quarterly estimated taxes and your basic summer expenses is vitally important. If you are a professional musician who is hired for performances irregularly, enjoy the added income, but do not count on it to pay you rent/mortgage or for other required monthly expenses.

I have personally had the experience of thinking everything was OK, receiving an unexpected tax bill in April, and being left with almost no money set aside for summer. When it happens, those relaxing weeks of summer with less teaching and fewer obligations can become a nightmare rather than one of the perks of being a teacher! Now, after years as a teacher trainer, I have heard the story many times and know that I was not alone as a young teacher who was caught in a bad situation.

Once I realized that my primary income would be the 9 or 10 months of the school year, I had to make adjustments in my basic budget. Our tax accountant gave us a wonderful formula that has worked for over a decade. She recommended setting aside 15% of your monthly income for estimated taxes.

As most of us have figured out by now, the federal government assumes that income is stable from January-January. This is the number they use to predict your quarterly estimated tax payment. But for many of us, our income changes rather drastically every September. Maybe this is the year that you took 15 new students in September. In this case, you need to plan for a high tax bill in April reflecting the added income from September-December. Or maybe, as is the case for my family, you have a year in which you moved and had to begin building a studio from scratch. In this case you will receive a tax refund and lower tax estimates for the following year. But don’t be fooled. As you build your studio and income improves, you need to have set that money aside for taxes.

No matter what your unusual circumstances are, come next April, you will owe taxes on the money you have made the past year. If you have a low quarterly payment, enjoy earning a little interest off the money you put away, but ABSOLUTELY DO NOT SPEND THAT MONEY. It is not yours, you just get to use it for a while until your estimated income catches up with your actual income.

In the music teaching business we are typically going to be in the lowest tax bracket (yes, I know, I wish we made more money too). The 15% rule only applies if you are counting your teaching income as your primary income and DO NOT have another significant income source. Please check with your tax advisor about your individual situation.

Once you have figured out how much you will owe in taxes for the year (remember that this is NOT always the number the government has said you owe in estimated taxes), you can move on to trying to plan for the summer. My next post will be “Part 2- saving for summer”.

Taxes are like getting your roof fixed. It is one of the unglamorous parts of our job. How have you handled planning for taxes? Have you ever been caught off guard with a huge April tax bill? Let me know your strategies.