Music Teacher's Office - End to End

Over the next few weeks or so I am going to cover Music Teacher's Office from the beginning to end. From is birth out of necessity to the features, benefits and best practices on its use. So to keep this organized I will start with an outline of topics.

1. How and why it all started
2. The Problem(s)
3. The Solutions(s)
4. Setting Defaults Nity Grity
   
5. Best Practices - Administrators
6. Best Practices - Teacher
7. Recap
   

How and why this all started

Since 1992 my wife and myself have been running Weed Music ltd which is a music retail store and large music school. Around 1998 - 1999 it became apparent that there had to be a better way to run a large music school. We needed a tool that not only kept all of our ducks in a row business wise but actually and a positive impact on the quality of teaching in our school.

Up until 1998 we had created a great school manual that laid out procedures for registrations, invoicing and lesson forms and life was good.

We did very well with pencil and paper for registrations and had an easy to use multiple copy registration form that gathered all the parent and student information and an area where to record payments. We created multiple copy lesson assignment forms to record weekly assignments so that one copy stayed in the lesson log book to calculate pay and the other went with the student. The system worked great about 65% of the time but there were a lot of cracks in the system where a lot of tasks and information could fall through.

When we started to get a large number of students and teachers using the system these cracks became larger and larger.

How it worked was this way. When a payment for lessons was recorded to the registration form and then we added corresponding lesson assignment sheet to the teachers lesson assignment binders so the teacher knew that the lessons were paid for and they were not teaching for free. The registrations form worked great until you had a payment or check go bad or had a student cancel lessons. If a check went bad and for some reason you forgot to pull the lesson sheets out of the teachers binder or could not because the teacher was using it at the time the student could walk in and take the lesson without it being paid for.

So that in a long story is the problem. What the administration and staff really needed was real time information about the status of the student. This was just not possible with pencil and paper.

So with that revelation I went looking for software. I looked at a couple of systems that were tied to music retail software and they did nothing for scheduling, or recording student assignments or achievements not to mention teacher payroll. I spent a lot of time surfing the net and trade shows and found nothing that would work the way I felt it needed to. This was about the time I was spending a lot more time on the computer and I found a book called VB6 Databases published by Wrox. Well, that was it. I had taken a basic computer programming course in my last year at the University of Montana and this book refreshed my zeal for coding. I knew then that I had to create my own Windows application to solve my problems. In about 1992 I made the step up to VB.NET in Visual Studio 2002 and never looked back.

So I guess thats how this journey began. We had a problem that needed a solution that did not exist until now.

Next time I will elaborate on the problems.