Money
A month you look at before it happens.
The billing run shows you every account, every line and every skip with its reason. Nothing is issued until you say so.
Preview, then commit.
A monthly run is built from active billing profiles and shown in full before a single invoice exists.
Most billing mistakes are not arithmetic. They are an account that should have been on hold, a student who left in August, a rate that changed on the first and was applied from the fifteenth. Those are all visible in a preview and invisible in a batch of ninety finished invoices.
So the run is two steps. Build it, read it — including the accounts it deliberately left out and why — and then commit. Every run is kept, so the question “what did we bill in March” has an answer that is not somebody’s memory.
Invoices carry a billing mode. Lessons accrue and are issued on a cycle with terms; repairs are issued and due the moment the instrument is collected.
An approval chain with real ceilings.
Credits, discounts, prorations and late-fee waivers all go through the same queue.
Each tier has a ceiling. A request that exceeds one escalates to the next until it reaches a tier that can cover it — so a large credit cannot be quietly split into small ones by somebody who is allowed to authorise small ones.
Requesting a credit and approving a credit are two different permissions. In practice that means the owner can hold the only unlimited approval and still let the front desk take twenty dollars off a bill without a phone call.
The rest of it.
Tax per line, rounded per line
Not worked out on the subtotal and apportioned back. It is the difference between an invoice that reconciles and one that is a cent out most months and nobody can say why.
Proration that counts the day
A student who starts on the 12th is billed from the 12th, inclusive. The preview says “19 of 30 days” next to the line so the parent can check the arithmetic themselves.
Reminders that escalate once
A courtesy note before the due date, one on it, escalating notices after, a final notice and a late fee warning. Each stage is sent at most once, so nobody gets the same email twice because a job ran twice.
Credits with a ceiling
Front desk can clear a small one. Above that it escalates to a manager, and above that to the owner. Requesting and approving are separate permissions, so the person who asked is never the person who cleared it.
Auto-Pay and stored cards
Families enrol a card against a billing profile and are charged on issue. Cards are captured through a link that opens Stripe directly, so no card number ever reaches the studio.
Statements, posted if you must
A branded statement with a detachable remittance stub, emailed as a PDF — or queued for print and post through Lob, with a manual release step so nothing goes to the printer by accident.
It is not generally available yet.
B♭ Studio runs a working music studio today. If you run one too, tell us about it and we will get in touch when there is something to show you.
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