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 authorize 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.
Falling behind is a process, not a flag.
An account that owes money is not in one state. It is somewhere on a ladder you defined.
You set the rungs: how many days past the oldest unpaid invoice each one triggers at, what it is called, and what the family is told it means — in your words, not ours. An episode opens when an account first falls behind and closes when it comes current. A closed one never reopens; the next time is a new episode, so the history reads as events rather than as one permanent mark against a family.
Every rung has a floor. Below a balance you set, the stage does nothing. Suspending a child’s lessons over four dollars costs you a family and earns you four dollars — and a floor is what stops an automated policy from doing something no person in your studio would ever have done.
The nightly review moves accounts along the ladder and records what it did. Nothing here decides on its own to be harsher than the rung it reached.
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.
A ledger that cannot double-count
Charges and credits sit on the account before any invoice exists. An entry counts as owed only until a draft invoice sweeps it into a line — after that the line is the debt and the entry is its history, because counting both would quietly double every swept amount.
Refunds with the same ceilings
A refund inside the requester’s own limit is recorded as exactly that — nobody else approved it, so the record never claims they did. Declined and failed refunds release the money again, because in neither case did anything leave the bank.
Twelve ways to sell a lesson
One time, one session, per hour, drop-in, trial, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly, semester, annual, package. The cadence is a property of what you sold, not a mode the whole studio has to be in.
Moving an account between people
A separation, a guardian change, an adult student taking over their own billing. Both people consent, the balance is frozen at the request and has to be cleared before it finalizes, and staff close it out. Not a phone call and a hand-edited record.
Referrals that cannot drift
One referral per new student — whoever they named first. The fee waived is recorded when the referral is created, so changing the setting next year cannot quietly restate what somebody was already promised.
Statements, mailed 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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