Configurable
Your studio already has rules. It should not have to adopt ours.
A hundred and nineteen settings across twenty-one areas — and any one of them can be overridden for a single family, without a workaround.
Most studio software has an opinion. This one asks.
Every studio has a notice period, a make-up rule, a late fee and a view on Auto-Pay. The question is only whether the software already agrees with you.
When it does not, you get the familiar workarounds: the spreadsheet beside the system, the family whose real terms live in somebody’s head, the rule everybody applies slightly differently depending on who picked up the phone.
None of that is a training problem. It is what happens when the software decides and the studio has to cope.
So the rules here are data, not code. They are read at the moment a decision is made — when a lesson is canceled, an invoice is issued, a reminder is due — which means changing one takes effect on the next one. No release. No support ticket. No being told it is on the roadmap.
A change can have a date on it.
Most terms say you will give notice before a policy changes. Software rarely helps you keep that promise.
A setting can be changed now, or scheduled for the day it starts applying — with the reason written in the studio’s own words, and the value it is changing fromrecorded at the moment it is scheduled.
That last detail is the one that matters later. “What did we change it from?” is a question asked after the change has happened, at which point the old value is gone unless somebody wrote it down. Here it is written down automatically.
A pending change is visible before it lands, and the announcement that tells families about it is a separate act somebody decides to send — not an email fired off the instant a number was edited.
Twenty-one areas, a hundred and nineteen decisions.
Not a settings page with a logo upload on it. These are the rules your terms and conditions already describe.
- Attendance
- Auto-Pay
- Automation
- Cancellation & make-ups
- Discounts & referrals
- Disputes
- Invoice review
- Invoicing
- Late payment & delinquency
- Lesson reminders
- Lessons
- Payment reminders
- Pricing
- Refunds
- Repairs & storage
- Rescheduling
- Security
- Student support needs
- Teacher payroll
- Termination
- Terms & agreements
And each one is a studio default that a single family can be excepted from — because the family who has been with you eleven years is usually the one on different terms.
Auto-Pay is an offer, not a condition.
Some systems only really work if every family is on automatic payment. That is a convenient assumption for the software and a poor one for a studio.
Here it is a setting — literally “Offer Auto-Pay” — and you decide whether it exists at your studio at all. If you offer it, you also set:
- the discount a family gets for enrolling, if any
- how much notice is needed to come off it
- how many days a failed payment has to be put right before it escalates
- whether enrolling requires signed consent, captured and kept
A family who never enrols is not a problem to be managed. They are a family with an invoice, which is how studios worked for a century.
Flexible for everyone who touches it.
For the front desk
The rule is the same whoever takes the call. A cancellation inside the notice period is handled identically at 9am on Monday and 6pm on Friday, because the notice period is a number in a settings screen rather than a thing people remember differently.
For the studio owner
Your terms, entered once, enforced everywhere — and changed without a support ticket, a release, or being told it is on the roadmap. A hundred and nineteen of them, and any one can be overridden for a single family.
For families
Auto-Pay if they want the discount, an invoice if they do not. Billing by the semester if that is what they agreed. A portal to check the balance instead of calling. Nobody is forced onto a payment method to remain a customer.
And news, which most of them forgot.
A studio is a community, not a billing relationship.
Announcements are drafted, scheduled and published to a chosen audience — families, staff, or both — and go out from your own studio mailbox rather than from a service your families have never heard of. Recital dates, a closure, a new teacher, a change to the terms.
It is not a feature anybody demos. It is the one you notice missing the week you need to tell two hundred families the building is shut.
Questions people ask about this.
- Do we have to use Auto-Pay?
- No, and neither do your families. Auto-Pay is a setting called "Offer Auto-Pay" — you decide whether it exists at your studio at all. If you offer it, you set the discount, the notice required to cancel it, how many days a failed payment has to be resolved, and whether enrolling requires signed consent. A family that never enrols is a normal family with a normal invoice.
- Can one family bill differently from everyone else?
- Yes. Rate, rate type, billing frequency, late fee policy and default discount all live on the family’s billing profile rather than on the studio, and any policy can be overridden for that profile alone. The long-standing family on legacy terms does not need a spreadsheet kept beside the system.
- Can we send news to families and staff?
- Yes. Announcements are drafted, scheduled and published to a chosen audience, then emailed by the same hourly job that runs everything else — from your own studio mailbox, not from a service the reader has never heard of.
- Does changing a policy need a developer?
- No. Policies are stored as data and read at the moment a decision is made, so a change takes effect on the next lesson, invoice or reminder. Nothing is compiled in, and no deployment is involved.
- Will it integrate with the other apps we use?
- Not yet, and this is the honest limit of the word flexible here. There is no public API, no outgoing webhooks and no Zapier app, so B♭ Studio does not currently connect to arbitrary third-party tools. It integrates deeply with Stripe, Microsoft 365 and Lob because those are wired in directly. If your workflow depends on pushing data into something else, say so when you join the list.
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.
Join the early access list