For families
Stop being the only way to find out what is owed.
Families sign in and see their invoices, lessons, balance and repairs — and pay from the invoice, without the front desk in the middle.
The call you stop taking.
“What do we owe this month?” is the most common question a studio front desk answers, and the least useful use of anybody’s time.
It is not that the answer is hard. It is that it lives somewhere a family cannot reach, so the only route to it is a person — and that person is usually mid-lesson, mid-repair, or halfway through a billing run.
The portal is the same data with the family let in: their invoices and the ledger behind the balance, their lessons and attendance, their make-up credits and when each one expires, and any instrument currently on the bench.
Nothing is recalculated for them and nothing is summarized. They see the documents the studio sees, which is why the numbers cannot disagree.
It answers before it asks.
The portal’s best feature is that a family finds out the consequence of something before they commit to it.
A parent canceling Thursday’s lesson is shown, on that screen, whether they are inside the notice period, whether this earns a make-up credit, and what it will cost if it does not. Then they decide.
That is the difference between a policy a studio has and a policy a studio can hold. The fee stops being a thing sprung on somebody at the counter and becomes a thing they chose with the number in front of them — which is also, in practice, the version families argue with far less. We wrote up how to word the policy behind it.
The same instinct runs through the rest. A reschedule offers the times a teacher has actually declared, not every hour in the week. An expiring make-up credit shows its date rather than quietly lapsing.
The noticeboard nobody reads is the one on the wall.
Most studio software has no way to tell families anything, so the studio falls back on a group email and hopes.
Studio news lives in the portal, beside the balance and the schedule — the two things a family opens it for anyway. A notice is a draft until it is published, goes to the audiences you choose rather than to everyone, can be pinned, and carries an expiration date so a recital that happened in March stops being news in June.
Emailing it as well is a checkbox, not the mechanism. That distinction is the point: a studio that has to email every announcement eventually stops making them, because nobody wants to be the studio that emails four times a week.
What a family can do.
The balance, without calling
What is owed, what is paid, and what a credit has already taken off it. The single most common call a front desk takes, answered before it is made.
Invoices they can actually read
Every invoice and its lines, the ledger behind the balance, and a statement — the same documents the studio sees, not a summary of them.
Pay from the invoice
A card charged against the invoice through Stripe, or a card saved for next time. Numbers go to Stripe directly and never reach the studio.
Lessons and make-up credits
Upcoming lessons, what was attended, and every make-up credit with the date it expires — so an expiration is never a surprise at the counter.
Repairs, if there are any
A family who left an instrument can see where it is without ringing to ask whether it is ready.
A message to the teacher
A question routed to the right person rather than to a general inbox, kept on the account with everything else about that family.
Cancel, and be told the cost first
Before a family confirms, the portal says what this cancellation does: inside the notice period or outside it, whether it earns a make-up credit, and what it will be charged. Nobody discovers the fee afterwards.
Ask to move it, and see what is open
A reschedule shows the slots the teacher has actually said they will teach, and arrives as a request staff accept or decline. Nothing moves on the schedule on its own.
Sign the agreement, and the Auto-Pay
The studio’s terms and an Auto-Pay authorization are signed by the family, in the portal, with the version they agreed to kept. Auto-Pay is offered rather than required — signing is the family’s act, not a condition of enrolling.
What was practiced, and what was said
Practice logged between lessons, and the teacher’s note about the lesson that already happened — so a parent who was not in the room knows how it went.
Studio news, where they already are
A recital date, a closure, a new teacher. Written as a draft, published when it is ready, aimed at the audiences it concerns, pinned if it matters, and given an expiration so last spring’s notice is not still on the board. Optionally emailed as well — a choice, not an automatic blast.
Enrolling without the clipboard
A studio invites a family by email. They fill in students, contacts and consents themselves, and none of it becomes a record until somebody approves it — because until then it is what a stranger typed, not a fact about your studio.
A link, or a password
Sign in with a link sent to the address the studio already holds, or set a password. Neither is imposed on a family who finds the other one awkward.
Questions studio owners ask about this.
- Do families need an account before they can use it?
- Access is granted per contact by staff, and can be revoked the same way. Sign-in is a link sent to the address the studio already holds, sent from the studio’s own mailbox rather than from a third party the family has never heard of.
- Is there an app?
- Not yet. Native apps for iPhone and iPad are planned — one for families, one for staff — and neither exists today. The portal is a website that works on a phone, which is a different and more honest thing to say. When there is an app, the early access list hears before anyone else.
- Can a family see another family’s information?
- No. A contact reaches only the billing accounts they are attached to, and what they may do on each one is a set of permissions rather than a single on-off switch.
- What can staff see about what a family did?
- Portal visits are recorded, and staff with the right permission can view the portal as a customer sees it — read-only — which is how you answer “it is not showing me anything” without asking for a password.
- Does a student see the same thing as a parent?
- Not necessarily. The system knows which students are minors, and what a portal user is shown depends on the permissions attached to that contact.
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