The Music Teacher's Secretary.

Private music teachers usually have to run a one-man (or one-woman) show. They must do their own publicity to attract clients (students), teach all the classes/ lessons, and also manage the administrative and financial tasks of the studio themselves. A marketing course will enable music teachers to find students for their studio, but not everyone has the knack to manage the accounts effectively. Luckily, help is now at hand.

Vision Software are the developers of a software package which will enable music teachers to organise and run a music teaching studio without any bookkeeping background or experience.

Music Teacher's Secretary stores all student details, progress reports, attendance history, lesson and payment details in a database. The program actually consists of six separate pages (modules) and each page has its own context-sensitive help page, with a "project" to teach you to use that specific function of the program.

*The Client Details page is the main page for the use of the program. Here you enter and change client information and select other procedures for the selected client. When you enter the required information (from address and telephone numbers to date of birth), the client is given a unique ID number. There is also a memo pad to enter specific information about the student. It's easy to move from one client to the next by using the Next and Previous buttons, or you can use the Find function, or the List button.

*The Attendance and Payment Records page is for entering these details about the selected client. Each entry also has space for comments.

*The Payments Totals Queries page will calculate total payments from clients between any two dates.

*The New Invoice page is for creating, printing and storing invoices.

*The Invoice List page allows you to check for unpaid bills and to examine past invoices.

*The Scheduler creates and prints your daily schedule of lessons.

The online help is very clear and all the functions of the program can be mastered within 30-40 minutes. The minimum requirements are very conservative, and you can probably run it on a computer that somebody else wants to throw away. You can buy a more powerful bookkeeping program, but it will probably be overkill, much more expensive, and significantly harder to learn.

Music Teacher's Secretary is a small but efficient software package, perfectly suited to the needs of the private music teacher with a small to medium-sized studio. It will allow music teachers to spend less time on tedious financial tasks, and more time on what they do and like best: teaching music!



The Cost to Register is US$105.