Fellow private music teachers, you know the struggle of balancing teaching & business. While the business part is incredibly vital (let’s be real, being paid is important), most of us didn’t get into this business for that part of it – we do it for our students and helping others develop musical skills.

I went to school for music performance, so when my career took a turn in the direction of education, I was under-prepared to handle the business. Payments, invoicing, expenses, taxes, student communication, marketing… I quickly learned how intensive owning your own business can be. I got to the point where I would have ten tabs open just trying to get all my information in one place.

I got so frustrated juggling different apps for scheduling, invoicing, and tracking finances, but then I found Square – the best music teacher software for all of it.

I initially started using Square because I was looking for an appointment booking software that sent out automatic reminders to clients (yes, it does that! Read about it below!) that wouldn’t cost me more money – that in and of itself was worth it to me. However, once I started, it opened up a whole new world of a single studio management software – almost every single thing I need to run it is in one place. I started out looking for something to solve one of my business problems, and found a solution to almost all of them.

I’ve outlined below the main ways Square can help you manage your private music teacher business simply and efficiently, and help you focus on what you love most: teaching!

use the table of contents to read about the features that are most relevant to your business

Why Square is the best Scheduling Software for Music Teachers

Online Booking

In most jobs, Calendar Management is a pain in the behind. Whether you opt for digital or paper, appointment setting just takes a lot of maintenance and upkeep. If you are a “solopreneur” like me, and don’t pay someone else to manage your schedule for you, efficiency and practicality is of the utmost importance, so you can work on managing the other parts of your music teacher business.

Square is set up to deal with appointment-based businesses like hairdressers, massage therapists, and yes, Private Music Teachers and Music Studios. Their online booking feature is easy to customize to fit your business and your schedule, is easily shareable, and integrates into website builders, so you can host your online booking form (or a button that takes them to the form) on your very own website.

New: Square recently rolled out a website builder of their own that you can use to easily build your own website. Much like Wix, there are extra costs for things like a unique URL and other features, but it comes already connected to your schedule, your invoices, contracts, and everything else you use Square for; it can be a great place to start. For a more detailed breakdown of the best website builders for private music teachers, visit this blog post.

Appointment Reminders and Confirmations

This feature was what got me to finally set up my square account – their appointment scheduler can be set up to send out automatic appointment reminders or cancellations.

I know that ideally that kind of feature should not be needed, but I have found that it adds an extra layer of protection from missed lessons – whether from forgetfulness or lack of foresight on the parent’s part. So I set my reminders up to go out the day before the lesson, giving the parents ample time to let me know if they need to cancel outside of the 24 hour window.

Why Square is the best Invoicing software for Music Teachers

Easy invoicing, and lots of options

Depending on how you run your Private Music Teacher business, your invoicing needs will look different. I personally have tried several different ways of invoicing before I found the one that worked for me and my clients:

• Invoice after each lesson
• Invoice before each lesson
• Flat rate each month
• Monthly invoices at the end of each month (postpay)
• Monthly invoices at the beginning of each month (prepay)

For the sake of ease and of my sanity, I ended up settling on the last one, but Square can accommodate each of those options with relative simplicity (my favorite word when it comes to business – simplicity)

You can send an invoice straight out of the appointment schedule, you can set up recurring invoices, or you can send bulk invoices out at any time, and they can be sent to your client’s phones via text or to their email. Talk about a studio management software that does it all!

Easy Payments and Payment Options

Honestly, I think that the days of cash and checks for Private Music Lessons are pretty much over. I had just a few parents who opted for cash or checks back in 2017, but I don’t even get asked to pay in cash or checks anymore – it’s venmo, or paypal, or zelle.

While Square invoices aren’t able to be paid by third parties like venmo or paypal, they can be paid with credit or debit cards, just like if you went to the store and purchased an item. The customer can save their card on file for easy payment on future invoices, too!

You do have the option to record other payments, so you could take cash, checks, or another online payment company and still track it in square, but it does take a little bit more time, and it takes away from one of my favorite features of Square:

Square Card

You can get a debit card to access your Square funds!

When students pay you, your money goes into what is essentially a Square bank account. You can then transfer those funds into your main checking or savings account, or you can get a Square debit card to access those funds directly. Like many Private Music Teachers, I have multiple streams of income. It is incredibly helpful for me to keep my incomes separate so I can allocate business expenses accordingly.

The card is free, and you get discounts when you use it at other square retailers.

Costs money only when you make money

On the whole, Square is a free software. You can pay extra for certain things like Marketing or additional employees, but there are no up-front costs for setting up your scheduler, booking students, or sending contracts and invoices.

So how do they make their money?

They do make money on the extras, but for the rest of it, they take a percentage of each invoice as a processing fee. Right now, that processing fee is 2.9% + 30c for invoices, and 2.6% + 10c for in-person transactions (if you charge your clients in the terminal rather than in an invoice). This fee covers any bank charges that might come from your client’s bank.

This means that they don’t take any money until you make money. And even then, they aren’t charging extra for the customer, they just take a small portion of the transaction.

How Square helps Music Teachers with Paperwork and other Business Things

Contracts

Oh, boy. If you have been a private music teacher for any length of time, you know how important it is to have a private music lesson contract.

If not, read this post on how my contract saved my sanity.

I was actually scared to create a contract for a long time – years, in fact. I had so many people encouraging me that it was worth it, but I didn’t pull the trigger for fear of losing students or upsetting parents.

(side note: if a contract causes them to leave your studio, you don’t want them)

I kept giving excuses, and my favorite one was how inconvenient it is to write one up, to track who’s signed, the whole “organization” part was not something I wanted to do. And then Square rolled out a contracts feature.

Let me tell you – it is so easy to set up, send, and track your contracts through square, and I am SO glad I did. Square legitimately makes it easy.

Taxes

Full disclosure: I don’t use Square to file my taxes because of my multiple income streams. While they do partner with an online tax company, it doesn’t work for my personal business – I use an accountant.

However, the reporting features on Square make it very easy when tax season rolls around. I can easily export all of the information my accountant needs.

Square Card and Balance

As I mentioned above, I love using my square card to separate my streams of income. It works for my brain to have the money that I spend on my business come out of my business bank account – it’s much easier to track business expenses if they are all in one place – a huge time saver during tax season. (Click here to learn what business expenses you need to track as a private music teacher)

Why Square is the best Marketing avenue for Music Teachers

Let me start this section out by saying: Square marketing features are great and tie in easily to your already-existing customer base, social media platforms, and emails, but most of the features do cost some money. You can use all of them starting at $15 a month (for up to 500 subscribers), or you can choose to pay per email sent, typically $.10 per email.

If you want to avoid fees all together, you do have the option to use other services outside of square for social media and email marketing. However, one of the biggest draws for me was…

Completely Integrated

Having everything in one place is incredibly helpful. I do all the email and text marketing (yes, they have text marketing now!) for my clients in square just because it already has all of their information. Plus they have easily-branded templates that help me create beautiful and functional emails and texts with minimal effort – efficiency is my favorite! Everything in one place makes for an awesome music teacher software.

Marketing made Easy

For marketing beginners who are looking to snag a few more students or just get their studio out there easily, still look professional, and not pay out the nose for a marketing consultant, Square is perfect. Their templates are easy to use, everything is in one place (so you can send out the same message to multiple channels), and their personalize marketing assistant helps guide your choices! Great thing is, it’s all included in the base monthly fee.

Many kinds of marketing

In their marketing creator, you create a campaign and then choose which channels you want it to go out on – email, text, and whatever social media channels you have connected. You can send your campaign to everyone – it even connects to facebook or instagram ads, and keeps your analytics in one place for you.

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That’s why I think Square is the best music teacher software on the market – it takes care of all the Studio Management stuff that we don’t really learn in music school.

As you can clearly see, Square is completely worth the investment – if you can call it that. It is SO inexpensive and yet SO helpful and effective. They also have gone above and beyond in light of the changing business landscape to help small businesses (like mine) make it through hard times. They are also constantly rolling out great new features (the Contracts one is a great example) that help me further my business!