The call nobody answered at 5pm was a new student.
Your teachers are each in a room with a child until 8pm. Reception answers the phone in your school’s name, quotes your real prices, and books trials.
7:31pm, to the studio inbox
While you were teaching: 3 calls
Nadia Halabi
4:12pm
Asked about drums for a 7 year old. Quoted your term rate and your beginner age minimum.
Enquiry createdCam Petrovic
5:38pm
Wanted Saturday guitar. Nothing free, so it offered the waitlist and took a number.
CallbackYuki Tanabe
6:12pm
Booked a trial. Holding Thursday 4:00pm until you confirm.
Holding a slot
Sent in the gap after your 6:45 lesson, never during one.
The enrolments you lose this way are the ones you never hear about.
Four steps, and the last one is why it never gets fixed from the inside.
A parent decides today
They ring three schools off Google in one sitting, usually in a ten minute window while the child is in the car.
Every teacher is mid-lesson
From 3:30pm to 8pm each one is in a room with a child. Being unreachable is not neglect, it is the service being delivered.
Voicemail is a decline
Parents under about forty five do not leave one. The call rings out and leaves no trace on either side.
Nobody finds out
You cannot miss what you never saw. This is why no school owner lists missed calls among their problems, and why the loss keeps happening.
Reception
It answers in your school’s name, from your own data.
A first enquiry is four facts and a time slot. All four are already in your studio, so the answer is never invented. Publish a price list and the quote updates itself. Add a teacher and a new instrument starts being offered.
- “Do you teach drums?”
- From your published instruments, live.
- “How much for a term?”
- From your price list and your state term dates.
- “What times have you got Thursday?”
- From the real calendar, checked twice before it offers.
- “How young do you take them?”
- From the age minimum on that instrument.
Sold on its own from $49 a month with 120 minutes, or $119 with 400. You keep your existing number and forward it on no answer, so nothing on your advertising changes and nothing gets ported.
See what a school paysWhat it can say
Anything marked live is read at call time, so it cannot go stale.
- Instruments taught9, from your teamlive
- Term 4 fee$420, 10 weekslive
- Open times Thursday4:00pm, 5:30pmlive
- Sibling discount10% second childtyped
- How to payNothing on file yet6 parents asked
A question with no fact behind it becomes a message, and the gap gets counted. Your setup list arrives ranked by how many parents actually asked.
What it refuses to do, which is the part worth reading.
A receptionist that guesses is worse than one that takes a message, because then you have to honour the guess.
It will not discuss an enrolled child with a caller it cannot identify
A phone number is not an identity. Existing parents get a message taken and a callback, never a guess about their daughter’s lesson.
It will not book a minor with a teacher whose child-safety check is not current
The database refuses the write. The call ends in a callback, not a booking you would have had to unwind.
It will not confirm a booking, only hold one
It says so out loud to the parent, and the hold frees itself after 48 hours if nobody confirms. You keep the last word on your own timetable.
It will not answer a question it cannot source
No fact behind it means a message taken and the gap counted. Six parents asking how to pay becomes a one line job, ranked by how many actually asked.
It says it is an assistant
Recording and AI disclosure in the greeting. Not optional: several states require all-party consent.
Reception
Tuesday, 4 callsAnswering- 4:12pmNadia HalabiDrums, 7 year old, Saturdays2:48Enquiry created
- 5:38pmCam PetrovicSaturday guitar, nothing free1:55Callback
- 6:04pmWithheld numberAsked about an enrolled child0:51Refused, message taken
- 6:12pmYuki TanabeBooked a trial, Thursday 4:00pm3:22Holding a slot
6:12pm, what it did
- Read your published price list and quoted the Term 4 rate
- Checked Thursday against the real calendar, twice
- Held 4:00pm with Priya, and said out loud it was not confirmed
- Created the enquiry and the guardian record
The assistant’s half is quotable because it is our copy. The caller’s half is never stored.
You can read exactly what was done in your name.
Every call leaves a receipt: the sentences it said, the facts it looked up, the rows it wrote, and the things it was refused. The 6:04pm row is the one worth reading twice. A caller asked about an enrolled child, the assistant would not discuss one, and it took a message instead.
Refusals are the rows that earn trust. A school that watches the machine be stopped by its own database stops worrying about what it might say.
This is the part a solo teacher never sees.
Rooms, rosters, staff hours, a term that rolls over, and a public page your teachers finish themselves. Four screens you would open on a Tuesday.
Priya
Tom
Mei-Ling
Dan
Sofia
Staff pay
Week 3From attendance, not from a timesheet.
- Priya R.11.5 hrs$632
- Tom W.9.0 hrs$495
- Mei-Ling C.6.5 hrs$357
- Sofia B.5.0 hrs$275
- Dan O.3.0 hrs$165
Term 4 enrolments
240 studentsRolled from Term 3, chased automatically.
- Returning
- 186
- Not yet answered
- 38
- Leaving
- 16
- On the waitlist
- 9
- Trials this week
- 4
The 38 who have not answered have a reminder queued for Friday. Nobody has to build a list.
Northside Music School
Brunswick and Coburg VIC · 9 instruments
Meet the teachers
- Priya RaghavanPiano, theory
- Tom WhitfieldGuitar, bass
- Mei-Ling ChowViolin, viola
Each teacher fills in their own card. The page finishes itself as they accept.
We asked one Melbourne school owner to list her weekly admin. She listed eleven things.
Nine of them are integration and funnel work that no software she pays for is doing. Her timetable covers about two.
One new student, typed five times
- Kudosity, for the SMS
- YAMM, to mail merge
- The contact sheet YAMM merges from
- LessonMate
- The leads sheet
One data entry event, fanned out by hand across five systems. Killing the mail merge kills the contact sheet with it, because the sheet only exists to feed it.
The funnel, rebuilt by hand
- Check the timetable for trials
- A leads spreadsheet
- A metrics spreadsheet
- An enquiries inbox
Nothing she pays for holds a pipeline, so she is the pipeline. The metrics sheet is maintained by hand, which means she wants those numbers enough to do that and cannot get them from anything she owns.
Actual music school work
- AMEB and ANZCA exam enrolments
- Student of the Month
Two of the eleven. This is the part that is really her job, and the only part a general SaaS has any excuse for not touching.
The tools those retypes feed are cheap. Bulk SMS here has no monthly fee, and the mail merge costs about three dollars a month, so this is not a story about cancelling subscriptions. It is a story about one student being typed in five places, and about a pipeline that lives in spreadsheets because nothing she owns will hold it.
Our software is cheaper than all of them. That is not the interesting part.
Every one of these runs a timetable well. One of them will transcribe the voicemail your caller did not leave. None of them picks up, and none of them puts you in front of a family searching for a teacher tonight.
My Music Staff
A$25 to A$236
per month, landed in Australian dollars
Per teacher with no ceiling, in USD. The incumbent most Australian studios actually leave.
No directory, no phone cover, priced in a currency that moves.
Opus1
about A$144
per month, landed in Australian dollars
Flat, which is why a growing school likes it and then outgrows it.
Their voice add-on transcribes the call you missed. It does not answer it, and they list it as available in the United States.
Jackrabbit Music
about A$130
per month, landed in Australian dollars
Priced in student bands, so growth costs you money on a schedule.
No directory, no phone cover, built for dance and gymnastics first.
Landed prices convert at about 0.7062 and add the foreign transaction fee an Australian card really pays a United States vendor, because that is what leaves your account. We bill in Australian dollars, so our number does not move when the exchange rate does.
The six things school owners ask us.
- Can we buy the receptionist without moving our school across?
- Yes, and most schools should start that way. It needs a published listing and your prices, not your roster. Nothing about your timetable, your billing or your existing software has to change for the phone to start being answered.
- When can we actually switch systems?
- Between terms, which is the only honest answer. A school cannot re-key a roster in week three of a term, so our migration calendar is the Victorian term dates and the summer break is the real window. Reception has no such constraint, because it does not touch your data.
- What happens to our existing phone number?
- It stays yours and it is never ported. You set conditional forwarding on no answer, so your number keeps ringing your phone first and only overflows to Reception when nobody picks up.
- Do you take a percentage of our fees?
- No, at any size, ever. No commission on lessons, no per student charge and no per lesson charge. A school should never be charged more for growing.
- We have two campuses. Does that work?
- Name each site and put its rooms in it, and campuses past the first are A$40 a month each. It is priced because a building is a deliberate decision, unlike hiring a casual teacher, which should never be one.
- What if it does not work for us?
- Ninety days, money back, no conditions. That covers the case a trial cannot: a school spends its first month migrating and only finds out whether we work in week ten, when the term bills.
Want to check us against your current system line by line? Every module, spelled out.
See the full suiteTeaching on your own, or with one or two others? Same software, same price, without the school apparatus.
For solo teachersPricing
Priced per teacher, per campus, per minute. Never per child.
The software has one dial and it stops climbing at 14 teachers. Everything else is something you are already paying somebody else for.
Your school
Teachers
Campuses
What you pay
- Studio software, 6 teachers
- $60
- Reception, 250 minutesbundled rate
- $59
- Per month
- $119
Cancel any time. Then $0.35/min past your call allowance, and 12c per SMS past the first 50 a month. Migration is $299 once, or free if you pay yearly.
A year of this costs $1428. One student at $40 a week across four terms is about $1600, so a single enrolment you would otherwise have missed covers it.
30-day trial on the software, no card. 90-day money back on everything.
For scale: at 14 teachers the software line stops at $116 and never rises again, while My Music Staff keeps charging per teacher and Opus1 Starter lands at about $144 before you add a campus. Every teacher past your 14th is free, which is deliberate: a casual teacher should never be a purchase decision, because the answer to a purchase decision is a shared login.
Start with the phone. The rest can wait for the term break.
Reception needs your prices and a published listing, not your roster. Nothing about the software you run today has to change.
Start with Reception