Why I Moved From My Music Staff to Fons

Although I have been a My Music Staff users for many years, I recently discovered Fons and pretty much immediately made the switch. In this post, I will explain why I did this along with my thoughts about how Fons and My Music Staff compare.

It's worth mentioning that I have really enjoyed using My Music Staff (MMS). It has served me well for many years. It is difficult to outgrow something like My Music Staff. The main reason I went with Fons is that Fons just has a different view on how scheduling should work compared to MMS. Consider the name “Flex Lessons” for example…this name implies flexibility with lessons. Fons helps me realize this in a way that is not possible with MMS.

Clicking this link will take you to the Fons website where you can sign up for a free trial. If you choose to become an active user of Fons, please know that I may get rewarded with a commission, which helps support this site.

Fons Referral Link

Why I Loved My Music Staff

My Music Staff is an awesome platform for managing your music studio. The folks over at MMS have pretty much thought of everything. MMS has an absolutely awesome feature set for the price, and for folks looking for one platform to do it all, MMS does make alot of sense.

Here are a list of things that I personally got out of using MMS:

• Automated invoicing for all lessons in a calendar month combined with any previous balance

• Email communication to all students and parents

• New student application which brings folks into your system and marks them with a specific status

• Hosted studio website (I used this for new student applications and policies)

• Limited student self scheduling

• Student Portal (access schedule, calendar, open slots, notes, etc.)

• Student notes with an additional area for private notes and notes to a parent with checkboxes to send a copy via email to student, parent, or both. 

• Repertoire management system

• Cancellation policy enforcement

• Attendance marking

• Expense and income tracking

• Manage list of students and parents that can be filtered by status (active, inactive, lead, etc.)

• And much, much more!

I will admit to you that Fons does not have many of these features. So you might ask...what on earth could Fons do that would cause me to exit My Music Staff? 

What's Wrong With My Music Staff?

My main complaint about My Music Staff is the scheduling system. It is just not nearly as flexible as Fons. Depending on how you set it up, MMS might make you seem busier than you are, and your students will have limited options for rescheduling. There is a way to make it all work, but Fons just does it better, in my opinion.

I think MMS works fine if you have a dedicated day for makeup spots or you charge a flat rate and don't ever allow credits for cancellations. However, given the name of this site, I prefer to be quite flexible with my students, and I knew that the MMS approach was costing me money.

With My Music Staff, the only way to have students schedule and reschedule is to create open lesson slots of varying lengths and change some settings so that when students cancel a lesson, it opens the spot. However, this is not really optimal. The lesson slots are manually created (though they can be set to be reoccurring events) and have fixed lengths. If you have an open lesson spot from 7 to 8, and 8-9, a student who needs a 7:30 to 8:15 won't take the spot without your manual intervention. 

Using this method, your schedule will seem signifantly tighter than it actually is. All the empty spots will push to your calendar, so it will always look busy even if you have an empty week. Not to mention, it is much more complicated for a new student to onboard themselves and pick a lesson spot without intervention from you and a fair bit of back and forth communication. MMS might have all the bells and whistles, but it takes more work to run and it doesn't have any mechanism for establishing work hours and letting students pick from those. 

Fons is Basically Calendly For Music Teachers

Fons has quite a lot going for it, especially in the customer service department. But, the real magic is in the scheduling system and booking system, which is significantly more efficient and flexible than pretty much any other music studio platform out there. I am convinced that you can make more money with Fons compared to other platforms, at least with the way I run my studio. Fons is certainly more expensive than something like MMS, and admittedly has less features, but it will pay for itself quite quickly, and give you a greater sense of peace.

While I was using My Music Staff, I discovered an application called Calendly, which made me realize that the scheduling approach with MMS wasn't working. There was clearly a better way. Calendly lets you identify available work hours for clients to choose from, and they can schedule using various intervals across your availability. In the realm of online music lessons, this concept is completely game changing.

The problem with Calendly is that it isn't specifically geared towards music teachers, and so there is quite a bit of awkwardness to deal with (lack of payment model support, lack of reoccurring events, etc.).  I don't feel like Calendly is a realistic option for running a music studio. I tried combining Calendly with MMS, but then I had to pay for two applications and there was still a bit of manual work involved in copying over Calendly bookings.

Fons features a similar scheduling approach to Calendly, but it is much more compatible with music lessons. With Fons, you can define your hours, and use 15, 30, or 60 minute intervals for booking. For example, if you had nothing scheduled from 7-9, and a 45-minute student needed a lesson, they could pick from 7, 7:15, 7:30, 7:45, 8, and 8:15. The system works that all out for each day and time that you are available. Considering this, students with all sorts of different lesson durations can very easily work themselves into your schedule.

I did a little napkin math and determined that Fons would pay for itself over MMS if one of my students took an additional lesson that they otherwise wouldn't have across a three month period. With my studio, the chances of this happening are extremely high, so this is a no brainer. I decided that I would find other applications to handle what Fons lacks, and ended up moving to Fons for scheduling and payments immediately upon discovering this. 

Payments, Billing, & Booking in Fons

I did want to briefly touch on payments in Fons, as this is what makes it more relevant to musicians compared to something like Calendly. Fons has three payment models: pay by the lesson (auto charged at the end), pay by the package, and pay by subscription.

There's quite alot of flexibility across these models, and everything can be automated (and Fons encourages this automation at every step). My favorite payment related feature is for packages to automatically renew when clients use up their last remaining appointment.

You can setup billing per client and per appointment. Fons helps you by automatically enforcing your cancellation policy in addition to collecting payment for you. There really are no invoices with Fons, just payment requests, which should be very infrequent once you collect a customer's payment information. Payments are processed using Stripe and automatically deposit into your bank account with no additional actions needed.

Another cool feature is the ability to create public bookings and packages which anyone can access using a unique link that Fons generates for you. This makes onboarding insanely easy. Note that all public bookings are visible on the same page.

One last thing that's definitely worth mentioning is the Fons Marketplace, which is a new feature that was released in 2023. This feature essentially allows you to create a mini-website / profile to be used for lead generation. You can learn more about this in another article I wrote here.

What I Don’t Like About Fons

Since Fons isn't intended to be everything that MMS is, I don't consider the lack of certain features a "con", especially if another application can easily step in and replace functionality. The main issue that I have with Fons, and this is one that you are all likely going to have to reconcile, is the lack of full support for account family members. 

Fons intends for you to have one point of contact for a family, and that will be the person that gets scheduling privileges, messages, notifications, and payment requests. That person often will not be the one actually attending lessons. There are many situations where you would want to be able to notify the person who is attending lessons. In fact, Fons has a really impressive messaging system that could be used for notes and all sorts of communications, but this feature doesn't work with family members. Since I can't use this feature with all of my students, I pretty much don't use it at all except for infrequent studio wide messages. And even then, I have to hope that parents pass along relevant communications. 

Fons does support family members to some extent, as they can be associated with the main account holder and scheduled independently, but you cannot communicate with them directly. There is a place in the family profile to list other email addresses, but these addresses will receive ALL notifications (including scheduling and billing related things).

To get around this limitation, I have made the following suggestions to parents who own a Fons account but aren't the ones attending lessons:

• For students to be aware of their schedules, they can subscribe to a Fons calendar feed on their device

• Students can log into the Fons website using the family account to reschedule lessons.

• If students use a cell phone, you can list their number as the main contact number, and they will receive notifications via text on the day of their lesson.  

While these aren't perfect solutions, they do get around most of the inconvenience of having one account per family. Considering everything that Fons is and does, this is literally the only thing I don't like. Considering that I likely make significantly more money per year with Fons, I am happy to find ways around these sorts of issues.

MMS vs Fons: Why Not Use Both Platforms?

You may wonder why I am comparing these applications, as they clearly do different things. In my mind, for the sake of simplicity, I feel that you should pick one or the other. In my opinion, there is too much redundancy between the two platforms with regards to scheduling, billing, and client lists. Running both programs at the same time will likely add too much complexity to your studio management and sort of defeat the purpose. 

This means that your real choice is between MMS as a single solution and Fons combined with a few other applications for expense tracking and notes. For me, the ease of scheduling and potential for much higher yearly profit wins out. I am more than happy to find alternative applications to replace the missing essential features that I lose from MMS. Fons is also still relatively new and early on in its development, so many of these features might eventually be baked in. I should also mention that I often felt like I couldn't take full advantage of what MMS has to offer, so I don't necessarily miss many of the features. 

Assignment Notes & Expense Tracking

The lack of student email communication means that we really can't use Fons for notes for all of our students unless all members of a family share a single email account. Since that is likely not on the table, a more graceful way of dealing with assignment notes would be to use an external application that generates a link to a shared document.

My favorite application with this feature is called Notion which allows you to share documents via hosted links quite easily. The documents work well on all devices and appear to the student as a typical website (and they can bookmark it).  Considering how good Notion is, I don't mind the lack of notes from Fons so much.

If you don't use the family members feature in Fons, the built in notes & followup feature (recently added) works very well to send assignment notes.

With regards to expense tracking, Fons used to have no support for this feature. However, in a recent update, Fons ended up adding expense tracking functionality. It's worth mentioning that Fons already has Quickbooks integration as well.

How to Transition to Fons from MMS

It's relatively easy to transition to Fons. All you need to do is announce it to your clients, input their names and email addresses to create Fons accounts, choose a billing model for each client, and then recreate your schedule over on Fons. Once payments and schedules start going, Fons will send emails to your clients and they can confirm their account and get fully setup very easily.

If you are coming from MMS, One thing to note is that it is not technically possible to recreate an existing account balance on Fons. This is because Fons doesn't use account balances. My clients paid by the month based on the number of appointments in MMS, and so I basically created a lesson package for them that represented the amount of appointments that they had remaining. I named the package "MMS Balance Transfer", put a $0 price on it, and set it to default at one appointment. I then checked each client's account balance in MMS, and figured out how many appointments that translated to, and then adjusted the number of remaining appointments in Fons for each client. 

This actually isn't nearly as difficult as it sounds, and it perfectly solves the problem. Once the clients run out of appointments from this particular package, I get them setup using normal billing in Fons. I am encouraging weekly folks to pay by the package, and intermittent folks to pay by the lesson. Done. 

When My Music Staff Makes More Sense Than Fons

For some people, MMS makes more sense than Fons. To me, MMS seems like a product that caters to a traditional studio with traditional policies, and it sort of feels like a studio management style reminiscent of a previous generation of thought about how music lessons should work. I mean that in the best possible way. MMS has a ton of features that are specifically designed for typical music studios, and it supports them well. If you are someone who needs invoicing, lesson notes, expense tracking, new student applications, hosted websites, repertoire management, and other features, you might be best suited by MMS.

Fons is something totally new and much more lightweight, and it represents what I feel is the future of music lessons, considering the impact of the pandemic and the online lesson phenomenon. The future of music lessons is likely very different from the past. I knew this back in 2018, even before the pandemic, when I became exclusively an online piano instructor. I could see that our more casual, more technology-infused culture might need a more flexible approach to lessons with less commitment, especially if the lessons were online. I created a website called Flex Lessons where I offer exactly the sort of thing you expect from the name...flexible music lessons. Students can study with me in real time or asynchronously through my membership, and they can jump in and out of lessons as they please. Fons is absolutely perfect for this. I feel like it was made for me, but I am sure there are many other folks out there who would appreciate the way that Fons does its thing. 

Seriously…Try Fons!

I sincerely hope you found this essay of an article helpful. If you did and you are interested in giving Fons a test run, I would greatly appreciate it if you used my referral link or let them know that I referred you, provided you feel like I earned it. 

I should also mention that there is a significant amount of depth to Fons, despite its simplicity. I focused on the important features that affected me and compared them to how MMS handles things. However, Fons does quite alot of stuff that MMS doesn't, which I didn't get into. You can learn more on the main Fons site. 

If you have any questions about Fons, first of all, know that Fons has awesome customer support. You'll notice that Fons uses a similar real time chat system that I use on this website, and so you can communicate with the folks on the Fons team in real time. During business hours, they are very responsive and you will definitely get assistance for whatever you need. You can also ask me questions using the chat on this site if you want learn more about my personal experience with Fons. 

Once you experience the magic of that scheduling system, I doubt you'll look back. 

Fons Referral Link