Lessons and a bench
A teaching business that also fixes things.
Most software here starts at the till. This starts at the family account — and the repair bench hangs off it, on its own billing rhythm.
Two lines, one customer, two due dates.
The Ferreiras take lessons on Tuesdays and Thursdays. In September they also brought in a Martin for a fret dress.
In most setups that family exists twice: once in the lesson scheduler and once on a repair ticket, with a notebook by the bench as the only thing joining them. Nobody can answer “what does this family owe us” without adding up two systems and hoping.
Here it is one billing account. Lessons accrue through the month and are invoiced on your terms. The repair is invoiced the moment it is collected and is payable then, because the instrument is the only leverage in that transaction. Two invoices, one balance, one history.
That is the whole idea, and everything else follows from it — the notes, the credits, the statement, the question of who to chase.
What this is not.
Said here rather than on a call, because half of what a music shop needs is genuinely not in this.
There is no point of sale. No till, no card reader at the counter for a set of strings, no barcode scanning, no serialised inventory, and no rentals. Those are real parts of running a music retailer, and there is software that does them well —Music Shop 360 and AIM by Tri-Tech are both built for exactly that, with lessons and repairs as modules alongside the retail floor.
B♭ Studio comes at it from the other end. It is a billing and operations system for a business whose centre of gravity is teaching, which happens to also run a bench. The things it is unusually good at are the money ones:
- A monthly billing run you preview in full and then commit, including every account it skipped and why.
- Credits and discounts with real ceilings, where the person who requested one is never the person who cleared it.
- Teacher pay derived from attendance at the rate that applied on the day taught, paid out through Stripe as contractors.
- An audit trail the database refuses to let anyone edit, and forty permissions you can retune yourself.
If your day is mostly ringing up sales, that list is not what you need. If your day is mostly lessons, families, invoices and a bench in the back, it is.
Questions people ask about this.
- Is this a point-of-sale system?
- No. There is no till, no barcode scanner, no inventory and no rentals. If you need to ring up strings and picks and track serialised stock, you want a music retail POS — Music Shop 360 and AIM by Tri-Tech both cover that ground properly. B♭ Studio is for the teaching and repair side of the business, where the questions are who owes what and who taught which lesson.
- Can it handle instrument rentals?
- Not today. Rentals are not modelled, and neither is retail stock. If rentals are a significant part of your income, this is not the right fit yet.
- Do a family’s lessons and repairs really share one account?
- Yes, and it is the decision the whole system is built around. A family taking lessons who brings a guitar in for a fret dress is the same billing account, with one balance, one set of notes and one history — but two invoices, because the two lines are due at different times.
- Why not just put the repair on the monthly lesson invoice?
- Because you cannot hand back an instrument against an invoice that is not due for three weeks. The repair is invoiced and payable at pickup, and releasing the instrument is its own permission that will not fire against an unpaid invoice. The lesson invoice keeps its terms.
- What about a walk-in who has never taken a lesson?
- A repair creates or attaches a billing account, so a one-off customer still lands somewhere you can look them up next year.
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.
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