Thinking through all the actions, and potential pitfalls, involved in running your own music school or studio can be daunting - especially for a teacher new to running a business.

While individual lessons have generally been paid on amonthly basis, because group classes have set schedules and durations, the most common form of payment has been "Up Front", or a deposit and balance at first class.

After outgrowing and "graduating" from the spreadsheet management technique, I used Quickbooks for several sessions as my only management system for managing class enrollment in an enrichment studio. You can do a lot by defining families as customers, students as jobs and setting up memorized invoices for each class. However, very soon the limitations of using an accounting system as a registration database drove me to a more modern database approach.
Modern dance studio management systems for tracking family/student enrollments are the natural, and the best, place to keep on top of customer fees and payments.

Modern music studio management systems for tracking family/student enrollments are the natural, and best, place to keep on top of their fees and payments. This raises the question of how to use them in combination with the rest of your financial accounting systems and processes.
Our approach, using YourVirtuoso and Quickbooks as an example, is described below.