How to switch from My Music Staff without losing a family.

Switching studio software feels risky because the stakes are real: families, cards on file, a calendar that has to be right on Monday morning. But the actual work is smaller than it looks. Here is the plan we used to move our own two-location studio, in the order that avoids surprises.

Before you touch anything: decide your billing model

Most of the pain in a migration is not data, it is discovering mid-move that your new tool bills differently. So decide first. My Music Staff studios usually run one of three ways:

• Monthly tuition — a flat amount per student per month, regardless of how many lessons fall in it.
• Per-lesson — families pay for lessons that actually happened, billed on a cycle.
• Packages — prepaid blocks of lessons that get consumed.

Methodica supports all three, but it is built around a simple rule: the price lives on the student, attendance drives what is billed, and the family's invoice schedule decides when. If you are on monthly tuition today, you will set each student's price as "per month". If you are per-lesson, "per lesson" or "hourly". Packages stay optional. Knowing this up front means the import maps cleanly.

Step 1 — Export what you actually need (30 minutes)

You do not need everything. You need:

1. Families and contacts — names, emails, phone numbers, which students belong to which parent.
2. Students — instrument, teacher, current lesson length and day/time.
3. Open balances — who owes what right now. Print the aging report.
4. Your policies — cancellation window, make-up rules, late fees. Copy the text.

Lesson history is nice to have, not essential. Card details never export from any system (that is a good thing); families will re-enter cards once, and we cover how to make that painless below.

Step 2 — Run the import (10 minutes)

Methodica has a direct My Music Staff importer. In your new studio, open Import from MMS, paste your MMS API token, and it pulls teachers, families, parents, students, and lesson history. When we moved our studio it brought over four teachers, sixty-six families and about a thousand lessons in under a minute, with a review screen before anything is committed.

Two things the importer does that matter:

• It never emails anyone during import. Families are created quietly. You decide when invitations go out.
• Adult students are handled correctly. An adult learner becomes a student who manages their own billing, not a fake "parent" record.

Not on MMS? The CSV importer takes the same columns.

Step 3 — Set prices and the invoice schedule (1 hour)

This is the part to do carefully. In Pricing & Billing:

1. Create your lesson types (30 min, 45 min, 60 min) with default prices.
2. Set studio billing defaults: invoice day (say, the 1st), billing cycle (monthly is the default; weekly, every four weeks, quarterly or a custom number of days are there too), in advance or in arrears, and days until due.
3. Set per-student prices where they differ from the defaults. The Student prices tab shows everyone and where their price is coming from.
4. Apply the schedule to all families in one click.

Then set your late-cancellation rule (hours of notice, and whether a late cancel is billed or gets a make-up credit). Attendance is what makes an invoice line, so decide now whether unrecorded lessons should still bill.

Step 4 — Connect payments (20 minutes)

Payments are built in. Each location connects its own bank account through Stripe, right from the Locations screen. Have your EIN, bank details and a government ID handy; Stripe's onboarding takes a few minutes and you will see a clear "ready to accept payments" state when it is done. If you have two locations with two entities, connect each one; families are charged by the location they attend.

Step 5 — The one email (and the card-on-file link)

Do not send families a "we have new software!" announcement and hope. Send one email that asks for exactly one action. Ours said:

Methodica generates that card link per family (Request cards → review → send), and shows you who has and has not saved a card. Chase the stragglers by text a week before your first invoice day.

Step 6 — Run one cycle in parallel, then cancel

Keep MMS alive for one billing cycle. Bill from Methodica. Compare the totals to what MMS would have billed. When the first cycle is clean, and it usually is, cancel the old subscription. Total elapsed time for us: a weekend of setup and one month of overlap.

What you gain on the other side

The admin is equivalent. What is different is everything after the invoice: teachers building lessons in thirty seconds, parents seeing actual progress instead of a balance, and students opening the app on their own because there is a streak to protect and a quest to finish. That is the reason to move. Here is the honest feature-by-feature comparison.