How To Work in Semesters

In Music Monitor, the billing itself is simple. You can process your billing on any schedule you choose. Just set the Number of Lessons per Billing Period to the number you want to bill for, and create billing lines for the current students.

See Send Tuition Fees to Accounts for guidance.

The place where it makes a difference whether you're billing per term or per semester is when you're reconciling the amounts billed. If you have a provision for making billing adjustments when lessons have been cancelled, you need to be able to calculate how many lesson cancellations apply to each enrolment in the billing period.

There is a robust process for doing this. See Billing Tuition Lesson Adjustments for guidance.

The calculations are made using information from your Attendance records, so the key to managing enrolments by semester is how you set up your rolls.

But first, a quick note on Calendar setup.

Most school calendars are set up in separate terms. The week numbering starts again at Week 1 each term. If your school works that way, you should set up your Music Monitor calendar the same way.

See Set Term and Week Names for guidance.

Only if your entire school calendar is set up in semesters should you set up your Music Monitor calendar to reflect that.

In the rare case that you are setting up your entire Calendar in semesters, the differences from the general guidance are:

When you do your billing reconciliation for a term or semester, the system finds all Attendance records that have the term or semester name you specify.

Therefore, if you're reconciling by semester, you need to name the rolls by the semester. In the rolls setup screen, you will see these boxes.

Then when you enter the Week Name for the roll, you must also specify which term it is. We recommend you use a fairly brief form of name here, to ensure the full text is visible in all the places it appears.

When you come to create rolls for Term 2, you will still be entering "Semester 1" in the first field, so this ensures you don't have any rolls with identical names.

By contrast, it's generally better to still set up Ensemble Rolls for one term at a time. This is simply because the screen that displays the rolls will only display 10 weeks at a time. Beyond the 10th week, teachers have to click a button to see the additional records, every time they open the roll.

The Ensemble Attendance data isn't used in the reconciliation process, so it's not important to include the semester label here - but you can if you choose, for consistency, e.g. "Semester 1, Term 1".