Good evening!
I hope everyone had a great holiday break! Now we are in the thick of contest season, state assessments, and the race to the end of school!
As we have mentioned before, we are always working on making our lesson billing as easy for you to understand and easy for us to process as possible. If you've had lessons with me for some time, you know that there have been many iterations of the invoices since we started our new system a couple years ago. But, it seems that we keep falling short of making it work in all situations, and we know what the real culprit is: billing in advance. It's the policy of all of the school districts where I teach that lesson teachers are supposed to bill in advance, and I understand the reasoning of the requirement - it protects the lesson teachers and the district. I'll refrain form explaining all that here as it is a long story, but I have always tried to do that as requested. The problem for us, myself and Paul - my husband who helps me with the billing, is that for billing in advance to make sense to all of you, the wonderful parents of my wonderful students whom I love very much, who pay for those lessons, we would have to be able to send out those invoices exactly on the first of every month so that those who pay a little later have every payment accounted for on that invoice. But, as I'm sure all of you can relate, that just doesn't work out for us most months. Hopefully, in future iterations of our billing system, this will become more automated, and maybe then we'll make it work, but for now we know that it doesn't.
So, as we approach summer, we will go to a "billing after" system, similar to we did last summer, hopefully better, with the intent of keeping that system in place going forward after that. Here's how we are thinking it will work for now. This is subject to change, so we will make a new post here with details as things develop.
- This April invoice will be the last "bill in advance" invoice
- We will not send an invoice for May until after the first of June; June's invoice won't come until July, etc.
- The next invoice will still state the number of expected lessons for the coming month, but the amount due will only be calculated based on the number of lessons your child has actually had
- You can still pay in advance and we recommend that you do that. If you want to do that, and have paid for the previous month's bill before the end of that month, refer to the expected number of lessons on the previous invoice, or just send me an email or a text around the time you're ready to pay, and I'll let you know how many lessons I expect your child to receive that month. However, I probably will not be able to let you know about any past due balances or credits you may have (that's Paul's department,) so, as I said, it only works if you've paid the previous month in full.
- If you don't choose to pay before the end of the month, we will expect payment in full at the time we send the invoice. Yes, we will still make payment arrangements like before, but since we are billing after the time when you would have normally made that payment, the expectation will be that you pay in full when you receive the invoice.
- This is still a work in progress, so we may make changes as we go.
