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After the sudden shutdown of Coinhop, we explore five auto-payment processing options for music studios such as Stripe and Wave.
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Transcript
Welcome to episode 149 of the Piano Pantry Podcast! I’m Amy Chaplin, your host. On this podcast, we talk about all things teacher life-related from organizing your studio to getting dinner on the table and all that comes between. Speaking of all that comes between, today is one of those as we consider auto-payment processing options.
I was planning on making episode 149 a whole other topic, but when I received an email in my inbox the week before Thanksgiving stating that Coinhop, my auto-payment processing app of choice since 2018, was shutting down, plans changed.
I’ve been a huge advocate for Coinhop for years, and I know many of you were using it on my recommendation. I felt responsible for helping us all figure this out, so I delayed the publication of this episode so I could have a little more time for research.
I hope my efforts in today’s robust episode help you work through your own thoughts and feelings on what to do next. It was a lot to do in a short amount of time, and I’m not totally 100% sure where I landed at this point is my final decision, but sharing this episode with you definitely helped me think through everything as I hope it will for you as well so let’s dive in.
I’ll just say upfront that there is nothing else out there like Coinhop. If you’re not familiar with Coinhop at all, it was an app that you could also access directly through the website. It had a very minimal interface. You entered your customer name, email, phone number, and the amount they were being charged monthly. An email or text could be sent to them to connect their payment method. ACH was the preferred method as it only incurred a 1% fee for the receiver. Payees could opt to use a credit card, but it charged a small percentage to them, not to the receiver.
All payments were processed automatically on the 1st of every month, and you were sent one transaction from Coinhop. However, depending on different payment methods and connection dates, you might end up getting paid in two or three deposits. That didn’t start happening to me though until I moved my entire studio to that method and had more people going through the process.
Here are all of the options we’re going to go over today: Acuity Scheduling, Studio Management Software, Stripe, Your Personal Bank, and Wave.
Acuity Scheduling
First up is Acuity Scheduling. Acuity is an appointment scheduling software similar to Square. I considered Acuity first because it’s the scheduling tool I’ve used for a couple of years for signups for things like Power Hours, one-on-one consultations, mine and Joy Morin’s Notion workshop, my digital organization coaching, studio summer lessons, group classes, and more.
The ability is there for you to set up recurring auto payments through their subscription tool. There is no free version of Acuity, though. The baseline is $16 a month, and the next level, which gives you access to text reminders and those recurring subscriptions for autopayments, is $27 a month.
While setting up the subscriptions isn’t too difficult, Acuity itself has a bit of a learning curve, so I wouldn’t recommend this option for most teachers unless you already use it.
Even though I am comfortable with and already pay to use Acuity, I’m not sure it’s the best answer for this need. As I mentioned, Acuity is designed around appointments. When you set up a subscriber for an automatic recurring payment, you have to assign that subscription to an actual appointment type and value for the subscriber’s redemption.
While I can fudge it and set the appointment type it’s connected to to $0—after the client sets up the subscription, it still displays two buttons: “Use Subscription” and “Check Balance.”
While I could instruct my families to ignore those buttons after setting up their payment information, having to do things like that feels messy and unprofessional to me.
For this reason, I think I’m leaning away from Acuity for my auto payments.
Studio Software
The next option, which is probably the most obvious or logical to consider, is to use a dedicated studio software program like My Music Staff, Duet Partner, or Fons. The wonderful thing about these sites is that they are designed entirely around the music studio business. The cost is anywhere from $15-$30 per month—similar to Acuity.
They all have the ability to smoothly process and manage your autopayments with a variety of setup options, including subscription-based flat monthly fees, packages, and such. I’m fairly confident they all connect through Stripe for payment processing, so you pay the usual 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction processing fee.
The possibility of moving to a dedicated studio software for payment processing for me has a somewhat complicated backstory, so bear with me as I has it out with you.
I used My Music Staff for several years but only ever used it for formal invoicing for semester and yearly payments, managing my student and family details, and connecting my studio website contact form to my student waiting list in My Music Staff. Even when I had My Music Staff, I wasn’t using the auto-payment feature because I was using Coinhop for those who wanted to make monthly payments, which was cheaper than doing it through My Music Staff with Stripe’s fees.
As Notion—a productivity and note-taking app—has become a huge part of my workflow, a few years ago, I moved the registration forms and management of my student and family details into Notion. This past June, I stopped accepting annual payments and moved my entire studio to monthly auto payments with Coinhop as my payment processor and discontinued use of My Music Staff entirely.
Now that I have to reconsider how I want to handle monthly auto-payments, I realized that I might need to simultaneously reconsider my current process for having students sign up for summer lessons and group classes during the year, a process that I have set up mostly for auto-reminders as well as making it easy for me to track who is coming without having to have direct communication.
The summer before last, rather than having students scheduled at the same set lesson time each week, I started letting them book their four lessons for the summer at whatever days and times worked around their schedule in June and July. Since their lesson times were not consistent, I wanted an auto-reminder feature. I was already using Acuity Scheduling for things like my Piano Pantry power hour and consultation signups, so I started using Acuity for my studio summer scheduling. The $16 per month fee included email reminders.
As you know, emails are not good for half my studio families. They just don’t check them, so this past summer, I upgraded to get text reminders in Acuity, which cost $27 a month. These days, I think most people respond better to text reminders than email reminders anyway.
I decided to continue using Acuity throughout this year for signups for weekly Jam Band and other classes that occur every couple of months, such as piano parties for my younger students, recitals, and performance and musicianship classes.
Now that I’m using Acuity throughout the school year and not just for the two summer months, and considering it’s the same price as a lot of the studio software, I realized I might need to just go back to studio software and kill two birds with one stone.
I’ll just say upfront that whether it’s My Music Staff, Duet Partner, Fons, or any other, most studio management programs are very similar in features and abilities. What distinguishes them is the overall interface and design. This is not a paid ad at all but I’m going to talk about Fons because it was the one I was most curious to check out as I was considering going back to a studio management program.
I created a free account in Fons and started playing around. I also had a Zoom meeting with Fons support where I could ask a lot of questions, which was very helpful. I had some pretty specific questions around payment processing but even more around the booking and auto reminders since I was comparing it to my experiences with Acuity.
First of all, I’m really impressed with the overall design. It’s very user-friendly and, for the most part, fairly intuitive. It is web-based—there is not an app. Families can just pin the link to the webpage to their phones’ homepage.
You will set up the family’s information and then invite them to create a login so they can connect their auto-payment information. They also need to log in to sign up for lessons and classes.
Both credit cards and ACH are accepted. Families do not pay any processing fees either way. As I mentioned earlier and as per the norm, we, the teachers, pay 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction for credit card processing and 1.8% for ACH. While a cheaper process fee, the ACH bank transfers can take longer to clear.
This is all connected to Stripe, so you will get a weekly deposit. You can set the due date any way you like. So, for me, since I was doing Coinhop, it’s been set to come out on the first day of the month. Luckily, you can set it up the same way to be due on the first of every month.
Families will receive an invoice when you send them the link to set up their payment method, but they will only receive receipts once the payment is processed. It truly is automatic. Families don’t have to approve the payment every month, nor do they receive an invoice prior to the payment coming out, which is great.
That’s the gist of the auto-payment feature.
Even though this episode is about automatic monthly payments, since I was considering and looking into class signups and automated text reminders, I’m going to share what I inquired about and learned as far as this goes in Fons.
The first question was, “Can I create one-off lesson times they can sign up for in the summertime?” Specifically, I want to open up exact lesson times, like Mondays at 3:20, 4:00, 4:40, and 5:20, and then they sign up for a specific time. Almost all my students are 40 minutes long, so I like having exact lesson slots. For students who take longer lessons, I just tell them to book two slots back to back.
The answer is that the only way to create open lesson times with specific times connected to them in Fons is to create a group class that only allows one person to sign up. Otherwise, the individual appointment system is designed around more of an open calendar similar to what Calendly does, where you set your availability, such as Monday from 10 am to 6 pm. Then, people can sign up for whatever time works for them.
You can set up regular recurring lessons throughout the year as recurring appointments. The family then has to accept or approve that recurring appointment. For weeks that you’re closed—like during holidays—once you set up that recurring appointment, you can cancel those appointments without notifying the families.
You set global settings for your entire studio on how far families can book lessons or classes in advance and how your reminders work. Email reminders are default and cannot be turned off. They go out 24 hours prior to the appointment. Text reminders are optional and do not cost you extra, which is nice as that was one feature that cost me $11 more a month in Acuity.
If you turn on text reminders and families do not want to receive them, especially when they have the same lesson time every week, they can reply STOP to the text, and they will stop receiving them. But it will turn ALL of them off – even for the one-off classes, but they will still receive emails.
I know there are a lot more features in these studio softwares but these were specific things that I was looking for. I’ve realized the big question I’m asking myself as I’m considering studio software once again as a possibility is: do I really need these auto-text reminders? Is it really worth the cost?
The only reason I’m questioning it now is that I have been slowly cutting back the size of my studio and am getting closer to the 15-student mark and 11 different families. There’s a big difference between managing a studio of 15 and a studio of 20 or more. It’s amazing what having 5 fewer students feels like. $30 a month is a big expense for a smaller studio. As always, we have to weigh the benefits and convenience with the cost.
I’m still not 100% sure with Fons. I’ve gone back and forth over the last couple of days. The fact that thrown in another decision point for myself regarding group class signups and text reminders has only complicated the decision for me. *sigh
Stripe
The next logical option to consider is to skip the studio mangement software that goes through Stripe anyway and go directly to the source—Stripe.
You can easily set up recurring auto payments directly in Stripe as well. First, you set up your customers, then your products, such as your flat monthly lesson fee. If you have new customers paying a higher rate than old customers or families paying for more than one student, then you would set up different products for each of those different fee amounts rather than having families have to make the payment twice for different students.
Next, you set up your online checkout preference—basically, do you want to use a direct link you can send to families, or do you want to embed it on your website. Then, you can choose what payment methods you want to let them use to process. You could do credit card only or you could allow things like Apple Pay, or ACH Bank Transfer. I personally would allow Credit Card and ACH Bank Transfer. If you turn on ACH, just know that those payments can take longer to process than credit cards.
Also, Stripe has a recommendation that will pop up to turn on something called Webhooks first. I don’t think that would be necessary for us, as it’s more for someone selling physical products that would want to make sure the payment clears before shipping. You might possibly consider this if you want to be 100% certain the payment clears before the students get the lessons, but if you have the payments timed right so that the payment is made prior to the lessons occurring, it shouldn’t be a problem. Just something to be aware of, though.
One point to note is that you cannot customize the payment link.
Another point to note is that Stripe recommends turning on something called “Link,” which is what will autofill your customers’ payment and address details so they can easily complete their purchases. This seems like a reasonable setting to turn on.
When you set up your bank account, you’ll also want to set up your payout schedule – how often you want your processed payments to come through to your account. Unlike Coinhop, you won’t get it all in one deposit. Your payouts will list what transactions they were from.
Use can set up custom branding with your main brand color, logo, and icon. I have my studio 88 logo and then a smaller version of the same design which just says S88.
Tiny little catch, though, which is isn’t a deal breaker but was just a minor annoyance. The brand color is used in a really wide strip at the top of the stripe payment link. For me, green. When I uploaded my logo, which is all black except the number 88—for studio 88—which is the dark green, the 88 doesn’t show up because it’s the same color as the green background. Luckily, since I had my logo custom-designed, I have the original black and green version as well as solid black and solid white versions.
So, I changed it to a totally white version of my logo so it would pop against the green background. However, when I checked the custom settings for the printable PDF invoice, the entire background of the page, which is white since it’s printable, the white logo did not show up at all. *sign
You can’t set different logos for different versions of the invoice, which makes sense. Again, this is not a total deal-breaker but just a little annoyance.
My solution was to use the solid black version of my logo rather than the one with the number 88 in color or the solid white version. Another thing you’ll want to know is if you need to use a .PNG version of your logo rather than a .JPG version, as PNG supports a transparent background. Otherwise, your logo will look weird with a white background set on top of your brand color. Hopefully, that makes sense through this verbal description.
Another minor branding workaround I had to do was with the ICON. The file of the short version of my logo, which fits into the circle-size social media profiles, is cropped right at the edge of the logo, so when I uploaded it, it got cut off a bit. The answer was to open a blank square-size file on Canva, upload the logo, and leave a large white border around it, export the PNG file from Canva, and then upload it to your Stripe Icon. Then it fit perfectly.
Patreon
Before we finish out with the final two options, I just wanted to let you know that this podcast is supported by listeners on Patreon. If you are finding value and enjoyment in this content, please consider supporting the podcast. For $4 a month you will make a big difference in keeping this content going. For $7 you’ll can get a few extras from me throughout the year. Visit PianoPantry.com/patreon
A shout out to newest member Barbara Collins for joining in and cheering this podcast on. Thank you so much Barbara for your support!
Your Bank
OK! moving on. The next thing you might want to consider is to talk to your bank. I scheduled an in-person meeting with the manager of the bank where I have my business checking account—it’s a local bank.
It was honestly really eye-opening. I opened my business checking account 14 years ago and have never checked in with my bank to see if I needed to move to something different. She made some really good recommendations for me, both for helping keep my account more secure online and sharing some payment processing options I had no idea existed.
I thought the only possibility might be Zelle for business, but that wasn’t the case. In fact, they didn’t recommend Zelle for what I wanted to do. First, it can be limiting to your clients because not everyone’s banks give it as an option. Second, at least with my bank, there is no option to set up automatic monthly payments through Zelle. Interestingly enough, I do know a teacher friend who has someone who has her set on autopayments through Zelle, so it might depend on the bank whether or not recurring settings are available.
I don’t know that it does a lot of good to dive into specifics here because every bank will have different options, but I’ll still share what I learned.
My bank has an option called Cash Flow. You can set up the recurring payments, and it will email your client to connect their payment method. Only ACH transactions are accepted with Cash Flow. You pay $20 a month plus $0.50 per transaction.
For comparison, I’m making up numbers here. Say you take in $4,000 in transactions total per month. If your student payments are $150 a month, then that’s roughly 25 transactions. With Stripe’s 2.9% fee and $0.30 per transaction, you would pay around $120 a month in processing fees.
With Cash Flow that would be $35.
The second option they have only accepts only credit cart autopayments. It’s called Clover Dashboard and it’s similar to Stripe with the 2.9% and $0.30 per transaction fee. It also has a one-time setup fee of $129 and then a $7 per month fee ongoing.
In our above scenario, it would cost you the same as Stripe, except you would pay an additional $7 per month plus the one-time setup cost. The benefit of doing things through your bank like this is that you have more personal support than you would through the online Stripe portal.
The only option my bank had that accepted both credit cards and ACH was more complicated than would make sense for any of us in this business, so I’m not going to dive into details.
The benefit of Stripe is that I can accept both ACH and Credit Card transactions, which gives families more flexibility. However, I’ll be paying a higher fee than if I use the option that only accepts ACH through my bank.
Wave
The last option we’re going to cover today is Wave. The first important point to note as we are talking about the Wave app. The website is waveapps.com. This is an important distinction between another website—Wave.com, which is another payment site dedicated to making Africa a cashless continent. So you want Waveapps.com not Wave.com. Also, that’s Apps plural. If you go to Waveapp.com without the S you will get a site that is not valid.
Wave app is an online money management portal. Unlike Stripe, you can use it for general accounting purposes, scanning and saving digital receipts, payroll, and more. The process of setting up recurring invoices is very similar to Stripe. You add customers, you add your products, and you set up your recurring invoices. An email is sent to the customer to set up their payment information, and they are mailed a receipt after it is processed every month. I thought both Stripe and Wave were very easy to use and intuitive.
Wave’s recurring payments are called “recurring invoices,” and Stripe’s are called “subscriptions.”
One thing that might take some time to see what works best is setting up the invoice date and the due date. If I understand correctly, unlike Coinhop, you can’t tell it to process the payment on the 1st day of every month. You have to tell it what date to generate the invoice and how long they have to pay it—like due on receipt, due within 7 days, or within 14 days, etc.
So, if you generate it on January 1 and set the due date to 14 days from receipt, the due date is the 15th of the month. What I’m not 100% sure of without testing it out myself is whether the date the payment is processed becomes set to whenever they set up the payment. So, if they get the invoice on January 1 and go in and set up their payment on January 7, will that be the date their payment will always process?
If you want all payments for the month of January cleared by January 1, then you might need to set the invoice to process on the 15th and say it is due within 14 days, so all payments for the next month are received prior to the first day of that month.
Again, I’m not 100% sure without actually using it myself.
While I really like the Wave interface and the professional-looking payment setup, we currently use Quicken to manage all our personal and business finances. It’s a little more robust than Wave, but personally, for now, I don’t think Wave is the option for me. Of course, you wouldn’t even have to use the other tools in Wave—you could just use the payment processing.
Conclusion
As we wrap up here, let’s recap.
Unless you are already using and are very comfortable with Acuity Scheduling, I wouldn’t really recommend it as an option for consideration for auto payments.
If you like the idea of getting a good autopayment option and want access to studio management tools, such as booking group classes and receiving auto text reminders, then you might want to use studio management software.
If you don’t already use an online money management tool for your business and are interested in using it more, I recommend strongly considering Wave.
If all you want is a simple way of offering auto payments without any other bells and whistles, then I would recommend just going with Stripe.
Before you make any decisions, though, please consider talking to the bank where you have your checking account—especially if it’s local. You might be surprised at the options they can offer.
As for me… well, as I said at the beginning, I’m not 100% sure this is my final decision, but right now, I’m leaning toward trying out my bank’s ACH processing option, Cash Flow. They have a 60-day trial period before the $20 fee is charged, which means I can have two months of processing to see if I like it.
While it’s nice to streamline things in the same place, I also think it’s good business and a nice courtesy to give people payment options. I might reach out to my studio families and let them know I’m going to trial ACH processing through my bank and just say that if anyone really prefers to do credit card processing, then I will set them up on Stripe.
One final thought. Size also plays a significant role in business decisions. If you manage a fairly sizeable studio, then I think there’s a strong argument for using studio management software. As my studio gets smaller and smaller, the need for certain tools like this feels less necessary.
Like anything, friends, there’s a lot to weigh in these decisions. Think about it for a while, make a decision, and if it doesn’t work well, then rethink it again next year. I know it’s not always fun making changes, but sometimes we don’t have a choice.
As we roll into the end of 2024 and see 2025, peeking around the corner, remember to mark your calendar for two upcoming dates. The first is the workshop Organize Your Life with Notion put on by myself and Joy Morin. It will run for 3 Fridays in a row from January 10-January 24 from 1:00pm-3:00pm Eastern Time. Visit PianoPantry.com/notionwait to join the waitlist.
The second item is my online digital organization small group coaching series, which will run for 6 Fridays in a row from January 31 – March 7 from 1:00pm-2:30pm Eastern Time. Visit PianoPantry.com/getorganized to join that waitlist.
Thanks for taking a moment to rate the podcast on your podcast app and if you have an extra minute, I would appreciate a review as well. Next week you can look forward to a special teacher talk episode with my pal and fellow podcaster Christina Whitlock. Until then, friends!
