Hello friends, I’m Amy Chaplin and this is the Piano Pantry Podcast, a place where you’ll find practical and sustainable rhythms for your everyday teacher life. Today we’re having fun chatting a bit about taxes, studio management software needs, and all those subscriptions which just keep coming out of your account month after month so stick around for a bit of business talk.
Before we dig in I just wanted to start the conversation about the upcoming MTNA Conference in Chicago. I will be there both presenting a session on Monday during the young professionals track and also managing my entrepreneur table in the exhibit hall. I can tell you right now we’re going to have some fun in that corner. I have some awesome swag to give out and I’ll be doing a special giveaway for some extra fun swag on Tuesday afternoon so stay tuned.
It’s the end of February when this episode drops, and for many of us that means we’re in the midst of tax time. While I can’t imagine any of us actually enjoy the work needed to submit taxes, over the years I’ve slowly come to appreciate the annual marker of time that forces us to pause and take a deeper look at our business. If it weren’t for tax time, it would be very easy to just keep trekking along the way we always do and forget to stop and assess whether our finances are really in check.
If you don’t pay close attention to your outgoing cash, it’s very easy in 2026 for recurring subscriptions to keep quietly pulling those fees every month. When you see $3 here and $10 there, it doesn’t feel like much — but I bet if most of us stopped and made a list of everything we pay a monthly fee for, there would be at least two or three items we’d forgotten about.
As part of my tax preparation checklist, I keep a list of expenses that come out monthly so that, during tax prep time, I can go in and save all of those receipts at once rather than worrying about saving them throughout the year.
As much as possible, I make annual payments, but for some things — for one reason or another — I prefer to let them come out each month. It never fails that every year that list needs editing, whether it’s items I’ve stopped subscribing to or new ones that have crept in. Usually it’s the latter. LOL
I’m never going to be your girl who talks extensively about money and finance, but I do like to touch on a range of topics related to running a business — including things like finances and tax prep. If you want more specific ideas on tax preparation, go back and check out episode #54, Tackling Tax Prep.
For us as studio teachers, the timing of submitting taxes is actually perfect because early spring is when many of us begin looking toward our student roster and fees for the next school term. If you don’t already, I would encourage you to complete your taxes before making any hard decisions about what your income needs are — and in turn what your rates will look like for the following year. It can be easy to let tuition pricing become a shot in the dark, sometimes only considering what you think you can charge or should charge based on what you see others doing in your area.
This is not a way to set pricing.
There are some great tuition calculators online that offer helpful starting points based on location, education, demand, and more. I would encourage you to seek one of those out. Joy Morin also published a strong in-depth post recently on how to calculate a flat monthly fee for lessons. I’ll link to that and a couple of different tuition calculators in the show notes. You can find the show notes at PianoPantry.com/podcast/episode178
Beyond those considerations, we also have to account for our expenses — especially recurring ones. Gone are the days when most of us avoided subscription fees as much as possible. It’s simply how the world runs now. Because it’s so easily out of sight, out of mind, that’s all the more reason we need to stay aware of how much is flowing out of our accounts.
As you’re doing your tax prep this year, I would encourage you to ask two questions. First: do you actually utilize the tool you’re subscribing to, or are you holding onto it because you used to use it a lot — or because you think you should be using it?
And second: is the value the product provides worth the fee, especially considering your income-to-expense balance? So for example, a teacher who teaches one night a week doesn’t have the same spending power for tools as someone teaching full-time five days a week.
Most of the time, if you’re like me, you’ll probably say yes — you are still using and finding value in your subscriptions. But it’s something we definitely need to stop once a year and consider.
I myself have been struggling to get use out of a couple of tools I pay for monthly that I only use with a very small handful of students — less than 20%. I’ve justified them over the past year but am second-guessing continuing. In fact, I already canceled one and so far haven’t missed it.
To help kickstart your own review, I went through and made a list of subscriptions I pay for currently — or have at least paid for in recent years. Even though many of them are billed annually, I’m stating the monthly rate here for simplicity, going in cost order.
Musicnotes Pro membership — $1
Cloud storage — $3
Todoist — $5
Google Workspace — $7
Vivid Practice — $9
Canva Pro — $10
Notion — $10
Zoom — $14
Spotify — $15
SproutBeat — $15
ChatGPT — $20
Basic website hosting and domains — $25
That list alone is around $135 per month.
For some of us that could actually be the cost of one student per month depending on your tuition. So let’s talk easy numbers and say you charge $135 per month per student and you have 10 students, so if you have $135 per month in subscription fees, that’s 10% of your income.
So you have to weigh whether those tools are worth the expense that comes out of your income. Yes, they’re business write-offs — so it’s not purely dollar-for-dollar out of pocket — but it’s still money spent.
Another area to consider is studio management software. We’ve touched on this a little in past episodes, including:
– Episode 086 — On Assignments and Lesson Planning
– Episode 140 — Using Google Classroom for Assignments & Studio Communication
– Episode 149 — Auto-Payment Processing Options
The three most popular studio management platforms at the moment include Duet Partner, My Music Staff, and Fons. Some are flat rates and some are tiered by student count, but generally you’re looking at somewhere between $17 and $30 per month.
Considering the subscription list I shared earlier, that puts studio management software toward the upper end of expenses. Some practice apps have similar pricing on a sliding scale.
I’m not digging on the creators behind these tools — they’re expensive to build and maintain so they need to charge what they need to charge in order to make a living themselves — I’m just coming at this from the consumer side.
We all have to consider what our studios look like, what our needs are, and how those needs can be met in a way that makes life easier.
If you’re willing to think outside the box, I have another option you might consider. It’s a newer way of running a studio business but, so far, the best way I’ve found to use one tool across studio work, personal life, and other projects. It’s called an Everything App — a tool that pulls multiple formats together.
Now today, I’m specifically talking about Notion, my productivity and note-taking app of choice.
Like any new tool — including studio software — there’s a learning curve. But once you learn it, t he advantage is double duty. You’re not just managing students, waitlists, lesson plans, group classes, and repertoire — you’re also using the same system across your life.
Dedicated studio software helps organize your business but it typically doesn’t extend beyond that.
Better yet, Notion is cheaper than studio software. For many teachers, the free version of Notion is generous enough that you may never need to upgrade. Even if you do, it’s around $10 per month rather than $20-plus like many studio platforms.
I’ll never pretend any app can do everything, but Notion comes close. I can create forms that feed directly into databases for inquiries and onboarding, track repertoire and rote pieces, store notes links for courses I’ve purchased, track student gift ideas, save interesting articles, link to all the surrounding school calendars and more and it’s— all housed on one dashboard where I can see all of this in one place.
Notion even now includes a calendar with basic scheduling. At the moment, it works best for one-off bookings — like scheduling a new student interview — where you send a link and they choose a time. The calendar is free.
Notion also offers AI features for an additional cost.
For transparency, here’s what Notion doesn’t do — yet.
It isn’t a full class registration system where you can cap group enrollment automatically. The calendar scheduling is still primarily one-person booking and is not something I even use for my regular lessons. I just set the schedule in the fall and maintain my own Google Calendar for that.
It also doesn’t process payments. I wouldn’t be surprised if that changes someday, though. Who knows!
For my studio, it works because I’m small enough to use a separate payment processor so it doesn’t bother me to not have that all on one. Everyone is set up on autopay, so once it’s configured, there isn’t much to manage. Stripe works well for this, and so does Coinhop.
There are lots of teachers now utilizing Notion to manage their studios. In fact, you can hear more in episodes 134, 135, 136, and 177.
If you’ve been second guessing continuing to pay fees for studio management software now may be the time to take the plunge. The good news is you don’t have to figure it all out on your own, you can hit the ground running with your new Notion workspace in just a few weeks when you join Organize Your Life Notion an upcoming workshop put on by myself and Joy Morin.
We’ve spend the last 5 years perfecting how we use Notion as independent teachers and will walk you through the process in an easily digestible way. No gimmicks, just clear how-to’s. You’ll get a starter pack of Notion page templates designed especially for our teaching colleagues as well as practical hands-on experience building out your workspace live with us there to help.
Believe me when I say you will be saving yourself the learning curve and will walk away with a clear path and plan for what Notion can do for you.
It kicks off this Friday, February 27, 2026 and runs for three Fridays in a row from 12:30-2:30pm eastern time. The extended discount of $30 off is good through Wednesday, February 25 so don’t delay! Use code NOTION 30 at checkout. Visit PianoPantry.com/notion to register.
If you’re interested in Notion but not ready for the workshop, you can join the waitlist at PianoPantry.com/notionwait.
As always you can find the transcript for this episode along with links to everything mentioned PianoPantry.com/podcast/episode178.
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Have a great end of February, friends!
