Run your teaching business on software that carries your name.
Cadence is a customer relationship manager for small, lesson-based businesses — music schools, tutoring centres, driving instructors, studios and coaches. Scheduling, billing, reminders and family communication all live in one place, and every screen your customers see belongs to your brand rather than ours.
A walkthrough runs about half an hour, and we use your own roster as the example.
Good morning, Dana
Tuesday, 14 April · 31 lessons scheduled today
Most teaching businesses run on six tools that don’t talk to each other.
A roster in a spreadsheet, a calendar somewhere else, invoices typed by hand, and reminders sent from a personal phone. Every one of them is a place for something to go wrong, and all of them need you. Cadence replaces the stack with a single record of each family, each instructor and each lesson.
Payment structures that match how you already charge.
Some businesses bill a flat monthly tuition regardless of how many lessons fall in the month. Others charge per lesson and need the count to be right. Cadence supports both on the same roster, so you never have to reshape your pricing to fit the software.
- Flat monthly plans and per-lesson rates, set per family or per student, on any billing day of the month.
- Your cancellation policy decides what counts as billable. A family is charged for a late cancellation exactly when the instructor is paid for it, so the two halves of the ledger cannot disagree.
- Account credits for closures, make-ups and goodwill carry forward and appear on the invoice with the reason attached.
- Cards and bank debits are vaulted with Stripe and charged automatically each period. QuickBooks records every transaction for the books.
- Run the whole month as a dry run first, read what would happen, then commit it.
Ramirez family
Recurring plan · bills on the 1st
Switch the rate mode to see the invoice recalculate.
Families or individuals — you choose the shape of an account.
A music school bills a parent who has three children in lessons. A driving instructor bills the person sitting in the car. These are genuinely different businesses, and software that assumes one of them makes the other awkward forever.
Cadence asks which model you use and then commits to it. In family mode, one paying account holder can have any number of students beneath it, each with their own lessons, instructor and history, and one invoice covering all of them. In individual mode the split disappears completely: the person who books is the person who attends, and nobody is ever asked who their parent is.
- Switching the model changes what everyone sees — portals, forms, invoices and reports all follow.
- Siblings share one login, one payment method and one invoice, while keeping separate lesson records.
- A second parent or guardian can be given their own access to the same students.
Family mode. Daniel receives one invoice covering both children, and sees both schedules on one dashboard. Each child keeps a separate lesson history, instructor and set of notes.
Reminders go out whether or not you remember to send them.
You write the rules once. A rule is a plain sentence — what happened, who hears about it, by which channel, and how far ahead. From then on the schedule triggers them, and every send is logged so you can prove a message went out when a family says it didn’t.
- Triggers cover lesson reminders, new bookings, cancellations, no-shows, late cancellations, completed trial lessons and lesson-count milestones.
- Email through your own sending domain, SMS through your own number, or both for the same event.
- Each rule picks its audience independently: the family, the instructor, or your admin team.
- Message templates are yours to edit, and they carry your logo and colours.
- A single pause switch stops every outbound message at once — useful while you are loading real data before going live.
Hi Daniel,
A reminder that Ava has piano with Marcus Okafor tomorrow, Tuesday 15 April, at 3:30 PM in Studio 2.
Need to move it? You can request a new time from your portal until 3:30 PM today.
View the lessonConversations stay inside the business, where you can see them.
When instructors and families text each other privately, the business loses the thread. Schedule changes get agreed in a conversation nobody else can read, and when an instructor leaves, the relationship walks out with them.
In Cadence, families message instructors and your office through the portal. Your admins have a read-only oversight view of every parent-and-instructor thread — visible enough to protect both sides, and clearly marked as read-only so nobody is quietly impersonated.
- Direct threads between a family and the office, a family and their instructor, or an instructor and the office.
- A staff room for your whole team, separate from anything a customer can see.
- Oversight is read-only by design: admins can read a thread, but cannot post into it as somebody else.
- Nobody has to give out a personal phone number, and the history stays with the business.
Three portals, one set of facts.
Your office, your instructors and your customers each get a view built for what they actually do. They are looking at the same schedule and the same records, so a change in one place is true everywhere immediately.
Master calendar
All locations · week of 14 April
The office sees everything. One calendar across every location and room, the full roster, billing, contracts, reports on instructor hours and student retention, and an audit trail of who changed what.
Today — Tuesday 15 April
5 lessons · 3:30 PM to 7:00 PM · Studio 2
Instructors see their own day. Their schedule, attendance marking, lesson recaps that go straight to the family, their own availability and time-off requests, and their hours for the period. They never see another instructor’s roster or anybody’s billing.
Hello, Daniel
Ava and Noah · next lesson in 2 hours
Customers see their own account. Upcoming lessons, the recaps their instructor writes, invoices and the card on file, their signed agreement, and a way to request a lesson or a reschedule without a phone call. Requests come to you for approval rather than changing the calendar on their own.
Your customers should never learn our name.
The portal your families log into runs on your domain, carries your logo and your colours, and uses your vocabulary. There is no third-party badge in the corner and no mention of Cadence in the emails or texts your customers receive. As far as anyone you serve is concerned, you built this.
Good morning, Dana
Tuesday, 15 April · 31 lessons scheduled today
Your domain
The portal lives at an address you own, with a certificate in your name. Families bookmark your site, not a shared subdomain with our branding on it.
Your logo and colours
Upload a logo and set a primary and accent colour. Both flow through the portal chrome, buttons, invoices and the emails your customers receive.
Your vocabulary
Rename the domain words to match your trade — lesson or session, instructor or tutor or coach, instrument or subject or vehicle. The interface follows your language rather than making you adopt ours.
The rest of it, recorded from the product.
None of these are mockups. Each clip is the working software, captured from a live school account with the roster, the hours and the money it actually holds.
Scheduling and recurring series
One-off lessons, weekly series and group sessions across every location and room, colour-coded by subject, with conflicts caught before they are booked.
Reschedule and lesson requests
Customers ask for a new time or an extra lesson from their portal, with their reason attached. The request reaches you for approval instead of silently moving the calendar.
Instructor availability
Instructors set the hours they teach and request time off. Changes go to the office for approval, and the schedule they already have stays live in the meantime.
Contracts and e-signature
Build agreements from reusable clauses, mark which ones need initialling, send them for signature, and see at a glance who has signed and who has not.
Announcements
Write a notice once — a closure, a recital date, a change of policy — choose whether families or instructors see it, set when it runs, and watch who has dismissed it.
Reports
Lessons taught, hours and earnings per instructor ready for payroll, completion rates, and student retention — with the rows behind each figure, not just a chart.
Multiple locations
Run several sites from one account, each with its own rooms. Lessons are booked into a specific room, and the calendar can be filtered down to one site at a time.
And the parts that need no demonstration.
None of these are add-ons or upsells. They come with the product because a business this size cannot run without them.
Lesson recaps
Instructors write a short note after each lesson with practice for the week. Families read it in their portal, and you can see who has read theirs.
Recordings
Attach an audio or video clip to a recap so a student can hear the passage as it should sound, or watch back what they played.
Shared inbox
Connect the business mailbox so email from families sits beside their record, and anyone on the team can pick up a thread.
QuickBooks
Invoices, payments received and instructor bills sync to QuickBooks Online, so your bookkeeper works from the same numbers you do.
Roles and permissions
Owners, office staff and instructors each see only what their role allows, and it is enforced on the server rather than by hiding a menu item. Consequential changes are written to an audit record.
Moving your business across.
Changing the system a business runs on is the part people dread, and reasonably so. This is how it actually goes.
Start with a walkthroughWe look at your business first
Before anything is configured we go through how you charge, how your week is structured and what your policies say. That conversation decides the settings, not a default template.
Your roster is imported
Send whatever you have — a spreadsheet, an export from your current system, a shared calendar. Students, families, instructors and recurring lessons are loaded for you, and you check them before anybody else can see them.
Everything runs with messaging paused
The portal works on real data while outbound email and SMS are held back by a single switch. You can rehearse a billing run as a dry run and read exactly what it would have charged, without touching a card.
You invite your families when you are ready
Turn messaging on, send the invitations, and your customers arrive at a portal that already has their history in it. Nothing about the switch is visible to them except a better experience.
Built for a school that had to keep running.
Cadence started as the system behind a working music school, written because nothing on the market fit how the business actually charged and communicated. Every feature here exists because a real week of lessons demanded it, and the school still runs on it. That is the reason the defaults tend to be sensible and the edge cases tend to be handled: they were all encountered before they were designed for.
Priced against the size of your roster.
A studio with forty students and a school with four hundred are different businesses, and one price for both is wrong for one of them. We quote after the walkthrough, when we know what you actually need running.
What is always included
No feature in this page is held back for a higher tier.
- Unlimited instructors and staff accounts
- All three portals, fully branded
- Email reminders and in-app messaging
- Your roster imported for you
What varies by business
These are the things that genuinely cost more to run.
- The number of active customer accounts
- SMS volume, billed at cost through your own number
- A custom domain and certificate
- Multiple locations under one account
What we will not do
Stated plainly, so you can hold us to it.
- No commission on the payments you take
- No charge per lesson booked
- No contract that locks you in for a year
- Your data exports in full, whenever you ask
Payment processing fees are charged by Stripe directly and are not marked up by us.
Reasonable things to ask before switching.
Will my customers know they are using third-party software?
No. The portal runs on your domain with your logo and colours, and the emails and texts it sends come from your addresses and your number. Our name does not appear in the interface your customers use, in the messages they receive, or in the invoices they are sent.
We charge in a slightly unusual way. Will it fit?
Flat monthly tuition and per-lesson billing both work out of the box, set individually per family, and they can coexist on the same roster. Credits, make-up handling and your late-cancellation rule are configured rather than hard-coded. If your structure still does not fit, tell us during the walkthrough — it is worth finding out before you commit, not after.
Do instructors get access to billing?
No. Instructors see their own schedule, their own students, their recaps and their own hours. Invoices, payment methods and the rest of the roster are not visible to them. Access follows the role, and it is enforced on the server rather than by hiding a menu item.
Can we read messages between an instructor and a parent?
Yes, in a read-only oversight view for admins. It exists so the business keeps a record of what was agreed and so both sides are protected, and it is deliberately read-only: an admin can read a thread but cannot post into it as somebody else. The view is labelled as oversight where it appears, rather than being hidden.
What happens to our data if we leave?
It is yours and it comes with you. Students, families, lesson history, recaps, invoices and payment records export in full on request, in formats you can load somewhere else. There is no exit fee and nothing is held back to make leaving harder.
Do you take a cut of the payments we collect?
No. Payments are collected through your own Stripe account, and the money goes to your bank on Stripe's schedule. Stripe charges its processing fee directly and we do not add anything on top of it.
How long does it take to get running?
It depends mostly on the state of your existing records. A clean spreadsheet of students and recurring lessons can be live in a week, with several of those days spent on you checking the import and rehearsing a billing run rather than on us configuring anything. Messier histories take longer, and we would rather tell you that up front.
Is it only for music schools?
It was built in one, which is why the examples on this page look the way they do. The parts that are specific to music — the word "instrument", the idea of a lesson, the parent-and-student split — are all configurable, and the account model can be switched to individuals who book for themselves. Tutoring centres, driving instructors, coaching practices and studios fit the same shape.
See it with your own roster in front of you.
A walkthrough takes about half an hour. We will ask how you charge and how your week runs, then show you the parts that matter to that, rather than a tour of every screen. If it is not a fit we will say so on the call.
- No preparation needed, and nothing to install.
- We will tell you honestly what migrating your records would involve.
- Your details are used to arrange the call and nothing else.