Based just a few miles south of Glasgow Riverside Music College offers a variety of HND courses for those looking to follow a career in the music industry, from sound production and audio engineering to music performance and composition. Students leave with a rounded education, a Higher National Diploma and real-life experience of working in the music industry, able to make the most informed choices for their future careers.
Client brief
Scott at Riverside Music College contacted Angelfish looking to build new digital system to manage their music courses, tutors, clients and bookings. The system needed to include portals for administrative staff, tutors and clients to view and manage their bookings and the associated financial information. The new system would be replacing an existing system that was no longer supported and had limitations on functionality that made it unviable for continued use.
Software functionality and application
Infrastructure
- The new system would be fully cloud-based and accessible from any web-connected device with a secure username and password. The system would be hosted on our secure managed servers and is based on Microsoft ASP.NET and MySQL database, which is backed up daily with up to 7 days backups retained.
- The new system would be accessed via a set of URL's, one for each of the administration staff, tutor and client areas. These URL's could be based on a new domain or on a sub-domain of the Riverside Music College domain (e.g. admin.riversidemusiccollege.ac.uk/staff).
- All areas of the system will be secured with an SSL certificate to be provided and kept up to date by Angelfish
Display
The system would be designed to match the branding and style of the Riverside Music College website. The display would be fully mobile responsive allowing access and use on desktop computers, tablets and mobile phones.
Staff Administration
The staff administration area would be available to nominated staff members, each of whom would have their own username and password for access, and would allow staff to perform the following actions:
- Set up and manage courses (e.g. Guitar Basic, Piano Advanced)
- Set up and manage tutors including courses taught and standard weekly hours
- Manage tutor availability, based on standard weekly hours but with the ability to make daily/weekly adjustments and add holidays/other absences
- Set up and manage rooms
- Set up and manage clients (students) including the ability to add both admin and tutor-specific notes to the client
- Assign clients to courses and tutors as either a one-off booking, weekly recurring or monthly recurring booking with specified start/end dates
- Send confirmation/cancellation e-mail messages to clients and tutors based on customisable templates. The ability to send confirmation, cancellation or reminder messages by SMS will also be included, although this would require Riverside Music College to purchase and top up SMS text credits through a specified provider.
- Send reminder e-mails and/or SMS messages for upcoming classes
- Record details of payments made by clients and send payment reminders by e-mail or SMS
- View a daily/weekly calendar view showing bookings based on either a tutor-specific or room-specific views (staff members would be able to switch between the two views)
- View a set of reports related to system activity. This will include the following specific reports but may be extended in the future subject to requirement and possible additional cost:
- Bookings made/attended between specified dates filtered by tutor and/or course
- Transactions between specified dates filtered by tutor and/or client and/or payment method
- Transaction reconciliation for Cash, Card and BACS payments
- Cancellation charges filtered by waived/collected
Tutor Portal
The tutor portal would be available to all tutors in the system,, each of whom would have their own username and password for access (set up by staff members) and would allow tutors to:
- View and update their personal details
- View and update their core working hours and weekly availability
- View and update details of clients on their courses, including adding and editing notes for these clients
- View their historic, current and future bookings
Client Portal
The tutor portal would be available to all active clients (students) in the system,, each of whom would have their own username and password for access (set up by staff members) and would allow tutors to:
- View and update their personal details
- View and their course booking and transaction history
- View their historic, current and future bookings
Online Booking System
The online booking system would be accessible to clients via a secure URL (and optionally protected by username/password access). The booking system would allow students to view courses and availability for future dates and to book onto courses either as a single booking, a fixed number of bookings (e.g. 6 weeks) or a recurring weekly/monthly booking.
The online booking system would be styled and branded to match the Riverside Music College website and could be linked to from the website by a simple menu item/hyperlink. There would be no requirement for the web developer to perform any type of integration above and beyond adding a simple weblink.
Data Transfer
Angelfish will work with Riverside Music College to obtain a raw form of the data in the current system (e.g. database backup, CSV/Excel file exports of bookings, clients, tutors etc.) and import this data into the new system before formal deployment so that historic and current transactions, clients, tutors and bookings are in place in the new system.
Angelfish comments
This project resulted in a very comprehensive system that pulled together fadcilities, staff and students into one managable, easy to use application. it was a great project to work on and 4 years after its initial launch is still going strong.