One of the key ways you can professionalize your music studio is by making it super easy for your Studio Families to pay you. There are very few parents these days who actively look for a music teacher who accepts payment the "old fashioned" way: via check or cash. We use credit cards, ApplePay, GooglePay or ACH for almost everything else in our lives - Amazon, doctor appointments, our gym membership - so why not for music lessons? It is much more likely that parents are looking for music teachers who have an easy, automated payment system in place.
Duet makes it really easy to seamlessly collect payment for music lessons. And we have a big announcement: You can now collect payment via ACH!
(Not sure what ACH is? An ACH payment is an electronic payment made from one bank to another. So the money will come directly from your studio families' bank accounts and end up directly in your bank account! No credit cards or third party payment processors necessary.)
ACH is now a digital payment option, joining credit cards, GooglePay and ApplePay as the various ways Duet facilitates payment between your studio families and yourself.
So how can you add ACH as a payment option for your families?
In Duet, you sign up for all types of digital payments at once; you do not have to choose between credit cards, ApplePay, GooglePay and ACH. You sign up once in your Duet account, and then your studio families have access to all payment options when they go to pay their bill.
So how do you sign up to receive digital payments?
Step 1:
Review each Student Profile. Confirm that the Primary Contact for each student has a phone number entered and that the box next to "Send billing and event texts" is checked. Financial statements are delivered to Primary Contacts via text link, so it is crucial that this information is provided for the family to receive their statement of charges.
Step 2:
In your Duet account, go to Billing. Click on Payment Settings.
Step 3:
Click on the purple button to get started. In order to deposit the payments directly into your checking account, you need to connect your bank account to your Duet account. The processing of all payments - regardless of whether the payment is made via credit card, ApplePay, GooglePay or ACH - is all managed by Stripe, the most trusted payment processing company in the world. So Duet itself will never have access to your financial or personal information; that is all handled by Stripe.
Step 4:
After you've completed your digital payment registration and connected your bank account via the Stripe setup, you are now ready to collect payment for your teaching. Simply send out statements to your studio families and let them decide how they want to pay you.
Primary Contacts will open the statement of charges on their phones and will be able to review the invoice.
At the bottom of the invoice, there is a button that says "Pay Now."
After they click "Pay Now," they will have the opportunity to choose how to pay: credit card, ApplePay, GooglePay or ACH. Regardless of which payment type they choose, the money will end up in your bank account in 1-3 days.
Note: There are processing fees for all types of digital payment. If you would like to know more about the processing fees for each type of payment, read our article about processing fees here.
