Interview with Vanessa - Octavia User

Vanessa is a violin teacher running a private one-to-one teaching studio, also offering songwriting, composition and production lessons to students ranging from age five to fifty. She's been teaching for five years and discovered Octavia through an Instagram ad.

Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity and relevance.

You can learn more about Vanessa and her teaching at Essa Rose Art Music.

Tell me a bit about yourself, your teaching setup, what you teach, and how long you've been teaching.

I'm a violin teacher, and I also teach a bit of songwriting, composition, and production to some students who want it. I offer mainly private lessons, one to one, and if they want they can add on lesson packages and things like that. My main goal is to be able to teach part time, and I've been teaching for around five years now, to students from age five to 50-year-olds as well, who just want to pick up an instrument and learn for fun.

What were you using before Octavia?

I was just using my calendar and scheduling based on that. It's a lot of communication, and it keeps a record of who's coming, but I have to go back into my calendar and check, and kind of follow up on payments sometimes. I love Octavia because it helps me stay on track — I can mark who's present, who's late, and even create my own custom status if a student has an emergency and cancels before paying.

What was your first impression when you started using Octavia?

I thought everything was very simple, and the features were pretty easy to navigate. It's pretty intuitive — I didn't need to take too much time to learn and work around it. Just really good, very simple.

And it's so comprehensive at the same time.

What feature do you find yourself using most?

I think attendance marking and bulk billing.

What do you think is saving you the most time or effort?

Scheduling students' lessons on a weekly basis.

(Via the bulk scheduler.) Yes, I do it on a two-month basis — I just put in the dates, and it's very straightforward, because some of them will let me know if they're going to be on holiday or something, so I plan in advance for that. Some of them love fortnightly lessons and prefer that over weekly, so I've found the scheduler really handy for that.

Who would you recommend Octavia to?

I'd recommend it to music tutors, obviously, and even teachers who want to hold art lessons or any creative kind of lessons, or tutoring in any subject really — I think it could be useful for all types of private tutors.

What would you say to a teacher who's early in their career and thinking about trying it?

I think it's a very intuitive piece of software, and it has all the essential functions to help your studio run smoothly. It's a time saver, and as teachers our hours are precious, and our teaching rates too — we don't want to spend too much time on non-essential things, managing all the little logistics, and Octavia really smooths out that process for us.

What about for someone who's already using different software — worth them having a look at changing?

Well, I haven't personally tried other software, but I like the layout of Octavia a lot more. I find it's more flexible, and you can customise literally everything. I just thought that was really good.

What would you say to someone who thinks they don't have time to set it up?

It doesn't actually take that long — I only took about two hours on an afternoon to set everything up, and it's so intuitive to just put in the student details. I don't even need to fill in everything about the student, like date of birth or email — I can just put their name down and the type of lesson they want, and that's enough.

How did you come across Octavia?

I saw it on an ad — on Instagram.