The studio runs on terms. Your software should too.
Families enrol two children, not one. Moving a Tuesday class lands on forty households at once. The costume levy falls due in the same week as the fee. Nixie is studio management written to those facts, not adapted from a gym booking tool.
How you manage your dance studio
Timetable
The whole week on one screen. Drag a class to a new time and Nixie checks the room, the teacher and the families before you commit.
More on the timetableFamily records held in Sydney. Bank details never held by Nixie.
A dance school is not a gym with mirrors.
A studio owner keeps the week in their head, the money in a spreadsheet and the parents in their phone. Nixie is the one place those three meet: who is dancing where, what that earns, and what has to be said to whom when it changes.
- Terms, not sessions.
- A term has an end date, and the fee schedule has to agree with it. A family enrols for the term and pays across it, so a calendar of bookable sessions is the wrong shape from the start.
- Families, not customers.
- A family with three dancers pays a different total to three families with one. One account, one statement, and discounts that show their working.
- A class is forty households.
- Move a Tuesday class and you have changed the week of every family in it, and of every sibling in the class next door. Nixie counts them before you commit.
Move a class and see who it lands on.
Drag any class to a new time. Nixie checks the room, the teacher and the closing hour before you commit, then tells you how many families you just affected and how many of those have a sibling in another class that day. Nothing reaches a parent until you publish.
Drag any class to a new time. Nixie checks the room, the teacher and the families before you commit.
- Studio 1 is already running Ballet Grade 5
- K. Hart is already teaching Ballet Grade 5
- Studio 1 is free
- K. Hart is free
- Finishes before the 8:30pm close
- From
- Tuesday 4:00pm
- To
- Thursday 4:30pm
- Affected
- 14 families3 have a sibling in the next class
A quiet room is a pale room you can point at.
Nixie draws the building where it actually stands and shades every teaching room by how full it runs that week. A hole in the timetable stops being a number in a report. Play the term forward and watch it fill up and empty out.
- One ramp. Pale when the room is dark, sage when it is ticking over, rose when it is working hard.
- Gaps wear a dashed crown. A room with bookable slots it did not sell that week is marked, so you can see where a new class would fit.
- The foyer never flatters the numbers. Change rooms, the store and the foyer are hatched and left out of every utilisation figure.
One family, one account, only their own dancers.
A parent enrols every child on one account and sees one total. Sibling, loyalty and early-payment discounts apply on their own, in a fixed order, and show their working, so nobody has to ask and nobody has to explain.
The privacy rule is not a setting. A family sees its own dancers' classes, teachers and rooms. No other family's children, contact details, attendance or fees, and no class roll. The studio cannot switch that on.
A request is not a booking, and Nixie says so.
A parent taps a lesson and proposes a different time. A one-to-one private lesson is a genuine conversation about two diaries. A group class runs at one time for everybody in it, so it cannot move for a single family. What the studio can offer is a place in another group of the same level, which is a transfer, and depends on space.
- Nothing is confirmed until a person approves it. Until then the old time stands, and the parent is told to come to the class they are booked into.
- The studio sees who will be told. Every recipient and channel is listed before approval, with email free and SMS priced.
- Replies come from the studio. The email arrives from the studio's own name and address, not from Nixie.
A group class runs at one time for everybody in it. A transfer moves your dancer to a different group. It depends on space and on the teacher agreeing the level is right.
Ask about a group transferUntil the studio replies the old time still stands. Please come to the class you are already booked into.
Drafted in your voice. Sent by a person.
Nixie learns how the studio already writes (first names, "pop in", no exclamation marks) and drafts a reply in that voice. A person reads it, changes it and sends it. Nothing sends on its own.
The audit trail records what was suggested and what was actually sent, word by word. Money, refunds and an upset child are on the do-not-automate list, where Nixie offers no draft at all and says which rule stopped it.
- The studio chooses where the model runs: on its own infrastructure, or with its own provider key. Family messages are not sent to a shared model by default.
Two dancers · Ballet Junior, Jazz Junior
Who is in front of children, and what they hold.
The roster splits on one question, because that question decides which clearances a person needs. A teacher needs the full child-related set: Working With Children Check, first aid, CPR on its shorter twelve-month clock, annual child protection and teaching registration.
The bookkeeper who comes in two days a month does not, and the record says why rather than leaving a blank that looks like an oversight. Renewals are chased from thirty days out, and a lapsed Check stops the roster from publishing.
Direct debit that costs the family nothing.
Payments run through Ezidebit. A family sets up direct debit once, on Ezidebit's own secure form, and pays no fee for it. The bank details go straight to the payment provider, which hands Nixie back a token. Nixie keeps the token and a masked display and nothing else, so a break-in at Nixie finds no bank numbers to steal.
- The dates shown are the dates that happen. A debit that falls on a weekend moves to the Monday, and the schedule a parent sees already says so.
- A failed debit is two different problems. Not enough money is worth retrying. Wrong account details never is, so the family is asked to update them instead.
- Card carries its surcharge in the open. Any surcharge is shown before a parent chooses, at the rates the studio sets.
Books that agree with the studio.
Nixie owns the enrolments and the fees. The ledger stays where your bookkeeper already works: Xero, MYOB or QuickBooks, one connection at a time, so the same invoice can never land in two books.
Every fee type maps to an account code your bookkeeper already recognises, and Nixie never invents one. Approved invoices go out nightly, payment allocations come back, and a failed sync says what failed in words rather than a code.
| Fee type | Account | Tax |
|---|---|---|
| Term feesbilled per term | 200 Sales | GST on income |
| Costume levyper dancer, per performing class | 201 Costume and uniform sales | GST on income |
| Examination entrycandidate fees | 203 Examination fees collected | GST free income |
Where a family's details go, and where they stay.
A parent types their details once. This is every place they travel. Family records, payment tokens and messages are held in Sydney, and do not leave Australia for backups, support or reporting.
Bank details never take that road.
They go from the parent's phone straight to the payment provider's own secure form. Nixie receives a token and a masked display, and that is all it ever stores.
- Held in Sydney
- The database and its daily backups sit in the Sydney region, with no replication to anywhere else.
- TLS 1.2 at minimum
- Every connection is encrypted in transit. TLS 1.2 is the floor because the payment provider requires it, and 1.3 is preferred.
- AES-256 at rest
- Records sit on disk scrambled, so that a stolen disk reads as noise. Backups are encrypted the same way.
- Filtered at the edge
- Known attacks, floods of fake traffic and automated bots are turned away before they get near the studio's data.
Nobody ever resets a password.
Parents and staff sign in with the Google or Microsoft account they already have, or with a single-use link sent to their email. There is no password for anyone at the studio to see, set or leak.
One honest exception. The layer that filters attacks runs at data centres worldwide, because it has to sit in front of the traffic to stop it. It inspects requests in passing and stores nothing. Saying "everything is in Australia" would be simpler and slightly untrue, so we say this instead.
No badge we have not earned. Nixie does not claim any security certification. Because card and bank details are captured by the payment provider and never touch Nixie, a reduced PCI DSS scope is what the design aims for. It is a target we build to, not a certificate we hold.
One price, with a ceiling.
per month
Capped at $1,400 a month, which a studio reaches at 156 students. Past that, growing costs nothing more. Prices are in Australian dollars and include GST, so the figure shown is the figure invoiced.
- Email is included. Reminders, invoices and replies by email cost nothing extra.
- SMS is a paid add-on, metered per message, and priced on screen at the moment you choose it.
120 × $9 = $1,080.00 a month. 36 more students until the cap.
Payment processing is not in this price, and it is not ours.
Ezidebit bills the studio directly for processing, at the rates the studio has agreed with them. Nixie takes no share of those fees and adds no margin to them. They are not our revenue, so they are not in our price, and the two are kept apart everywhere they appear.
The week, the money and the parents, in one place.
Sign in to see a full term running: the timetable, the building, the family portal and the payments behind them.