Derby YMS is one of the biggest Yamaha Music School's in the UK. They have over 500 pupils that come for a weekly lesson. For a long time they managed all their pupils, teachers and payments on paper. The owners asked me if I could help them create a new website. After looking at how their business operated I suggested that they would benefit from much more than just a website, and so the project began.

I first created a website that allowed customers to learn about the offerings of the school and also sign up for a free taster lesson. The owners wanted a very budget friendly solution, so I actually set up google sheets as the main database to run the system.

The data flow all starts from the free taster lesson html form on the website that sends form data to a google sheet. From here the receptionist can contact the customer to arrange a date and time for the lesson. After the lesson, if the customer would like to sign up for lessons, the receptionist clicks a button that I created on the google sheet that sends an email to the customer with a link to a google form that is pre-filled with all of the information that the customer submitted in the taster lesson form, plus some extra information that the receptionist inputs in the google sheet.

When the customer submits the pre-filled google form, the results go to a new google sheet that acts as the database of pupils for the whole system. From this sheet we can automatically populate a register sheet for each day of the week, as well as a diary to keep track of what lessons are happening on which days and in which room with which teacher. Throughout the week the receptionist will fill in the register for each day keeping track of which pupils attend.

Then there are a range of CRON jobs that run to perform tasks that used be done manually. For example, calculating teachers wages, calculating royalties that are to be paid to Yamaha, calculating business metrics.

This was a super fun project to work on and is still in use today. I'm currently working on a full overhaul of the website and backend system, so that we can add more advanced features and make everything more robust.

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