A new season brings fresh energy, new faces, and endless opportunities. But if your back office isn’t set up correctly, the excitement can quickly give way to stress. The beginning of the dance year is one of the busiest times in a studio’s calendar, and a few overlooked admin tasks can spiral into major issues later.
Here are five common mistakes studio owners make at the start of a season and how to avoid them with smarter systems and a little planning.
1. Delaying Tuition Setup
If your billing isn’t ready before classes begin, you’re already behind. Late setup leads to late payments, confusion over charges, and more follow-up for your staff.
Avoid it: Use Akada to set up tuition in advance. Assign classes, apply discounts, and build payment schedules before the first week begins. With the Stripe integration, families can pay securely online—no awkward reminders needed.
2. Skipping a Clean Session Transition
Rolling into a new season without clearing out old data causes confusion for everyone. Outdated classes, inactive students, and lingering session settings can create a messy experience.
Avoid it: Use Akada’s end-of-year checklist to deactivate accounts, reset session data, and update your defaults. A clean slate makes everything run smoother.
3. Not Updating Class Schedules in One Place
If you’re juggling spreadsheets, whiteboards, and emails, it’s easy to miss a change—and your families will feel it.
Avoid it: Centralize your class and recital schedules in one place. Akada lets you drag and drop schedules, run reports by class or student, and eliminate double-booking before it happens.
4. Under-communicating With Families
The start of a season brings lots of questions: What’s the dress code? When are fees due? Where’s the class location? If you’re not proactively answering these, your inbox is going to overflow.
Avoid it: Akada makes communication simple with built-in tools for email and text messaging. Set up studio-wide announcements, schedule reminders, and weather-related updates all from one place. You can even assign a studio text number through Akada so families instantly recognize your messages—just a few clicks and your updates go straight to their phones.
Learn the Communication Essentials
5. Overlooking the Power of the Parent Portal
Some studios wait to roll out their portal, thinking it’s something to “set up later.” But the longer you delay, the more manual admin work falls on your staff—and the more disconnected your families feel.
Avoid it: Invite families to use the Akada Parent Portal from day one. Parents can register for classes, review policies, update their information, view their schedule, make payments, and even subscribe to studio texting—all from one login. It’s mobile-friendly and easy to set up, whether your studio sends an Account Activation email or simply shares the portal link.
You can also enable features like recurring billing, saved credit cards, and online class access (if applicable), making it easier for families to stay up to date without calling the front desk.
Pro tip: Once your families are in, encourage them to bookmark the portal link or download the app, and save your studio’s text number so they recognize messages when you send them.
Start Strong With the Right Systems
The first few weeks of the season set the tone for everything that follows. With Akada, you can skip the chaos and start the year on solid ground.
Ready to streamline your studio admin?
