About Sligo Academy of Music
Founded in 2000 by Sligo-born musician Niamh Crowley, the Sligo Academy of Music is a leading music school offering instrumental and vocal tuition across classical and contemporary genres. A registered charity based at Summerhill College in Sligo, the Academy has always been driven by a simple mission: to make high-quality music education accessible to its community, regardless of age or level.
Today the Academy teaches between 350 and 380 students across roughly 600 classes with a team of around 30 tutors, running six days a week. Most students are aged 3 to 18 and attend part-time, alongside a growing number of adult learners returning to music or fulfilling a long-held ambition to learn a new skill.
Beyond the lesson room, the Academy runs numerous ensembles and orchestras that perform throughout the year and have recently toured across the United States and Europe. But sustaining a school of this scale, largely from a single administrative office, demanded that the systems behind the scenes be genuinely reliable — and that is where the Academy faced its most pressing challenge.
Challenges
Operating as a busy, growing music school, the Academy faced a number of operational challenges that impacted efficiency and reliability:
Billing Disconnected from Attendance
Calendars and charges lived in separate spreadsheets, with no reliable way to check what students paid against the lessons they actually attended creating a real risk of lost revenue.
Manual, Repetitive Scheduling
Each of the 30 tutors had their own calendar, meaning around 30 separate schedules had to be built by hand every year, on top of manually re-registering every returning student in Excel.
Time-Intensive Billing
Invoicing took around two days per term close to a full week of manual work a year, all handled by a single person.
GDPR and Communication Concerns
Contact with families and older students relied on personal phones and text messages, raising GDPR concerns and offering no safe, centralised channel.
FAQ’s
Classter brought calendaring, billing, and communication into one integrated platform, replacing 30 individual tutor calendars and scattered spreadsheets with a single annual calendar that billing runs from automatically.
Classter addressed challenges related to disconnected billing and scheduling, time-intensive manual invoicing, repetitive data entry, and GDPR-compliant communication.
With Classter, the Academy reduced its billing and timetabling time from a full week to around a single day, while tying billing directly to attendance for greater accuracy and control.
Classter gives the Academy a single, secure, GDPR-friendly channel for contacting parents and students, replacing the use of personal phones and text messages.
