Business Case

A community music school is a small nonprofit school that services private music lessons for 40+ students, ages ranging from 4 to 40 years old. Students can take piano, guitar, drums & percussion, brass and woodwind lessons. The school is run by a music director, and has 3 part time teachers. One teacher can teach all instruments except the guitar, one teacher can only teach guitar and brass and the last teacher can teach all instruments. New teachers are looking to be hired in the future.

Teachers and the music director are part time contractors and get paid 2 times a month only for the lessons they teach. Since they are contractors, payments do not deduct taxes, but a yearly 1099 tax form is required.

Students schedule lessons in 30 min blocks and some will schedule 2 blocks at a time.

Lessons are given in 2 locations. One location has 4 classrooms and the other has a single room. Currently the location with the 4 rooms is temporary. The school is trying to raise money to remodel the location with a single large room into 4 classrooms

The school has a piano in 3 of the class rooms at the temporary location and a single drumset in the 4th class room. The location with the single large room has a piano.

The music director bills students and their families one time per month via an email. Payments can be received in cash, check or credit card via a Square account (squareup.com at 2.75% per transaction). The music director also creates a salary report 2 times a month for payroll. This report is what is used to make online bill payments.

The school pays rent to the 2 locations each month, and the school also pays for insurance one time each year.

Lessons are $25 per 30-minute block, but if a student enrolls for more than 4 lessons, they get a where a lesson is only $22.50

During the summer, the school also puts together a summer chorus and 2 levels of summer bands. These group classes run for about 6 to 8 weeks each and are directed by one of the music teachers. Tuition for these groups is separate than lessons at a fixed cost per student.

Currently the director manages everything in Excel and email, files are stored in DropBox. Free bill pay is used for sending out checks and once a year, 1099s are sent out via a service for $4 apiece.

As the school grows, it will get more difficult to run the business with current processes.

The future goals of the school are to increase the number of students to 150 or more. Raise $12,000 to remodel the rented space with the large room.

Business Problem

To manage the business the school will need to utilize a more sophisticated software package. There are a few options to choose.

1. SAAS - Jackrabbit

Implement a SAAS product: Jackrabbit Software at $45 per month for up to 100 students and $85 per month for 100 to 250 students. Also needed would be $2,000 to be used for training one time a year. This solution is very feature rich, including email services, payroll processing, online registration, calendar of events. Quickbooks integration for managing all financials and 1099s $40 per month. Not all features offered are needed or wanted. (Items not needed are crossed out below.)

Other expenses - Wordpress website hosting - Hosting $100 per year

Jackrabbit Features

All features available with Jackrabbit software: www.jackrabbitclass.com/features/

Online Registration

• Website Integration
• Class Listings
• Online Registration Form
• Customer Portal
• Events
• Mobile App For Parents

Class Management

• Visual Calendar
• Multi-Location Support
• Prospect Management
• Emailing
• Text Messaging
• Skill Tracking
• Private Lesson Management
• Enrollment
• Attendance

Time Clock

• Security: Permissions
• Integrate with Express Payroll
• Time Entry
• Staff Schedules
• Email Staff
• Mobile Staff Portal

Billing/Payment Processing

• Discounting
• Fees
• Statements
• Electronic Payments
• QuickBooks
• ePayments

Point-of-Sale

• Credit Card Reader
• Inventory Reporting
• Barcode Scanning

Reporting

• Dashboard
• Financial
• Family
• Class

Costume/Recital Management

• Costume Measurement
• Costume Ordering
• Recitals

2. Custom Build - Access

Hire someone to build a custom MS Access database at $3,000 with yearly maintenance costs of $600. Training costs would be at $50 per hour and may need as much as 10 hours. Quickbooks for managing all financials and 1099s $40 per month. (No integration available). May not meet all requirements of Jackrabbit software

3. Custom Development - Joomla

Create a Joomla Application hosted using open source CiviCRM and other paid plugins

1. Hosting $200 per year
2. Joomla Template - $75
3. Hire Joomla developer $5,000 with maintenance of $100 per problem as needed. Joomla has an easy administrator module that the administrator can do most if not all maintenance on the system
4. Plugins
   1. Calendar of events - $100 per year
   2. Shopping cart - $100 per year
   3. Email integration - $25 per month
   4. Accounting module - $45 per month
   5. 1099 service - $50 per year (expected number of employees to increase)

Assignment

This is a group assignment.

1. Write a Business case with the following items
   • Mission Statement
   • How would you create a cost benefit analysis based on the information provided? (You do not need to actually do a CBA calculation.) Come up with the things needed to identify feasibility of each option.
   • Which option would you choose and why?
2. Based on the information listed and if all options were available, create a Functional Decomposition Diagram (FDD)
3. Write 20 business requirements for this system, based on the information in the business case and things you think the system would need to run securely and scale as the business grows.
4. Write a user story for each of these requirements for this system
5. Create a Context Diagram of the System DFD 0
6. Create a dataflow diagram on the activities of the system for scheduling a class.

Include the following separate activities

• Create New Class Administrator
• Assign a Teacher Administrator
• Assign a Time slot Administrator
• Assign a room Administrator
• Select an open class Student / Parent
• Check out class Student / Parent
• View Class Schedule for Student - Student / Parent

7. Create a sequence diagram for one of the activities listed above
8. Create a decision tree or table on how to determine how much to bill a student for a month of lessons. (Assuming there are only 4 weeks in the month)