They asked for a payment button. We looked at what they actually had.

The school ran an off-the-shelf CRM built for a gym or a clinic — fixed schedules, regular payments, few cancellations. A music school is none of that: most lessons are private and one-on-one, and the schedule moves constantly. The platform couldn’t handle it, so the director handled it by hand — every reschedule, cancellation and payment query routed through one person’s phone, on an expensive subscription whose features went largely unused.

We built a CRM on Directus around the school’s actual processes. First we went through every field with the director — is this used, is this number checked — and kept only what survived. The data model is students, teachers and lessons; payments are tied to specific lessons with paid, pending and overdue statuses calculated automatically, and period totals appear without anyone counting. Scheduling is a weekly calendar with a teacher filter; adding or rescheduling a lesson takes two taps. Three roles each see their own view: the administrator sees both locations, the teacher sees their day and manages their own availability, and the parent books in three steps — pick a child, a duration, a time — with the request landing in the administrator’s approval queue and appearing on both calendars once approved. Because it’s Directus, a new field, report or third location doesn’t mean switching platforms.