Update for Charms Friends

CutTime is the leading fine arts education program management platform in North America. CutTime platform was previously owned and operated by J.W. Pepper & Son, until they formed a joint venture with Conn Selmer and Group Collect and spun the company out as an independent commercial entity as CutTime, LLC. CutTime, LLC is headquartered in St. Augustine, Florida and employs over two dozen professionals dedicated to supporting fine arts programs in locations across the United States.

Yes, we are confident that CutTime will achieve parity with the core features of Charms next year. Functionality with instruments, attire/uniform, and music library inventories, along with communications, financial, questionnaires, documents/forms with eSignature, and the End of Year process that meet the needs of the Charms community will be in place.

Some items will not be merged with the new CutTime. Among them is a full ‘general ledger’ system. After speaking with hundreds of customers about their priorities and minimal viable product (MVP) requirements, we took a strategic decision to keep our focus on supporting programs with super simple to read account balance statements with costs, payments, and credits that are exportable for other third-party accounting platforms. We’ve implemented new things like automated account balance payment reminders, which have been extremely successful and well received.

We will communicate more about the merger status of specific CharmsOffice.com features as part of the upcoming migration communications. Be on the lookout for these emails. 

No. Rest assured that there will be no changes or interruptions to the UIL services we provide through the CharmsOffice.com platform for the remaining portion of the 23-24 school year. Quite the opposite as our leadership and product teams have spent a considerable amount of time with the UIL executive team discussing how best to preserve the functionality that Charms users have come to rely on in the NextGen of CutTime, while exploring some exciting improvements and optimizations for the new school year ahead. No action required from you on this item at this time.

As part of the migration process, we’ll set up a new CutTime account for your program and provide you with tutorials and other resources so you can hit the ground running quickly.

In our experience, we’ve found running your program on two different platforms is highly problematic for several reasons. Data integrity is a huge challenge when you have people trying to maintain information in two places. Program members and helpers quickly become confused on which system is being used for what purpose, which leads to confusion and frustration. Lastly, having data in multiple platforms increases the potential exposure to cybercrime threats. All this to say, we advise limiting the simultaneous operation of Charms and CutTime to only what is necessary to complete the data transition. Anything exceeding beyond this guideline, will need to be evaluated on a case by case basis.