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 this year. You can now self-import your program’s instruments, attire, and music library inventory data from Charms quickly and easily. We continue to enhance the communications and financial tools, and are working on a much more simplified End of Year process so it can be available for you to use by the end of this semester. Other key items such as Online Store, Fundraising, and Questionnaires and Forms are planned and are expected to be released before the start of the 24-25 school year.

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. 

58% of people say that texting is the most effective way for businesses and organizations to reach them. 74% of people respond to text messages from a business within an hour. In our CutTime community, we see a 95% open and read rate for text messages within 24 hours vs. only a 25% open only rate for email in the same time period. Simply put - email is old school and difficult for busy parents and guardians to keep up and respond. Isn’t everyone’s inbox overflowing these days?

That’s why we came up with a more modern solution that focuses primarily on SMS text messaging. We use SMS text as a web-based push notification to get your messages center stage on your members’ devices. Now instead of having to send a personal text message reminding a member to read your emails - they can just tap and go straight to your message! A huge time saver and life saver when you have an urgent item to communicate. A good example of this is when you are coming back from an away game or performance and run into unexpected traffic delay. Being able to send a quick announcement in that moment to guardians that the pick up time will be thirty minutes later is priceless. Your guardians getting that time sensitive notification on their phone where they are more likely to see it is gold. Best of all, we enable you to see the ‘deliverability’ of your messages and alert you to issues where someone has changed their mobile phone number or accidentally ‘opted out’ from texts. Trust us, you and your members will love the convenience of our SMS text approach.

For cases where a student is not able to provide a mobile phone number for SMS messaging or the message fails to reach a student or guardian, CutTime will automatically re-send the Magic Link notification to the email address on file for that person. Email is also available as a primary method for sending Magic Link notifications to students if needed. If your students or guardians do not wish to receive text messages from CutTime, they can reply ‘STOP’ anytime to opt out and 'UNSTOP' to opt back in. View our SMS Terms of Service here.

Yes! Our Self-import tools enable you to quickly take several of your exported Charms program data files and upload them into our system. Go to the Program Settings section of your new CutTime account, and look for all of the current options listed under ‘Onboarding’ to the right side of your screen. Once you upload your data, our importer will highlight and provide guidance on any formatting errors or missing data that needs to be addressed.

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.

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. 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.

If you need updated paperwork from us, please send your request to support@gocuttime.com.