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Guardians & Families Overview

Guardians are the parents, caregivers, or family members who are responsible for your students. In Conductly, guardians play a central role in communication and billing -- they're the people who receive invoices, make payments, and stay in touch with your school about their children's lessons.

Why Guardians Matter​

Most music school students are minors, which means the adults in their lives handle the practical side of enrollment:

  • Billing -- Guardians receive invoices, pay them, and keep a card on file
  • Communication -- Emails about schedule changes, recitals, and school updates go to guardians
  • Decision-making -- Guardians decide on enrollment, session changes, and lesson schedules

Even for adult students, the guardian model is flexible enough to support family structures where someone other than the student handles billing.

How Guardians Work in Conductly​

Each guardian has their own profile with:

  • Contact information -- Name, email, phone number, and address
  • Linked students -- The students they are responsible for, shown on the Family Members card
  • Invoice recipient flag -- Whether they've been chosen as the invoice recipient for any of their linked students (shown as a green Billing badge)
  • Payment methods -- A saved payment method for paying invoices
  • Communication history -- A log of emails sent through Conductly, available via View Past Emails

The Guardian-Student Relationship​

Guardians and students are linked together, and the relationship is flexible:

  • A guardian can be linked to multiple students -- A parent with three children taking lessons only needs one guardian profile
  • A student can have multiple guardians -- Both parents or a parent and grandparent can be linked to the same student
  • One guardian can be flagged as the invoice recipient -- Use the Set as Invoice Recipient action on the student's Family Members card to choose who receives that student's invoices
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The invoice recipient is flagged per student, not per guardian. If a guardian is linked to two students, they might be the invoice recipient for one but not the other.

You don't have to flag anyone. When Conductly creates an invoice, it picks the recipient automatically: the flagged guardian if there is one, otherwise the student's first guardian, otherwise the student themselves. Nothing breaks if the flag is never set. The recipient is determined when each invoice is created -- changing the flag later affects future invoices, not existing ones.

Guardians as Students​

Sometimes a guardian is also a student -- for example, a parent who takes piano lessons alongside their child. Conductly supports this through the Enroll As Student action in the guardian's context menu, which gives the guardian their own student record without creating a separate profile from scratch.

See Managing Guardians for details on how this works.

Learn More​