← Back to Work Nixie

Studio management,
built for dance

Dance schools run on terms, not sessions. Families enrol two children, not one. Moving a Tuesday class lands on forty households at once, and the costume levy falls due in the same week as the fee. Nixie is studio management software for Australian dance schools, written to those facts.

$9
per enrolled student a month
$390
monthly ceiling, GST inclusive
60 min
sandbox sign-in, no form to fill

The week, and what is waiting on it

Nixie Operations screen showing a week timetable from Monday 28 September to Sunday 4 October, with ballet, contemporary, jazz and hip hop classes in their rooms and places taken, a red line at the current time, and an Incoming requests panel with nine to do, including moving a private lesson and a first class for a new dancer.

Requests a person decides

A reschedule request open over the timetable: Sarah Whitfield asks to move Ava's private lesson from Tuesday 7pm to Thursday 5:30pm. It shows normal priority, the studio manager as reviewer and human approval required, with Approve change and Decline buttons.

A teacher's day

The teacher notebook for Friday 2 October, week 40, for Marguerite Hale: a schedule with Morning ballet at 8am and Ballet grade 1 at 4pm, and priorities including preparing a dance soundtrack, recording a practice video and reviewing the exam preparation plan.

What it is

A studio owner keeps the week in their head, the money in a spreadsheet and the parents in their phone. Nixie is the one place those three meet: who is dancing where, what that earns, and who has to be told when it changes.

The work is in the specifics. A term has an end date that the fee schedule has to agree with. A family with three dancers pays a different total to three families with one. Teenagers leave at fifteen, which is a revenue fact before it is a pastoral one. Nixie is built around those, not around a generic calendar.

Members and classes

The Members register listing 24 fictional members with age, join date, source such as website, phone or walk-in, monthly fee between $110 and $215, and number of classes.
The Classes list showing each weekly class with its discipline, day and time, length, room, teacher and enrolled against capacity, such as Ballet grade 3 on Tuesday at 16:00 in Studio 1 with Marguerite Hale, 15 of 16.

The money

The Payments fee records screen: $1,140 of term fees recorded, $540 received, $600 still outstanding and $380 overdue, with rows for the Chen family overdue by direct debit and the Moreno family paid by BPAY.

Direct debit is being built against Ezidebit. Bank and card details are entered in Ezidebit's own hosted form, so Nixie never receives, sends or stores a card number, BSB or account number; it keeps a reference, the BPAY customer number and the payment results. The integration is going through Ezidebit's certification.

From 1 October 2026 an Australian business may no longer surcharge card payments. Direct debit and BPAY are not covered by the ban. The home page of nixiedance.com carries that notice, because a studio passing card costs on to families has to change its fee schedule before it raises term 4 invoices.

One account, however many dancers

The member portal on a phone: Hello Sarah, everything for Ava and Mia in one place, with this week's classes for both dancers, such as Ballet Pre-Primary on Monday for Mia and Jazz Junior and Tap Junior on Wednesday for Ava.
Account statements on a phone: invoices of $103.30 marked scheduled or paid by direct debit with settlement times and receipt numbers, and the original term invoice converted to eight instalments.

How long the money lasts

A twelve-month forecast table from October 2026 to September 2027 at 2 per cent churn a month, with opening members, assumed leaving, new members, closing members, income, costs, result, closing cash and last year's income for each month.
The owner-only staff assessment: sliders for a monthly class revenue threshold, a goal completion threshold and a maximum class size, a bar chart of class revenue against direct teaching cost for four teachers, and a table of each teacher's revenue, cost and review flags.

The concert

The Events screen for a show called Onward in Motion on Friday 30 October 2026, on its Cohorts tab: a running order of Ballet company, Junior jazz and Adult contemporary, each with a 16:30 call time, costume note, stage leader, number of dancers and a $35 cost per family.

Forms and plans

The Forms and plans screen in Administration, listing seven published forms and plans such as an event delivery plan, a staff onboarding plan, event registration and volunteer expressions of interest, each with its questions, responses, status and Open, Clone and Hosted form links.

Priced on enrolments

$9 per enrolled student a month, capped at $390 including GST. Email is included; SMS is a paid add-on. Payment processing is billed by the provider.

Your assistant, on a lead

A studio can connect an AI client over MCP to read its overview and incoming requests and suggest who should handle one. It suggests; it does not send a message or change a request.

Nothing locked in

Any owner can export the templates, the roll, the timetable and every invoice in an open format, at any time, without asking first.

Where the records live. Studio records are kept in Cloudflare D1, and the primary database is currently served from Sydney. The application itself runs across Cloudflare's global network, so not every part of processing stays in Australia, and a database location hint is not a residency guarantee. The site says this rather than "everything is in Australia", which would be simpler and not quite true.

Notes on the build

SvelteKit 2 and Svelte 5 on Cloudflare, with a separate Worker for the API and D1 for storage. Accounts are email and password through BetterAuth. Owner reports are drawn with Apache ECharts in its SVG renderer, each chart paired with a table of the exact values.

The sandbox is a real account, not a recording. Each visitor gets a private workspace seeded with the fictional studio; changes persist for sixty minutes and a scheduled job removes expired workspaces. Saves are versioned, so a stale tab gets a conflict instead of overwriting newer work.

The mark is one sine wave drawn twice, fitted to the supplied artwork by least squares: the two strokes share the same wave, one placed to crest and one to trough, so they cross once. It is generated from constants rather than drawn by hand, so it cannot drift.

SvelteKit Svelte 5 Cloudflare Workers D1 BetterAuth ECharts Ezidebit Direct debit BPAY MCP Remotion

Try it yourself

The sandbox signs you in to the same fictional studio for sixty minutes. No card, no charges.