The Progress is slow, but rewarding!

The school year has been soul-crushing so far. With recruiting, new students, scheduling, helping parents get instruments, creating new Google solutions, administration, before and after school practices and lessons, as well as grad school work, I've been running full bore. Still, I chip away at building this new business a little at a time. I am seeing positive progress, and I am learning patience. What more could you ask for? I am most excited about the Google solution I just built for my school inventory. It is a little bit of spaghetti logic which I hope to refine in the future (no time to stop and think now. It works, that's good, move on). It has been rather difficult to track my inventory of school instruments on paper. Last year I began transferring the old word document to google sheets to be able to use that info dynamically. Over months, accumulating yesterday, I've been building a sheet that does many things and that I can control from my phone. The phone input is two different forms, one for regular yearly inventory tracking and the other for when I sign out an instrument for a student to borrow. On the first form I can also decommission a broken instrument, and attach a photo of the damage. On the second, it automatically e-mails the student's school e-mail, as well as the parent's which is drawn from another form parents fill out for permission for their son or daughter to play an instrument. In that e-mail it contains the statement of responsibility, and that by receiving the instrument they are accepting that agreement, as well as some information about what they will need to do. Once in the sheet, the information flows back and forth. The master inventory is updated with the current location of the instrument, as well as the student in possession of the instrument last. If I have entered the condition of the instrument on either sheet it also updates the current condition of the instrument on the master sheet. There is a sheet that keeps a history of who has borrowed the instrument as well as the condition of the instrument at each of those borrowings. There is a sheet that tracks all instruments that are out and where they are. This really streamlines my process, and makes the information very easy to access, plus I don't have to second guess if something has changed that I didn't write on the paper at the particular school I am at or that I have written at another building but haven't updated all sheets yet. It's very freeing! I also did a bunch of inventory with the Inventory Tracking form and it's so easy!!!! Now I'll also have solid documentation with photos for when I need to decommission a broken instrument to the dumpster, so I can weedle down the instrument graveyard that is hiding in various corners at school. I don't think I'll do a tutorial on how to do this one as a whole, but maybe pieces of it will be suitable for a "How To" or three.