Change the order items appear on invoices

3 minute read time · Updated April 10, 2025

MIDAS booking software includes powerful invoicing features. These extensive capabilities mean that you won’t need a separate accounting package to handle the finances in relation to the hire and use of your facilities. (Of course, we do also support exporting invoices from MIDAS into 3rd party accounting packages too!)

With just a couple of clicks, MIDAS can generate an invoice for a booking, or indeed a series of bookings. You can also manually create new invoices at any time.

Once an invoice has been generated or created it can then be printed or emailed to your customer from within the system.

Before an invoice is finalized (before it is printed or emailed), its contents may be freely edited.

This allows you to add or remove items on the invoice or update quantities or charges.

However, until now, there’s not been an easy way to ‘move’ items up or down on invoices to change the order in which they appear.

Why might you want to reorder items on an invoice?

If you’re retrospectively generating an invoice for all a customer’s bookings over a period of time, MIDAS will include these bookings on the invoice in chronological order.

If the client has booked multiple rooms on a number of different dates, you may prefer bookings for the same room to appear consecutively together on the invoice.

Alternatively, if you use the “Merge Invoice” tool in MIDAS to combine two or more invoices for the same client, MIDAS will simply append each invoice’s items onto the end of the first invoice. This may result in items listed on the invoice not being in a logical order.

Introducing the ability to change the order of items on invoices

Starting with MIDAS v4.39, we’ve introduced the ability for you to move items up or down on invoices prior to them being finalized.

On the create/modify invoice screen, to the left of each invoice item you’ll now see both a small up and down arrow.

Clicking the up arrow alongside an invoice item will move that item above the previous invoice item.

Likewise, clicking the down arrow will move that invoice item below the following item.

Clicking the “Save Invoice” button will then save the changes you’ve made to the order of invoice items, along with any other changes you’ve made to the invoice.

Tags: invoice, invoicing, v4.39

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When the term “Venue” doesn’t quite fit

3 minute read time · Updated April 9, 2025

Ever since the first version of MIDAS, we’ve used to the term “venues” to refer to the rooms or bookable spaces you can manage using our scheduling software.

Why did we choose the term “venue”?

There are a number of reasons why we originally settled on the term “venues” to describe bookable spaces.

Firstly, MIDAS was initially development for a large school in Manchester, England. The software which it had replaced at the school also used the term “venue”. So for consistency, the “venue” terminology was carried over into MIDAS.

Secondly, the school that MIDAS was originally designed for had not only rooms, but also sports facilities, a recording studio, a courtyard, and a theatre available for booking – so the term ‘room’ didn’t quite fit when it came to addressing things like football (soccer) pitches.

We also didn’t want to use the word “resources” to denote bookable spaces, as “Resources” in MIDAS are things like equipment and consumables that you can ‘add’ to bookings.

“Venues” don’t work for everyone!

From its first release nearly 20 years ago, MIDAS has since found booking applications across a whole host of industries and settings.

Today, MIDAS is used by bowling alleys, libraries, village halls, recording studios, cruise ships, vehicle rental companies and many more!

As such, the term “venue” we use to describe a bookable ‘thing’ isn’t necessarily always the most appropriate in all scenarios.

Changing the term “venue”

Now, self-hosted MIDAS customers have always been able to modify the included language packs to change the wording and terminology within their booking system. That way they can tailor the language used in their MIDAS system to their specific operations.

However, this can be quite a cumbersome process, and there’s been no way for cloud-hosted customers to make such changes (unless they have the optional Custom Branding addon)

But we’re improving this for MIDAS v4.39.

For new self-hosted or cloud-hosted installations of v4.39 (or later), the first time you login you’ll be prompted to select the term which best describes the primary ‘things’ you’ll be booking.

Setting up the terminology for the things you'll be booking in MIDAS — Setting up the terminology for the things you’ll be booking in MIDAS

The 10 terms initially available to choose from are:

Areas
Desks
Facilities
Lanes
Locations
Rooms
Spaces
Studios
Vehicles
Venues

…so if you’re using MIDAS for managing bookings at a recording studio, you could select “Studios”. Alternatively, if you’re using MIDAS for desk booking in a library, you could select “Desks”

MIDAS will then replace all references to “venues” with your chosen terminology throughout the software.

Should you wish to change the term MIDAS uses in place of “venues”, you can update this setting at any time. You’ll find it via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Appearance → Language.

Changing the term 'venues' to something more relevant — Changing the term ‘venues’ to something more relevant

A couple of things to note…

The ability to change the ‘venue’ terminology as described above is only available when MIDAS is displaying in an English language variant.

You’ll still see references to ‘venues’ across our website. For example, in our online documentation, there are references to the “Manage Venues” screen. However, if you’ve set your MIDAS system to use the term “Rooms” instead, your “Manage Venues” screen will be a “Manage Rooms” screen.

The local documentation which accompanies your MIDAS system – and which is accessed via the [Help] links – will automatically update reflect the specific terminology you’ve set.

Tags: language, v4.39, venues

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New “Stay Signed In” feature

4 minute read time · Updated April 4, 2025

Have you ever hit the reload/refresh button in your browser whilst logged into MIDAS? Were you surprised to be bounced back to a login screen when you did? Well no more!

We’ve redesigned and improved the sign-in experience for MIDAS v4.39.

In previous versions, two options were offered on the sign-in screen..

Remember Me

Previously, the login screen included a “Remember Me” tick box. If this was selected when a user logged in, MIDAS would store their credentials in a cookie. The next time they accessed the login screen in the same browser, MIDAS would read this cookie and automatically populate the various fields on the login screen.

Auto-Login

An optional “Auto-Login” box was also present on the login screen whenever the “Remember Me” box was selected.

If “Auto-Login” was also selected, then the next time the user accessed the login screen, MIDAS would not only read the ‘remember me’ cookie and automatically populate the fields on the login screen, but also automatically click the “Login” button.

Drawbacks

There were a number of drawbacks to this approach. The primary drawback being that the “Remember Me” option stored a user’s credentials in a cookie. Whilst this data was encoded and obfuscated, it is no longer best practice to store such data in this manner.

The “Remember Me” option is also now somewhat outdated redundant. It was first introduced some 16 years ago – way back with MIDAS v2 in September 2009. Back then, password managers weren’t really a thing, and web browsers themselves didn’t provide a means to remember logins to websites.

Nowadays, all modern browsers off users the ability to remember credentials to websites and webapps. In addition, third party password managers are now also common place.

So it was time to give the “Remember Me” function a complete overhall.

In doing so, we also wanted to address a frustration which a number of our customers have reported over the years. If, when using MIDAS, they accidentally hit their browser’s reload/refresh button, MIDAS jumps them back to a login screen. (That is, unless they had selected both the “Remember Me” and the “Auto-Login” options when they initially logged in).

To combat this frustration, and to simplify the number of options on the MIDAS login screen, starting with v4.39 users will see a single “Stay signed in” option on their sign in screen.

The previous “Remember Me” and “Auto-login” options have been removed.

Staying signed in

Selecting this new “Stay signed in” option when signing in will keep the user signed-in to MIDAS on that browser until they sign out (or until their session times out, based upon the security settings setup by an administrator in your booking system.

Here’s how the new sign-in screen looks:

MIDAS sign-in screen with the new 'Stay signed in' option — MIDAS sign-in screen with the new ‘Stay signed in’ option

Like the previous “Remember Me” option, the new “Stay signed in” option also stores data in a cookie. However, unlike the former, the new “Stay Signed In” option only stores a randomly generated and unique session ID. No credentials themselves are stored in a cookie.

Refreshing and Reloading

Regardless of whether the new “Stay signed in” option is selected on a user’s sign-in screen, once the user has signed in, hitting refresh or reload in their browser will no longer jump the user back to a login screen – they will remain signed in!

With the “Stay signed in” option selected (and assuming the user isn’t accessing via a private/incognito browser window), the user can completely close their browser, and the next time they open it and access your MIDAS URL, they will still be signed in.

Security Considerations

Naturally, if the browser/device you use is shared by multiple people, then you should not select the “Stay signed in” option when signing in to MIDAS.

An administrative setting also exists to prevent the “Stay signed in” option from being shown to users.

An administrator may also still wish to force user’s sessions to expire if there is an extended period of no activity. To accommodate this, new settings have been added to the Session Control section of the security screen. This screen may be accessed via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Security.

New Session Control security options in MIDAS v4.39

Tags: security, v4.39

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Will US-imposed tariffs affect MIDAS software prices?

2 minute read time · Updated April 4, 2025

On 2nd April 2025, US President Donald Trump announced that he would be imposing new ‘Tariffs’ on the majority of countries in the world.

Since then, a number of customers have reached out to us to ask us if this will have any impact on the price of MIDAS.

The short answer is no!

As you may be aware, we’re a UK-based business. Whilst President Trump is levying a 10% tariff on the UK, the newly announced tariff plans apply only to physical goods traded between countries.

The tariffs do not apply to services, which include sectors such as banking, finance and legal services.

Our booking system, MIDAS, is a software product. We do not supply physical or tangible goods – we supply a software service.

As such, the newly announced tariffs by the US do not apply to the supply of our software.

Consequently, the price of our software remains unchanged. In fact, we haven’t raised our prices now in over 5 years!

It remains to be seen what wider global impact the tariffs announced by President Trump will have on economies around the world.

However, as it stands today (which at time of writing is 3rd April 2025) – we have no plans to increase our pricing as a result of the tariffs announced in the US yesterday.

Tags: pricing

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