We have a couple of new and exciting addons available for MIDAS v4.40+.
Our optional “Discord” addon joins our existing range of addons which allow events occurring in your MIDAS booking system to be posted to your organization’s communication channels.
We already have addons that support popular communication platforms Slack and Microsoft Teams. Now we’re adding Discord to this list.
Discord is a popular free communication platform that allows users to interact through text, voice, and video. Users can join or create servers, which are essentially chat rooms organized around a specific topic.
A MIDAS “Watch” notification appearing in a Discord server
We have a couple of exciting brand new addons available for MIDAS v4.40+.
Our optional “Zoom Meetings” addon adds a “Create Zoom Meeting” option to the Booking Availability screen.
Option to create a Zoom Meeting for the booking
If this option is selected when a booking is added, a corresponding Zoom meeting will also be automatically scheduled for the same time (an active Zoom account is required).
You can also configure the addon to automatically send a link to the Zoom meeting to the client via email, and for that link to be stored in a custom field for the booking, allowing users easy access to it.
A number of other settings are available too, which can be used to customize the Zoom meetings that this addon can automatically schedule…
Zoom Meetings addon settings in MIDAS
..and there’s also an email template you can customize for the Zoom meeting invite links that can be automatically sent to your clients…
New Zoom meeting invite email template
Expanding possibilities
Not only does the new Zoom Meetings addon make it simple to schedule Zoom meetings which correspond to your bookings, but it also opens up new possibilities!
Until now, MIDAS could primarily be used to book and schedule ‘physical’ spaces and resources.
But with the addition of the Zoom Meetings addon, MIDAS can now be used to schedule “virtual” spaces and meetings with your clients.
This opens up MIDAS to new business sectors who use Zoom as a primary tool for client communications, such as…
Online Counselling
Consulting and Coaching – Business consultants, life, career, or executive coaches, marketing consultants.
Education and Training – Tutors and educators, corporate trainers, language tutors.
Financial and Legal Services – Financial planners, accountants, bookkeepers, lawyers and legal consultants.
Health and Wellness (non-counseling) – Personal trainers and fitness coaches, dietitians and nutritionists, meditation or yoga instructors.
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.
Modifying an invoice in MIDAS v4.39
On the create/modify invoice screen, to the left of each invoice item you’ll now see both a small up and down arrow.
Moving items up and down on invoices
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.
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.
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
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
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.
