Category: Development

Additional Recipients for Booking Confirmations

2 minute read time · Updated January 17, 2024 · First published June 8, 2018

When adding new bookings to MIDAS (or modifying existing ones) if there’s an email address on record for the client that you’re making/modifying bookings for, then MIDAS will offer a “Send Booking Confirmation?” tick box on the Booking Availability screen. Selecting this option will send an automated booking confirmation notification by email to the client when the bookings are made.

Sometimes, you may wish these booking confirmation notifications to go to multiple recipients in addition to the primary client that the bookings are for.

That’s why MIDAS (v4.19 and later) automatically detects any email addresses added to the standard “Booking Notes” field, or any text custom booking fields, and offer these as additional “CC” email addresses for the booking confirmation notification to also be copied to.

Here’s an example to illustrate:

Detect email addresses entered into booking fields

Two email addresses have been added to the “Booking Notes” field for the above booking. When “Check Availability and Book” is clicked, the following “Booking Availability” screen is shown:

Offer additional recipients for booking confirmation notification

Notice how MIDAS has detected these email addresses and offered each as an optional “cc” recipient for the booking confirmation email to the client.

Please Note: Cloud-hosted editions of MIDAS will detect a maximum of 5 additional email addresses in booking fields when MIDAS is configured to send via an external SMTP server, or a maximum of 2 additional email addresses when configured to send via the Sendmail option. There are no limits imposed in self-hosted editions.

MIDAS can be configured to send outgoing email via SMTP/Sendmail via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Email. For more information, please refer to the “Manage Email Settings” documentation.

This isn’t the only new feature to be added in v4.19. There are a number of other new & improved features in MIDAS v4.19 too!

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New “Per Person” Venue Rate

1 minute read time · Updated March 12, 2024 · First published June 8, 2018

We love giving customers flexibility over how they charge clients for use of their rooms and spaces.

MIDAS already allows specifying different “room rates” for different days of the week, and for different lengths and types of bookings. In addition, venues can be charged “per booking”, “per hour” or “per day”.

For more information on setting venue rates, please see our short video tutorial:

How to set venue rates

For our upcoming v4.19 release, we’re introducing a new “per person” venue rate:

Per Person Venue Rate
Per Person Venue Rate

When a venue rate is set to “per person”, the charge for hire of the venue will be determined by the number of attendees for the given booking.

For example, suppose you set a “per person” venue rate of $5, and you then add a booking with 10 attendees. The total charge for hire of that venue would be 10 x $5 = $50.

You’ll still also be able to setup different rate types for different lengths of bookings too. For instance, this would allow you to charge a reduced rate for lengthier bookings.

Click here to continue reading about some of the other new & improved features coming in MIDAS v4.19!

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Include field names on booking blocks

2 minute read time · Updated March 12, 2024 · First published March 29, 2018

MIDAS v4.18 is almost ready for general release, and boasts a variety of user-requested features and improvements.

One of these improvements concerns the way that information is display on “blocks” within the booking grid. Each “block” within the booking grid represents a booking. Administrators can set up to two booking fields to display within each block. A further two booking fields can be set to display on the associated tooltip.

Here’s a typical example showing the Client and Organization field values on the booking block, and the booking times and booking notes in a corresponding tooltip:

Booking Block within the MIDAS Booking Grid

Now, that’s all fairly obvious as to which fields are being displayed. But as MIDAS allows you to add your own custom booking fields, which can also be shown on booking blocks and their tooltips, consider the following example:

Booking Block within the MIDAS Booking Grid with no field names

In the above example, the value of two custom booking fields has been set to shown on booking blocks. These two fields are drop-down lists. However, because the name of the field isn’t shown on the block, only it’s value, the above offers little insight into what’s being shown.

That’s why for v4.18, we’re giving administrators the option to choose whether individual field names are included on booking blocks/tooltips along with their corresponding values, or just the field values only (as in earlier versions of MIDAS).

Here’s the above example again but this time with the settings configured to include the name of the field too:

Booking Block within the MIDAS Booking Grid displaying the names and values of custom booking fields

As you can see, this is a lot much user-friendly. So we’re sure this improvement will be welcomed by our customers.

Click here to continue reading about some of the other new & improved features coming in MIDAS v4.18!

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Export data and statistics in Excel (.xlsx) format

2 minute read time · Updated August 8, 2024 · First published March 12, 2018

We think we’ve really “Excelled” with our forthcoming update to MIDAS… literally!

…because we’re adding the ability to export directly in the native Excel (2007+) .xlsx format.

Previously in MIDAS, if you wished to export bookings, clients, invoice summaries, or resources directly to Excel, you’d first need to export as a CSV (Comma Separated Values) file, and then import this file into Excel.

However, in MIDAS v4.18, you’ll now be able to export data directly into a native .xlsx Excel 2007+ format!

Export data to Excel (.xlsx)
Export data to Excel (.xlsx)

Furthermore, following customer feedback, we’re also providing the ability to export Statistics & Reports data directly to Excel too. On Statistics report pages you’ll now find an “Export” icon:

Export statistics to Excel (.xlsx)
Export statistics to Excel (.xlsx)

Self-Hosted Customers: Please note – in order to take advantage of the new Excel export options in MIDAS v4.18, you’ll need to ensure that the Perl module “Excel::Writer::XLSX” has been installed on your server. (This module is already installed on our cloud-hosted infrastructure). For assistance installing Perl modules on your server, please refer to our KB article: How to install Perl modules.

Click here to continue reading about some of the other new & improved features coming in MIDAS v4.18!

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