Category: Development

Set multiple closed date ranges for each venue

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October 27, 2016

The latest exciting update to our web based room booking and resource scheduling software MIDAS is just around the corner, are we’re really excited to be introducing you to some of the notable new features and improvements you can except in v4.14 right here on our blog…

Now, the ability to “close” individual venues to bookings over a custom date range has long been a staple of MIDAS.

This has allowed users to, for instance, close a particular venue over a holiday period or when a venue is out of action due to a period of scheduled maintenance or refurbishment, etc.

The limitation of this feature has until now been that only one “closed from” and “closed until” date range could be defined for each venue at any given time.

Based upon feedback from our customers – notably including those in educational sectors – in v4.14 we’re improving the ability to close venues between dates, by now allowing multiple “closed” date ranges to be defined for each of your venues:

Specify multiple closed dates for venues
“Closed” date ranges for each of your venues may be specified in MIDAS v4.14 via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage Venues → [select venue] → Hours → Closed Between

From this screen, simply select a date from the calendar as the “Closed From” date, and a second date as the “Closed Until” date. Clicking the small “+” icon in the lower right corner will then allow you to specify additional “Closed From” and “Closed Until” dates.

Dates that fall within these “Closed Between” date ranges will be unavailable to regular users for booking. (Administrative users however who have been specifically granted the special “Can book outside operating hours” permission can still book even when your venue(s) are closed to regular bookings)

Taking the example of a school/college/university – This improvement for v4.14 will now allow staff to enter dates for all the holiday periods throughout their academic year and beyond!

You can read more about some of the other exciting improvements coming in v4.14 here!

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Improved Invoice Auditing

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October 24, 2016

Over the past few months we’ve been busy working on the next update to MIDAS, v4.14, and this upcoming release contains a wealth of new and improved features, which we’re really excited to introduce you to here on our blog…

We’ve made a couple of notable improvements around invoice “auditing” in v4.14 to help make it easier for you to keep tabs on your invoices. These new improvements will allow administrators with access to the invoicing capabilities of MIDAS to:

View the complete history log for each invoice

Whilst MIDAS keeps a log of all actions and activity relating to each invoice, in previous versions of MIDAS, only the most recent action on an invoice has been displayed on screen.

However, when viewing an invoice in v4.14, you’ll be able to click the latest invoice status line at the top of an invoice to open the complete history log for that particular invoice:

Store internal notes and comments with each invoice

Store internal notes & comments with each invoice

The ability to add visible “notes” to an invoice, which are then included on the finalized printed or emailed invoice sent to a client have been around in MIDAS for a while now.

However, we’ve also received a number of requests from customers who’d like to have the ability to additionally add “internal notes” to invoices as well (notes which don’t appear on invoices themselves and which are therefore hidden from clients), so that they can better keep tabs on each invoice.

To that end, in v4.14 we’ve added a “Comments” icon to the Invoice toolbar that’s shown whenever you view an invoice. Clicking this icon will allow you to view or edit internal notes/comments for the selected invoice:

Store internal notes and comments with each invoice

As these notes/comments are “internal”, they are only visible to those MIDAS users able to access the invoice. Internal notes/comments are never included on an actual printed/emailed invoice and therefore are not disclosed to the end client an invoice is for.

Continue reading about some of the other exciting improvements coming in v4.14 here!

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New features for hotels and overnight accommodation businesses

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October 19, 2016

MIDAS isn’t just for booking meeting rooms you know! Our software has successfully been used to manage activities for all kinds of venues and facilities. These include libraries, bowling alleys, vehicle rentals, recording studios, radio stations, golf courses, hire companies, flight simulators, airports, hotels.. and so much more!

To better accommodate those businesses that book facilities “by the night” – like hotels, guest houses, B&B’s, hostels, and camping & caravan sites – we’re introducing an exciting enhancement to v4.14. This will allow the ability to book by a number of nights stay.

MIDAS already allows you to control (on a per user basis) the type of time selectors each user sees on their Add/Modify Bookings screen.

By default, these are simple start/finish time selectors. However, they can be changed to a start time + duration, or a drop-down list of predefined time periods.

For MIDAS v4.14, there’s now an alternative option of booking by a number of “Nights”:

Tentative Booking Types

For users with this option enabled, they simply need to select a check in date and a number of nights stay. MIDAS will then do the rest!

Tentative Booking Types

Administrators can predefine your check in and check out times, as well as the maximum number of nights stay permitted.

Tentative Booking Types

For example, if your hotel’s check in time is 2pm and check out time is 11am, then a user would select their check in date and the number of nights stay. A continuous booking will be created starting at 2pm on the check-in date and running until 11am on the check-out date.

Furthermore, if you’ve enabled the Public Booking Request features of MIDAS, administrators can also enable the ability for the public to request by number of nights also!

We believe these enhancements further increase the flexibility of our scheduling software. It makes MIDAS even more flexible for hotels, guest houses, B&B’s, hostels, camping & caravan sites… and more!

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“Tentative” bookings which auto-expire if not confirmed

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October 17, 2016

During the Summer we’ve been busy working away on the next update to MIDAS, v4.14. This upcoming release contains a whole host of new and improved features. We’re really excited to introduce you to these over the course of the next few weeks here on our blog…

The first new feature we’re unavailing is “Tentative” bookings.

Currently, bookings in MIDAS can be thought of in one of two ways; either as “confirmed” bookings, or an unconfirmed “booking requests“.

“Confirmed” bookings are fairly self-explanatory. Unconfirmed “booking requests” are those which first require approval from an administrator before being converted from an unconfirmed “request” to a confirmed “booking”.

With the introduction of the optional ability to also make “Tentative” bookings in v4.14 you can add bookings which only persist for a certain amount of time before being automatically removed. That is, unless you change them to be “confirmed”.

How is this useful? Well, here’s an example;

Say you have a client who wants to book “Room 1” a month from today, and may also want to book “Room 2” for the same times as well. They don’t know for sure yet whether they’ll need the extra room until next week.

In v4.14, you’d be able to a regular “confirmed” booking for the client to “Room 1”, and also a “tentative” booking (or “hold”) for the client to “Room 2”, which could be set to auto-expire two weeks from today for example.

Once these bookings have been added, then for the next two weeks, both Room 1 and Room 2 will be booked for the client. If you hear nothing further from your client in relation to Room 2, then after two weeks have elapsed, the “tentative” booking which had been added to Room 2 will be automatically removed, freeing up/releasing that slot for other potential bookings! Alternatively, if you do hear from the client within the time frame (before the tentative booking would expire), and they confirm that they do also want Room 2, you can simply update that “tentative” booking make it “confirmed”.

Whether a booking is added as a “confirmed” or as a “tentative” booking is determined by its “Booking Type”.

“Booking Types” allow you to categorize and color-code your bookings, and by default all booking types are “confirmed” bookings.

MIDAS v4.14 allows you to set individual booking types to instead make bookings that are assigned that particular type, “tentative”. For each booking type you make “tentative”, you can also set how long tentative bookings of this type should persist for:

Tentative Booking Types

You can specify a duration (in minutes, hours, or days) that tentative bookings of the selected type will persist for. Also, whether this duration should be measured from the point in time the tentative booking is added to the system, or count back from the start time of the tentative booking.

For example, if a tentative booking is added to the system at 7am on a given day to take place at 4pm the same day, then;
a) A booking type with a tentative persistence of “4 hours after being added”, would mean that the booking would be automatically removed from the system if it hasn’t been confirmed by 11am. or;
b) A booking type with a tentative persistence of “2 hours before booking is due to commence”, would mean that the booking would be automatically removed if it hasn’t been confirmed by 2pm.

You can set different tentative persistence settings for each of your booking types, providing you with maximum flexibility over your tentative booking types.

When “tentative” bookings are being added, they will be clearly indicated on user’s Booking Availability Screens:

Tentative Booking Types
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