Category: Development

Improved Invoice Auditing

2 minute read time · Updated January 6, 2023 · First published 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

2 minute read time · Updated June 23, 2026 · First published 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 the type of time selector each user sees on their Add/Modify Bookings screen. These can be different for each user if required.

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.

Book By Nights

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 can simply 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, let’s assume that your hotel’s check in time is 2pm and check out time is 11am. A user would then select their check in date and the number of nights stay. The result being a continuous booking 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

3 minute read time · Updated February 14, 2025 · First published 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.

What are 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 in order to become a confirmed “booking”.

With the introduction of the optional ability to also make “Tentative” bookings, 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 are tentative bookings useful?

Let’s say you have a client who wants to book “Room 1” a month from today. They may also need “Room 2” at the same times as well. However, 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”. You can also a “tentative” booking (or “hold”) for the client to “Room 2”. This ‘tentative’ hold could be set to auto-expire for example two weeks from today.

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 in Room 2 will be automatically removed. This then frees up and releases that slot for other potential bookings. Alternatively, if you do hear back from the client before the tentative booking would expire, and they confirm that they do also want Room 2, you can simply update the “tentative” booking and make it “confirmed”.

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

Tentative Booking Types

“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 period is measured from the point in time the booking is added, or counting 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;

  1. A booking type with a tentative persistence of “4 hours after being added”. The booking would be automatically removed from the system if it hasn’t been confirmed by 11am. or;
  2. A booking type with a tentative persistence of “2 hours before booking is due to commence”. 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. This provides 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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Security Enhancements in MIDAS v4.13

4 minute read time · Updated July 21, 2023 · First published July 1, 2016

If you follow our blog, then you’ll know we’ve been busy putting the finishing touches to the next update to MIDAS. Whilst each new version of our world class room booking and resource scheduling software includes exciting new and improved features and functionality, we’re also proactively committed to providing a secure scheduling solution for your organization.

To that end, MIDAS v4.13 includes a number of security enhancements which we’ll explain below…

15-Point Security Audit

We’re including an on-demand security audit with v4.13. Administrators may access this audit via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Security. When run, the audit will test a number of key metrics of your MIDAS system. This includes your MySQL setup, MIDAS files, and recommended MIDAS settings. A detailed report is generated with appropriate advisories for improving and hardening the security of your MIDAS system:
15-Point Security Audit

Password “Block list”

MIDAS v4.13 includes a list of passwords that are considered “banned”. Banned passwords cannot be used by users when setting a new password or changing an existing password. By default, the block list contains the Top 1000 most common passwords of 2016. Passwords such as “123456”, “password”, “qwerty”, etc are included.

For our self-hosted customers, the list of banned passwords is also editable allowing you to add/remove banned passwords. You’ll find this within within the a file named “bannedpw.dat” within your MIDAS installation.

Improved clean-up of Temporary Logs

MIDAS has included a “Keep temporary logs for x days” setting for many years. This setting has previously defined how long entries persist in the “Recent Activity” log (an audit log which records all user activity within MIDAS). For v4.13 we’ve extended the functionality of this setting to also cover the persistence of log files which MIDAS may create from time to time. For instance, a log file is created if there are issues upgrading MIDAS from a previous version, or issues when importing data from another application, or when logging of API calls is enabled, etc. Whilst these log files would be retained until manually removed, the “Keep temporary logs for x days” setting will now ensure that these files are also removed after a specific period of time.

“Minimum” Minimum Password Length

MIDAS has also included a “Minimum password length” setting since its inception. This setting allowed administrators to set a minimum password length for all user passwords. Starting with v4.13 it will no longer be possible to set this value less than 5 characters.

Password Strength Indicator

Password Strength IndicatorOur password strength indicator has been a feature for administrators creating new user accounts since v4.07. For v4.13, we’ve also made this useful visual indicator available whenever an end-users changes their password. The visual indicator classifies the password as either “Very Weak”, “Weak”, “Fair”, “Good” or “Strong” as you type, with a corresponding color to match (i.e. Red = Very Weak, Orange = Fair, Green = Strong). This classification is based upon a number of factors including the length of the password, the presence of upper and lower case letters as well as numbers and special characters, and whether the password has been banned.
We hope the addition of this visual indicator for end-users will help promote the use of strong passwords.

MIDAS v4.13 is expected to be made available to Beta Testers in the next few weeks, with a general release shortly after. We’re always looking for additional testers to help test and provide feedback/bug reports on pre-release versions of our software, like v4.13. Becoming a tester is free and no experience is required, and what’s more we’ll reward you for your participation! Find out more about becoming a MIDAS Beta Tester here.

If you would like to be notified when v4.13 is fully released, then why not join our Mailing List?
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