Nearly a quarter of our customers choose this addon!

“Addons” further extend the capabilities of a MIDAS booking system beyond the extensive features that are already included as standard with our software.

Did you know that with one of our optional addons you can actually display a calendar of bookings right on your own public website?

Display a calendar of bookings on your website

The Web Calendars addon allows visitors to your organization’s public website to see what’s on at your venue.

You can embed daily and monthly calendars directly into your public website. You also have precise control which events appear (or are hidden) on these calendars, and how much information is shown for each.

Example of a MIDAS calendar embedded in a public website
Example of a MIDAS calendar embedded in a public website

Plus, if you already make use of the built-in Public Booking Request or Public Web Booking features of MIDAS, you can also configure Web Calendars to allow a visitor to directly book/request a specific date by simply clicking it.

Check our some live examples of embeddable public calendars at https://mid.as/web-calendars/live-examples

Get Web Calendars for your MIDAS system

Web Calendars is by far our most popular addon, with nearly a quarter of all customers choosing to add it to their MIDAS booking system!

You can add the Web Calendars addon to your MIDAS system too, by simply going to mid.as/upgrade.

Also check out our other optional addons to further extend the capabilities of your MIDAS software.


Review of the year: 2022

As we wave goodbye to 2022, we thought we’d take a few moments out to reflect on our year here at MIDAS HQ.

If you’ve been a valued customer of ours for a while now, you’ll know that we typically release significant “feature rich” new updates to our room booking software at least three times a year. This isn’t a new thing either – we’ve been adding exciting new features to our software ever since 2006!

2022 has seen some great new additions to our software for our customers to benefit from.

Here’s a brief recap of some of the major new features, in case you missed any of our previous posts and announcements during the year…

Send invoices as PDF attachments

In December with MIDAS v4.32, there’s now the option to send invoices directly to your clients as PDF attachments, rather than “inline” within the body of an email.

Send PDF versions of invoices as email attachments
Send PDF versions of invoices as email attachments

Read more in this blog post.

Set room rates based upon the time of day

Also, for v4.32 in December 2022, you can now set charging rates based upon a booking’s start time. This new addition now makes it easier than ever to charge different rates for daytime and evening bookings.

NEW: Set Rates based upon the time of day a booking starts
NEW: Set Rates based upon the time of day a booking starts

Read more in this blog post.

Visual booking from a floor plan or map

In September 2022, for MIDAS v4.31 we introduced a new “Floor Plan” feature. This allowed you to upload a map of your facilities to allow users to be able to visually book by simply clicking on a space on the map.

The Floorplan / Map Editor in MIDAS
The Floorplan / Map Editor in MIDAS

Read more in this blog post.

Other new features in MIDAS during 2022

Onwards to 2023…

Whilst we may have been developing MIDAS for over 16 years now, as you can see from all of the above (and from our changelog too), our commitment to making our software even better is unwaning.

This will of course continue during 2023, with lots more exciting new features in the pipeline.

Remember too, that many of the new and improved features you see added to our software come as a direct result of feedback and suggestions from our worldwide customer base.

So if you’ve got an idea for something that could potentially make MIDAS work better for your organization, please don’t hesitate to let us know.

Finally, we’ve like to end this post by wish you a very healthy, peaceful, and prosperous New Year from all of us at MIDAS HQ.


Other invoicing improvements in MIDAS v4.32

In our previous post we announced that you can now generate and send PDF versions of invoices to clients from MIDAS.

That’s not the only invoicing improvement that we’re introducing with our v4.32 update. Here’s what else we’ve added…

New Bulk “Remove Unsent Invoices” tool

By default, when new invoices are created or automatically generated in MIDAS, they initially remain “unsent”. This allows you to make any changes until you’re ready to send them to your clients.

That said, you can of course configure MIDAS to automatically send unsent invoices each day.

Now, MIDAS naturally retains invoices indefinitely in the system. Most organizations won’t need to keep old invoices for more than a handful of years.

So earlier this year, we introduced a new “Remove Obsolete Invoices” housekeeping tool in MIDAS. This allowed an administrator to remove old invoices in bulk.

As the “Remove Obsolete Invoices” tool only affects paid invoices, we’ve added a further tool to MIDAS v4.32. The new “Remove Unsent Invoices” tool allows an administrator to quickly remove all “draft” (unsent) invoices with just a couple of clicks.

Retain references to removed obsolete invoices with bookings

As we’ve mentioned, MIDAS already includes an administrative tool to remove obsolete invoices from the system. When this happens, any bookings that were originally used to generate a now obsolete invoice will no longer indicate that they are associated with that invoice.

For v4.32 we’ve included the option to leave references to removed invoices with booking when obsolete invoices are removed.

Retain clients with invoices when removing obsolete clients

Whilst we’re on the subject of “house keeping”, another database tool included with MIDAS is the “Remove Obsolete Clients” tool. This allows an administrator to remove clients from the database who haven’t had any bookings in a long time.

For such clients who may still have invoices in the system, this meant that those invoices became clientless when the client was removed.

We’ve now included the option to “Retain clients with invoices” when removing obsolete clients.

For any obsolete clients who still have invoices in the system won’t be removed – both the client and their invoice will be retained.

Options to include more information with resources on invoices

When MIDAS generates invoices for your room hires, the description of each room on the invoice includes the room’s name, as well as the date and times of hire.

However, for resource items, the invoice description for each item only includes the invoice name.

So for v4.32, we’ve provided options to control how resource items appear on generated invoices.

You can choose to have the resource’s name only, or the resource’s name and the venue (room) it’s been assigned to, or the resource’s name with the dates/time it has been book for – or a combination of the above.

Set default email subject when sending invoices, credit notes, and receipts

The “Templates” feature allows you to customize a range of template within your MIDAS system. For instance, you can customize how your printouts look, or how emails look, and so forth.

For v4.32, we’ve allowed the setting of a “default” email subject line for when invoices, credit notes, and receipts are emailed via MIDAS.

This means that when a user composes an email to a client in MIDAS when sending an invoice, credit note, or receipt, the subject line can be pre populated (rather than empty).

The user will still be able to change the subject line on a per email basis, but these new “default” subject line settings will mean that you can set an initial subject line for such emails.


How to send invoices as PDF attachments

Physical Printed Invoice

We first introduced invoicing capabilities to our MIDAS room booking software way back in 2009.

Since then, it’s fair to say that invoicing has been the area that we receive the most suggestions from our customers for new features and capabilities.

That’s why over the years we’ve been constantly expanding and improving the invoicing capabilities in MIDAS.

In the past 12 months alone, we’ve allowed customers to set even more flexible venue rates. We’ve also added Zoho Invoice to the growing list of 3rd party platforms you can export MIDAS invoices to. Additionally, we also added a couple of handy invoice tools too.

Now, the ability to be able to directly email an invoice to a client from within MIDAS is something that’s not new. In fact, it’s been available in our software ever since invoicing was first introduced.

This feature allowed a user to send an email to a client, with a copy of their invoice included in the body of the email.

For many of our customers this has worked well for many years, and continues to do so.

However, as the web continues to evolve, sadly many email clients haven’t kept up with more modern formatting and layout standards. This prompted us to recently introduce an new “Email Compatibility” setting. This setting helps ensure that invoices sent via email to your customers display correctly in the body of the email when it’s viewed.

Whilst this means that everyone can view a correctly formatted invoice contained within an email sent from a MIDAS system, we know that some customers would still prefer to send an invoice as a PDF file to their clients.

Until now, in order to send an invoice from a MIDAS system to a client in PDF format, a user would need to “save” the invoice to a PDF file. This file would then need to be attached and sent via an external email program.

Let’s be honest, this isn’t ideal! It would be far simpler if you could send PDF versions of invoices to clients directly from within MIDAS.

Generate PDF Invoices

That’s why starting from MIDAS v4.32, you’ll now have the option to be able to send invoices to your clients as PDF attachments, rather than “inline”.

Send PDF versions of invoices as email attachments
Send PDF versions of invoices as email attachments

To enable this option, cloud hosted customers can go to MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Email → Advanced. On this screen, tick the “Send invoices as PDF attachments” option and save changes.

For self-hosted customers, you’ll need to be running at least MIDAS v4.32. In order to enable this functionality, there’s also a couple of additional prerequisets you’ll need to install on your server first.

We’re also providing you with controls over the page size and orientation of generated PDFs. You can also control page margins too.