The “Date Notes” feature allows you to attach notes to a single date, or a range of dates within your booking system.
Add notes to calendar dates
These notes are then shown to all users who navigate to that date (or to a date within that range).
This can be used to remind other users of special dates, when your closed for public holidays, or other activities or notable events to be aware of on certain dates.
Dates with notes associated with them are also indicated on the Booking Availability screen where they can be quickly viewed before new bookings are added.
MIDAS v4.37 introduces a new setting which now also allows you to include date notes on your booking print outs.
This new setting may be found under MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Print → Include Date Notes on printouts.
This week we’ve released an update to the optional “Reviews” addon for MIDAS.
If you’re not familiar with this addon, it allows your business to automatically collect feedback, reviews, and ratings on independent review sites from the customers who hire and book your facilities.
How the Reviews addon works
The “Reviews” addon works by automatically notifying an independent review collection platform after a client’s booking has taken place at your facilities. The review platform then in turn sends out an invitation by email to your client asking them to leave a review or rating of their experience with your business on their website.
As our Reviews addon integrates with independent, third party review and rating services, our addon is reliant on these services remaining active.
Latest updates to our Reviews addon
Recently, the “Psydro” review platform appears to have closed. It’s main website has been timing out and returning errors for a while now. Whilst there’s been no official statement from Psydro, given their website had been inaccessible for some time, we believe this platform is now dead. Consequently, we have now dropped support for Psydro.
There’s also something strange going on with the “collect-reviews” website. Recently, it’s content has changed to a Thai gambling site. Again, there’s been no official statement from the collect-reviews team. It is therefore not known if they’ve sold their domain, or if it’s been hacked. Either way, it’s clear that right now their website is not the review platform it was previously. Consequently, we have now also dropped support for “collect-reviews”.
Finally, “TrustSpot” has recently rebranded to become “RaveCapture”. TrustSpot was one of the review platforms our addon supported from the outset. According to the TrustSpot/RaveCapture team, other than a name and logo change, nothing else has changed. The platform’s functionality remains the same. We’ve therefore updated the name and logo in our Reviews addon to reflect this rebrand.
In addition to RaveCapture/TrustSpot, our addon continues to support the Reviews.io and TrustPilot platforms too!
How to get the Reviews addon
If you’d like to get reviews from users of your facilities on popular review sites like TrustPilot, then the Reviews addon for MIDAS is for you!
This optional addon is available for both cloud hosted and self hosted MIDAS booking systems.
To add this addon to your existing MIDAS system, simply go to mid.as/upgrade.
One of the great features of our software is that it can allow visitors to your website to check room availability. They can then make an online booking (or booking request) for use of your facilities.
As this can be done without requiring a login or a user account. When making a “public” booking/request, the person simply needs to enter their details. This will typically include their name and contact email address.
When a public web booking/request is made, MIDAS checks the email address that’s been entered against its existing client database.
If a single matching client with the same email address already exists in the client database, MIDAS will associate the booking/request with that existing client.
This negates the need for a person to have to re-enter all their information (i.e. address, phone number, etc) each time they make a web booking or request.
MIDAS can also be configured to allow a person to update their information each time they make a web booking or request, if you so desire.
Multiple clients with the same email address
But what if there is more than one existing client in the database with the same email address as the person making the web booking / request?
In these instances, MIDAS will not only compare the email address given, but also the client and organization names provided.
If there is a single exact match based on this additional information, MIDAS will associated the booking/request with the one matching client.
Again, MIDAS can be configured to update the existing client record at time of web booking / request with new details supplied by the individual.
The problem
There is however an “edge case” where the above options don’t quite go far enough.
Take for example an individual who uses their personal email address to make web bookings or requests for multiple different organizations they’re associated with.
That’s no problem if there are existing client records for the client for each of their organizations. But it becomes an issue if this is a brand new client, or a client with just a single existing client record under one of their organizations.
Here’s an example to illustrate:
Let’s say Jeff is associated with two organizations – let’s call them “A” and “B”.
Let’s also assume that Jeff is a brand new client. There is therefore currently no client record with the same email address existing in your MIDAS system.
Jeff makes a booking request using his personal email address on behalf of organization “A”. A new client record is created for Jeff using this information.
A short while later, Jeff makes another booking request. He uses his personal email address again, but this time he’d like to make a request for organization “B”.
When Jeff makes his second request, MIDAS will see that there is already a single client in its database matching Jeff’s email address. At this point one of two things will happen, based on whether the “Allow client record updates” setting has been enabled in MIDAS.
If the “Allow client record updates” option is disabled, MIDAS will reuse Jeff’s original details (i.e. organization “A”). This will result in both his booking requests being for organization A.
If the “Allow client record updates” option is enabled, MIDAS will update Jeff’s original details (i.e. to become organization “B”). This will result in both his booking requests being for organization B.
…but that’s not what we want! We want his first request to be for organization A, and his second for organization B.
The solution
Instances of someone making web bookings / requests on behalf of different organizations but using the same email address are uncommon. But we still wanted to better accommodate this scenario.
So for MIDAS v4.37 we’ve introduced a new “Account for multiple clients/organizations sharing the same email address” setting.
NEW: “Account for multiple clients/organizations sharing the same email address” setting
Enabling this setting will automatically create additional client records for each client/organization variant using the same email address.
The result – in our illustrative example above – would be that Jeff can make booking request for either organization A or B (or even a future organization C) using his personal email address without issue.
We often make improvements to the already extensive invoicing capabilities of our room booking software. This is to accommodate a diverse range of invoicing scenarios and usage cases that our customers tell us about.
For MIDAS v4.37, we’ve made a couple of improvements based on customer feedback.
Manual quotation payments for tentative bookings can now update the booking’s type
“Tentative” bookings were first introduced in MIDAS v4.14 in 2016. Bookings of this type are automatically removed from the system if they’ve not ‘confirmed’ within a specified time frame or by a certain date/time.
In 2023, we also introduced a “quotation” feature. Used in conjunction with tentative bookings, you could generate quotations for clients when making tentative bookings for them.
If the client accepts and pays their quotation online, their ‘tentative’ bookings automatically convert to regular ‘confirmed’ bookings.
Of course, there may be instances when a client wishes to accept a quotation but pays ‘offline’ – perhaps over the phone or in person.
MIDAS can deal with ‘offline’ payments by allowing administrators to manually update quotations or invoices to reflect that a payment has been made against them.
Starting with MIDAS v4.37, if ‘manual’ payment is made for a quotation for a tentative booking, this can now update the associated bookings and make them ‘confirmed’.
Previously, this functionality was only available when an ‘online’ payment was made for a quotation.
Updating an invoice’s internal notes is now recorded in the Recent Activity Log
We appreciate that keeping an accurate audit trail is essential. The ‘Recent Activity Log’ in our software logs all user actions with date and time stamps. This useful log (which can also be downloaded) allows administrators to monitor how their booking system is being used.
Whenever an invoice’s status is updated, these actions are recorded to the audit log.
Each invoice can also have ‘internal notes‘ added to them. These notes are not visible to the recipient of the invoice, but are visible to administrators when viewing an invoice.
Until now, the action of updating internal notes for an invoice was not recorded to the ‘Recent Activity Log’ itself.
We’ve addressed this for v4.37. Whenever an administrator makes or updates the internal notes for an invoice, quotation, or credit note, this activity is noted in the recent activity log.
