Other invoicing improvements in MIDAS v4.32

December 7, 2022

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.

Tags: invoicing, v4.32

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Send invoices as PDF attachments

Filed Under: Development

November 30, 2022

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.

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

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.

Tags: attachments, email, invoicing, pdf, v4.32

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Setting Venue Rates just got more flexible!

Filed Under: Development

November 23, 2022

As you may know, our MIDAS room booking software includes integrated invoicing, allowing you to generate invoices for your client’s use of your venue.

What initially started off as quite basic functionality for setting your room rates, over the years as we’ve heard more from our customer’s specific pricing and charging scenarios – some of which have been quite complex!

As a result, over the years, we’ve constantly been developing more flexibility into how you can have MIDAS automatically calculate how much to charge your clients.

We’re now excited to announce that we’re adding even more options to venue rates, which we know will benefit a number of our customers!

More about that later, but first, let’s take a look back at some of the notable improvements we’ve made to MIDAS over the years to deal with a whole host of different pricing and charging structures.

September 2009

We first introduced invoicing capabilities with MIDAS v2.00 way back in September 2009.

From the outset, the initial invoicing features allowed administrators to define either “per booking”, “per day”, or “per hour” rates for each of their venues.

A different rate could also be set for each day of the week.

January 2011

Whilst the initial offerings of “per booking”, “per day”, or “per hour” charging rates worked well for many customers, since the introduction of invoicing in MIDAS, we’d heard from a number of customers who needed more flexibility.

Specifically, we have customers who charged different rates depending upon the “type” of booking taking place.

For example, internal users may be offered room hire at a discounted rate to that of external users.

We facilitated this scenario by introducing a new “Booking Type Discounts” feature from MIDAS v3.11.

This allowed for venue rates to be discounted by a specific percentage depending upon which Booking Type was assigned to the booking.

May 2014

The Booking Type Discounts feature certainly offered a lot more flexibility to venue charging in MIDAS.

But since its introduction, we’d also heard from customers who wanted to be able to charge different rates depending upon the length (duration) of bookings.

For instance, if a client wanted to book a space for a single hour, it would be charged at one hourly rate, whereas if they wanted to book the space for a longer period, it would instead be charged at a reduced hourly rate.

Eager to support as many different charging scenarios as practically possible, for MIDAS v4.06 we allowed setting different venue rates for different lengths of bookings.

September 2015

We made a small improvement to Booking Type Discounts for MIDAS v4.10.

Previously, Booking Type Discounts were just that – they “discounted” the standard venue rate.

For v4.10 we also allowed Booking Type Discounts to be set negative, effectively allowing venue rates to be increased from their standard rate for certain booking types.

April 2017

Further improvements came to Booking Type Discounts for MIDAS v4.15.

Discounts could now be set to take off a fixed (absolute) amount – rather than a percentage – of the standard rate.

July 2018

Another usage scenario was highlighted by a customer who wanted the ability to be able to charge for room hire based upon the number of people in attendance.

We therefore introduced a new “per person” venue rate option in MIDAS v4.19. This complimented the existing “per booking”, “per day”, and “per hour” options.

August 2019

Now, setting up (or modifying) your venue rates is something that you’ll likely do infrequently.

That said, as we’ve added numerous options to how your venue rates can be setup, it could become time consuming to set rates individually for each of the 7 days of the week.

So for MIDAS v4.22, we included an “All Days” tick box. When selected, this allowed an administrate to set the rates for just a single day of the week, but when saving have them applied to all seven days.

July 2020

Up until this point, MIDAS included a “global” tax setting that could be used to add a tax charge onto your invoice as required.

A further usage case was presented by a customer who only wanted to be able to charge tax on certain venues, with either a reduced tax rate, or zero tax on other venues.

To accommodate this, for MIDAS v4.25 we introduced “per venue” tax rates.

This allows you to setup a tax rate (percentage) for each individual venue in the software.

And now…

So that’s a brief overview of how we’ve constantly been improving the capabilities of our booking software over the years to meet our customer’s needs.

For MIDAS v4.32 we’re going even further!

A number of customers have requested the ability to be able to charge different rates depending on the time of day that a booking takes place.

For example, they may charge one hourly rate before 5pm and a different rate after 5pm.

That’s now possible starting with MIDAS v4.32!

You can set a rate based upon a booking’s start time within a given day.

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

These new “time of day” features can of course be used in conjunction with the other options for setting your venue rates.

You can still specify rates as either “per hour”, “per booking”, “per day”, or “per person”, have different rates for different lengths of bookings – at different times of the day, and on different days of the week!

The possibilities are immense and we hope this will cover almost every conceivable pricing structure that our customers have!

Tags: invoicing, v4.32, venue rates, venues

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Visually Book From A Floor Plan or Map

Filed Under: Development

August 29, 2022

Ever since the first version of our MIDAS room booking software, users choose spaces they wish to book from a “list” of available rooms.

Starting with MIDAS v4.31, we’re excited to now offer an alternative – the ability to book spaces by simply selecting them on a graphical floor plan, map, or schematic of your facilities.

Setting up floor plans / maps in MIDAS

Administrators can choose whether MIDAS shows a “list” of venues to users, or allows the selecting of venues from a visual floor plan or map. This is done though a setting which may be accessed via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Bookings → Floorplans / Maps.

Assign venues to groups

To be able to use floor plans or maps in MIDAS, you’ll first need to assign your venues (rooms / bookable spaces) to venue groups. Each venue group can have a floor plan or map associated with it.

For example, if your building has two floors, you could have a dedicated floor plan / map for each floor. In order to do this, you’ll need to assign all your first floor rooms to one venue group, and all your second floor rooms to another venue group.

Here’s a quick tutorial on how to assign venues to groups:

Upload a floor plan / map

Once you’ve “grouped” your bookable spaces, you can then upload an image of a floor plan, map, or schematic in which those bookable spaces appear.

You can do this via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage Venues → Groups.

Select the venue group you wish to upload an image for. Next, click the “Map” button to open the Map Editor.

In the Map Editor, click the “Upload New Map” button to select an image from your device to upload.

Upload a new floor plan, map, or schematic in MIDAS

Your upload should be a PNG image file with dimensions of at least 200 x 200 pixels.

Define areas on your floor plan / map

Once you’ve uploaded your map, you’ll then need to tell MIDAS the position of each of your bookable spaces on that image.

To do that, select the “+” icon alongside one of the bookable spaces in the group from the right side of the Map Editor.

The “Shape Tool” selector will then open. This allows you to select whether you wish to define a rectangle, polygon, or circle area on your floor plan / map for the space you’ve selected.

Accommodating Rooms of all Shapes and Sizes

For square or rectangular rooms, select “Rectangle“, then:

Click on one corner of the room on your floor plan / map (i.e. the upper left corner of the room)
Click on the opposite corner of the room on your floor plan / map. (i.e. the lower right corner of the room)

For irregular shaped rooms, select “Polygon“, then:

Click on each point in room on your floor plan / map where the perimeter walls change direction.
Once you’ve done this around the room’s entire perimeter, click “Done”.

For circular rooms, select “Circle“, then:

Click on the center of the room on your floor plan / map.
Click on a point on the perimeter of the room on your floor plan / map.

Once you’ve defined an area on your floor plan / map, a “tick” icon will be shown next to the name of the bookable space in the venue list.

If you make a mistake, you can easily clear an area by tapping the tick icon next to the name of the venue. The icon will change to a cross, and tapping this will remove that area from the map. You’ll then be able to recreate a new area.

Once you’ve defined areas on your map for each of your venues, click “Save Map” to save changes.

What end-users see

When a user clicks the “Add Bookings” icon in their MIDAS toolbar, they’ll see the floor plans / maps you’ve created for each of the venue groups the user has been granted permission to access. These are shown instead of the usual “list” of venues to choose from.

Visually selecting venues from a floor plan on the Add Bookings screen

Selecting a venue is then as simple as clicking on it on the floor plan. Each selected space will be highlighted in green on the floor plan. Multiple spaces may also be selected concurrently on each floor plan.

A larger floor plan may also be opened by clicking on the name of the venue group. This bigger floor plan makes it easier to select rooms on larger layouts:

Users can click to zoom a floor plan for a larger version from which venues can be selected — Users can click to “zoom” a floor plan for a larger version from which venues can be selected

The remainder of the booking process is exactly the same as before. The user enters the required information about their booking. Next, MIDAS checks that the dates, times, and venues they want are available and if so, the user places their booking.

Video Tutorial

Applications

The new floor plan / map feature a great way for users to see the location of the rooms they’re booking. It also have has other applications as well…

Take for example a computer room, where students can book an individual workstation.

Before the floor plan / map feature, each workstation in MIDAS may have been listed with a number. For example “Workstation 1”, “Workstation 2”, “Workstation 3”, etc.

This provided no real indication to students as to the particular location of their selected workstation within the computer room.

By uploading a defining a floor plan of your computer room, students will be able to select their desired workstation by simply clicking upon its location on the floor plan.

Tags: booking, floorplans, maps, v4.31

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