Posts Tagged: booking type

Generate Quotations For Prospective Bookings

MIDAS v4.35 introduces support for generating “Quotations” for prospective bookings.

Generate quotations when making tentative bookings
Generate quotations when making tentative bookings

Used in conjunction with the “Tentative Bookings” feature, you can generate quotations for clients when making tentative bookings for them.

Should the client accept and pay the quotation online, their “tentative” booking(s) automatically convert to regular “confirmed” bookings.

A number of configurable options are available with the new Quotations feature, including:

Automatically Update Booking Type

When a quotation is accepted and paid online, MIDAS can automatically update the corresponding booking’s “type” to be any confirmed booking type you’ve already defined.

Choose whether bookings become confirmed if their quotations are partially or fully paid

You can control when a “tentative” booking automatically converts to a “confirmed” booking based on how its associated quotation is paid.

Automatically change a booking's type when a quotation payments are received
Automatically change a booking’s type when a quotation payments are received

MIDAS can either “confirm” a tentative booking on just a partially paid quotation, or only confirm the booking once its quotation has been paid in full.

New Quotation Template

Templates” in MIDAS allow an administrator to customize a range emails, invoices, and more.

There’s already separate templates available for regular, deposit, and cancellation invoices, as well as receipts and credit notes.

v4.35 adds a further template now for your Quotations.

New customizable Quotation template
New customizable Quotation template

The default quotation template is very similar to the default regular invoice template, but introduces some new “placeholder” template variables too.

An example of a new placeholder variable available for the quotation template is “%QUOTEEXPIRES%”.

This special variable is substituted (at time the quotation is printed or emailed) with the date and time that the quotation expires.

By default, a quotation expires when its corresponding tentative booking(s) would expire in MIDAS.

However, there’s a further option available….

Variable quotation terms

As mentioned above, quotations by default are only valid up until the expiration time of their corresponding tentative booking(s).

So as an example, let’s say a tentative booking is made to commence at 9am on a Monday. The tentative booking settings are set to expire the booking if it’s not confirmed at least 2 hours before it is due to commence.

If the tentative booking hasn’t been confirmed by 7am on the Monday, the booking will automatically expire and be removed from the system.

In essence, a quotation generated for the above booking would remain valid until 7am on the day of the booking.

After this time, the quotation (and tentative booking) will have expired.

Now one of the new quotation options allows MIDAS to convert a tentative booking to a confirmed booking is only a partial payment has been made against the quotation.

In such instances, we’ve included an option to allow you to update the quotation’s terms to be the same as your standard invoice terms (i.e. for example 30 days).

Change a quotation's terms upon partial payment
Change a quotation’s terms upon partial payment

This means that as long as a client pays something towards the quotation, they will then have longer to pay the remaining balance, just as if they were paying a regular invoice.


Improvements to Booking Types

The next update (v4.17) to our room booking and resource scheduling system, MIDAS, is just around the corner. So we’re giving you a first look at some of the new features and improvements in v4.17.

In this post, we’ll look at the improvements coming to “booking types”. Booking Types allow you to color-code bookings based on their “type” making them easier to spot in the booking grid. Furthermore, you can assign discounts to each booking type. This allows charging different rates depending upon the type of booking.

You can also set booking types to be “tentative“. Bookings assigned as “tentative” will automatically be removed if not confirmed in a timely manner.

This time last year, for v4.14, we introduced the ability to set a default booking type on a per-client basis. For v4.17, we’re also giving you the ability to specify a global default booking type. If set, then any bookings added without a booking type being specified, will automatically be assigned the default type. This is especially useful if you’ve “hidden” the booking type selector from view, as you can still assign bookings a default booking type.

Additionally, following customer feedback, we’re making it possible for you to limit which booking types are available for selection on the public web request/booking screens. Many organizations have “internal” booking types/classifications. They may not wish to make these available for selection by external clients. This new feature will allow this to be achieved!

You’ll find the new “Public?” and “Set as Default?” options on the Manage Booking Types screen. This may be accessed via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage Booking Types. These settings can be set independently for each of your booking types. If a booking type is set as being the default, this will be indicated by an “*” after its name in the “All Booking Types” list.

Set Booking Types as Public and/or Default in MIDAS
Set Booking Types as Public and/or as the Default type

Per-Client Default Booking Types

“Booking Types” are a way for you to color-code your bookings in MIDAS based on their “type”. For example, you may have both internal and external users of your facilities, and so by assigning a different color to each of booking allows you to be able to visually differentiate between the two types of bookings in the booking grid.

Additionally, you can also setup discounted room rates based upon the booking type assigned to each booking. Using the above example, you may want to charge external users of your facilities “full price”, but offer a discount to internal users.

Normally, when adding new bookings on the “Add Bookings” screen, you’d have to select the client that the booking is for, and also separately select the booking type. However, wouldn’t it save time if when you selected a client, the appropriate booking type was automatically pre-selected for you? Of course it would!

That’s why with MIDAS v4.14, you’ll be able to set a default booking type for each of your clients. When a user then selects the client on their Add Bookings screen, the associated default booking type will be pre-selected accordingly. (The user may then manually change the booking type for that booking if desired)

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