First, a little background to the issue…

The “Client / Organization” Field

On the standard “Add Booking” screen in MIDAS, a “Client / Organization” field is shown, allowing you to specify the client who you’re adding a booking for.

By typing into this field, a list of matching existing clients are shown which can be selected accordingly.

If no match is found with an existing client, then depending upon the permissions assigned to the account from which the booking is being added, the user will be able to manually type in the name of a new client/organization directly into the “Client / Organization” field.

When the booking is added, for quickness MIDAS will then automatically create a client record in the database for the newly entered client.

Of course, if the user wishes to create a new client record and provide more details other than just the client’s name and their organization, they can click the “+” button to the right of the “Client / Organization” field. They will then be able to enter extended information about the new client.

Making Client Fields “Required”

MIDAS also allows you to not only create and add additional custom client fields to the database, but you can also flag client fields as “Required”.

A “Required” field must have a valid entry (i.e. it can’t be left blank) in order to add/modify a client.

Now, because MIDAS allows a user to quickly create a new client directly from the “Client / Organization” field on the “Add Booking” screen, an extended client record entry dialog isn’t shown (unless the user specifically clicks the adjacent “+” icon).

This allowed clients to be added to the system with any client fields marked as “Required” to be blank.

We’ve addressed this for v4.30 with the addition of a new optional setting.

On the Manage MIDAS → Bookings screen, administrators can enable a new “Prompt for detailed client information when adding bookings for new clients” option.

Once enabled, whenever a user clicks the “Check Availability & Book” button on the Add Bookings screen, if the booking is for a brand new client, MIDAS will open the extended client details dialog. The user must complete the client record (including any required fields) before they’ll be able to add the booking(s) to the system.

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For MIDAS v4.29, we’re expanding the range of options available to administrators when it comes to assigning user permissions.

MIDAS already includes an extensive range of permissions which can be assigned on a per-user basis. One of these permissions is the “Can Make Bookings” permission. This setting controls whether a given user account can make bookings, or just booking “requests”, or neither.

Following customer feedback, we’re adding a couple of additional options to this particular user permission.

Now administrators can restrict user accounts to only be able to book/request for themselves.

Prior to this, a user with permissions to make bookings/requests could select a client on their Add Bookings screen that the booking or request was to be for.

Now, if the “Can Make Bookings” permission is set to “Yes (For self only)”, the user will only be able to make bookings for themselves. They will not be able to make bookings for any arbitrary client in the system.

Similarly, the “Requests Only (For self only)” option works the same, but only allows the user to make booking requests for themselves.

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Improved Client Email Notification Settings

Previously, each client in MIDAS could be set to receive the following email notifications:

• None – Client isn’t sent any automated reminders.
• Bookings – Client is sent automated reminders about their upcoming bookings.
• Invoices – Client is sent automated reminders about their upcoming invoices.
• Bookings + Invoices – Client is sent automated reminders about their upcoming bookings and upcoming invoices.

Automated client email notification from your MIDAS system included an unsubscribe link. This allowed clients to opt out of receiving further automated notifications from your MIDAS system. Effectively, the client’s “E-Mail Reminders” setting reverts back to “None”.

For v4.25, we’re extending the automated client notification email options. These now include:

• Bookings (Upcoming) – Client is sent automated reminders about their upcoming bookings.
• Bookings (Recently Ended) – Client is sent automated follow-up emails after their bookings.
• Invoices (Upcoming) – Client is sent automated reminders about their upcoming invoices.
• Invoices (Overdue) – Client is sent automated reminders about their overdue invoices.

Clients can also unsubscribe from each notification type, rather than blanket unsubscribing from all notifications.

Easier For Clients To Unsubscribe From Notifications

MIDAS v4.25 now includes a “List-Unsubscribe” header in automated email notifications to your clients. This can make it even easier for them to opt-out of receiving further automated notifications from your MIDAS system.

Email software which support the “List-Unsubscribe” header may show a bar/banner at the top of emails, which users can click to opt-out of similar emails.

These are just a few of the new and improved features for MIDAS v4.25. Please see this post for details of other new features you’ll find in v4.25.

You can also ask questions and discuss the new features of v4.25 over on Reddit.

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We’re excited to announce that the forthcoming v4.22 update will include the often requested feature of “custom client fields”, including the ability for self-hosted MIDAS customers to attach documents (i.e. insurance certificates, contracts, etc) to client records.

Similar to the “custom booking fields” feature first introduced way back in 2010, which allows administrators to add additional booking fields to their MIDAS system on top of the standard booking fields, the new custom client fields feature will provide similar functionality to client records in your MIDAS database.

Prior to v4.22, the standard client fields in MIDAS were fixed and allowed you to capture the following items of data for each of your clients/customers:

• Client name
• Organization
• E-mail address (or addresses)
• Postal address
• Telephone number
• Fax number (since deprecated as a ‘standard’ field in MIDAS v4.35)
• Mobile/Cell number
• Notes

The introduction of custom client fields gives you even more flexibility! Now you’ll be able to add additional fields to capture other client information that you wish to collect, for example you could add a “Salutation” list field (Mr, Mrs, Ms, Miss, Rev, Dr, etc), or a file upload field to capture an insurance document from your clients..

The types of custom client fields that may be added are the same as those available for custom booking fields, namely:

• Checkbox – A “tick box” field
• File – (self-hosted editions only) Allows uploading/attaching of files and documents to client records
• List – A drop-down list of pre-defined items
• Number – A field that will only accept numerical input
• Range – A “slider” control allowing selection of a numeric value within a defined range
• Text – A single-line text field
• Text Area – A multi-line text field
• URL – A navigable web link to an external resource

Both custom booking and custom client fields may be managed via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Fields

From this screen you’ll also be able to control which client fields (both standard and custom) should be included on printouts, in search results, and on public booking/request screens. You’ll also be able to re-order client fields as well as selectively hide them from individual users too!

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We’ve overhauled the “client” field on the Add/Modify Bookings screen for v4.11:

The improved client selector is easier to read, larger (making it easier to select clients on very small screens), and highlights in bold the parts of the search results matching the characters you’ve typed into the Client field.

The improved client selector is also better able to handle thousands of client records. In MIDAS v4.10 and earlier if you end up with thousands of clients in your database, the loading time of the Add/Modify Bookings screen could become degraded. The new client selector in v4.11 combats this, by loading searching results dynamically “on demand” if there are a significant number of clients in your database.

One of the reasons why your client database can become very large is if users failed to select an existing client when adding new bookings. We’re also combating this in v4.11.

Previously, on Add/Modify Bookings screen, users had the option to select an existing client from a drop-down list of clients which appeared when they begin typing into the “Client” field. However, if a user ignored the drop down list of existing clients, and completed manually typing a client name into this field, MIDAS would assume that you didn’t wish to use any existing clients and instead wished to create a new client.

This led in many cases to customer’s databases containing numerous entries for what was essentially the same client, simply because users failed to select from the list of existing clients each time they added a booking.

There’s been a “Merge Clients” tool within MIDAS for a while now to allow administrators to merge the bookings & invoices of clients they deem to be essentially “identical”, however, we hope the need to use this tool will be minimized with a new feature in v4.11.

In v4.11 if you fail to select an existing client from the drop-down list of suggestions, and manually complete typing of a client’s name, MIDAS will check in the background whether there’s already one or more existing clients in the database that match the name you’ve manually typed into the client field. If there is, MIDAS will display of list of these clients, prompting you to “Use” one of these existing clients:

If, however, you really do want to create a new client, you can simply click dismiss this prompt to continue adding your booking with the new client.

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Making Clients Exempt From Tax

We love feedback and suggestions from our customers, and this next feature arises from just such a suggestion (which eagle-eyed readers may have already spotted in a screenshot from our previous post!)

MIDAS already includes powerful invoicing capabilities, allowing you to set flexible room rates for each day of the week as well as different lengths (durations) of booking. In additional, you can also setup discount rates depending upon the type of booking (for example, community hires can be charged at a lower rate than commercial hire of your facilities)

These extensive invoice capabilities are further enhanced for v4.07, as we’re introducing a new per-client setting allowing individual clients to be excluded from having the standard global tax rate you’ve setup for your system (via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Invoicing) applied to their generated invoices.

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Using our free import tool, you can import client data into MIDAS v3.00 or later, that is either in a .csv (Comma Separated Values), or a .txt (Tab, or other character, Delimited) file format.

This means that provided your 3rd party application allows you to export client/contact data in one of these formats, you can easily import it directly into MIDAS!

You can also use our import tool to import data directly from a spreadsheet application, such as Microsoft’s Excel!

We’ve even given you the option to replace, or simply add to your existing client data when importing new data!

Here’s a few screenshots of the new import tool:

For further information, and to download our free import tool, please see our How do I import client data from another application into MIDAS? knowledge base article.

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