One of the automated tasks your booking system can perform is to send any unsent invoices to your customers.

Previously – and if enabled – the “Send any unset invoices” setting would cause MIDAS to check for and send any unset invoices. This action would occur once a day during the hour in which you’d set your daily scheduled tasks to run.

For MIDAS v4.41, we’re giving you more control over when unsent invoices are automatically sent.

Set “Send any unset invoices” to “Daily”, and MIDAS will behave as before. Once per day (during the hour you specify), MIDAS will send any unsent invoices to your customers.

Alternatively, you can change “Daily” to a specific monthly date. So if set to “1st”, then on the first day of every month, your MIDAS system will automatically send any unsent invoices.

What constitutes an “unsent” invoice?

MIDAS considers an “unsent” invoice to be any invoice which has not been either printed or emailed. Once an invoice has been either printed or emailed to the customer, the invoice is considered to have been “sent”.

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For MIDAS v4.40 we’ve further extended the search function to now also allow searching for invoices in your booking system.

When searching for invoices, MIDAS will match your entered search term against invoice numbers, clients, organizations, and invoice items. Invoice items include both your rooms (venues / bookable spaces) and resources.

So if you need to quickly locate an invoice containing a specific item, or all invoices for a particular bookable space – you now can!

The addition of a powerful new invoice search function compliments the existing features will allow you to quickly locate individual invoices….

Quickly locate an invoice

The main invoicing screen is accessed via the Invoicing toolbar icon.

This screen displays the most recently created invoices, finalized invoices, overdue invoices, and credit notes in your booking system. Clicking any of these will display the corresponding invoice or credit note.

Additionally, if you know the invoice number you wish to view, you can enter it in the “Jump to invoice” field and hit go, and MIDAS will instantly display the full invoice.

But that’s not all you can do from the toolbar at the top of the invoicing screen…

Filtering invoices

MIDAS allows you to filter the list of invoices by both their status and the client they are for.

For instance, you can quickly see all invoices which have been paid in the past week, or all those where payment is still outstanding after a month.

The combination of the ability to “filter” invoices, quickly “jump” to invoices, and now also “search” invoices means that it’s now easier than ever to rapidly locate invoices in your MIDAS booking system.

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With just a couple of clicks, MIDAS can generate an invoice for a booking, or indeed a series of bookings. You can also manually create new invoices at any time.

Once an invoice has been generated or created it can then be printed or emailed to your customer from within the system.

Before an invoice is finalized (before it is printed or emailed), its contents may be freely edited.

This allows you to add or remove items on the invoice or update quantities or charges.

However, until now, there’s not been an easy way to ‘move’ items up or down on invoices to change the order in which they appear.

Why might you want to reorder items on an invoice?

If you’re retrospectively generating an invoice for all a customer’s bookings over a period of time, MIDAS will include these bookings on the invoice in chronological order.

If the client has booked multiple rooms on a number of different dates, you may prefer bookings for the same room to appear consecutively together on the invoice.

Alternatively, if you use the “Merge Invoice” tool in MIDAS to combine two or more invoices for the same client, MIDAS will simply append each invoice’s items onto the end of the first invoice. This may result in items listed on the invoice not being in a logical order.

Introducing the ability to change the order of items on invoices

Starting with MIDAS v4.39, we’ve introduced the ability for you to move items up or down on invoices prior to them being finalized.

On the create/modify invoice screen, to the left of each invoice item you’ll now see both a small up and down arrow.

Clicking the up arrow alongside an invoice item will move that item above the previous invoice item.

Likewise, clicking the down arrow will move that invoice item below the following item.

Clicking the “Save Invoice” button will then save the changes you’ve made to the order of invoice items, along with any other changes you’ve made to the invoice.

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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.

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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.

Should 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.

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.

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….

Can I set flexible 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).

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.

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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.

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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”.

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.

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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.

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!

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The “Database Tools” in MIDAS allow administrators to perform operations on the software’s database.

For example an administrator could “merge” similar client records “merge” bookings from two or more venues into a single venue, remove inactive clients or users, and more.

The two new Database Tools we’ve added for v4.30 are…

“Unfinalize” Invoices

To understand what the “Unfinalize Invoice” tool does, we first need to understand what a “Finalized” invoice is.

In MIDAS, whenever a new invoice is generated (or manually created), it’s contents may be freely edited up until the time when the invoice is either first printed or emailed to the client.

Once an invoice has been either printed or emailed to the client, MIDAS assumes that the invoice has been “Finalized”. It then protects the contents of the invoice from further editing (other than updating its status/paid amount).

This is done to ensure that the invoice that has been printed/emailed matches the invoice stored in the system.

Without this protection, it would be possible for an invoice to be printed/emailed and sent to the client, and then for a user to change the items, quantitates, or charges on it. If this were to be allowed, the invoice the client received would then be different to the invoice held in the system.

So to prevent this, MIDAS “Finalizes” (locks) invoices once they are first printed/emailed.

Now, there may be some rare circumstances where you need to modify the contents of an existing invoice instead of issuing a new invoice or a credit note.

To that end, we’ve now included an “Unfinalize Invoice” tool.

We don’t encourage the regular use of this tool, for the reasons outlined above. But in exceptional circumstances, this will allow an administrator to remove the “Invoice Date” from a previously “Finalized” invoice. Once the invoice date has been removed, MIDAS will allow the invoice’s contents to be fully editable again.

Remove Obsolete Invoices

Similar to the “Remove Obsolete Bookings” tool (which allows removal of ancient bookings from the system), the “Remove Obsolete Invoices” tool does something very similar, but for invoices.

By default, MIDAS retains invoices indefinitely. Many organization’s financial reporting procedures require that they keep records for a number of years.

But if you’ve been using MIDAS for many years, do you really need to retain invoices that were paid over a decade ago!? Probably not! – That’s where the “Remove Obsolete Invoices” tool comes in.

You can select a point in the past of between 6 months – 10 years. Invoices which were paid in full before this point in time will then be deleted from the database.

For example, selecting the “5 years ago” option would remove all invoices that were paid in full at any time before today’s date 5 years ago.

Removing obsolete invoices – and indeed bookings – using these tools are a great way of keeping your database running efficiently.

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We already support exporting invoices to several popular invoicing platforms, including:

• QuickBooks Online
• Sage Business Cloud
• Xero
• Clear Books
• KashFlow
• QuickFile

For MIDAS v4.30, we’ve now added Zoho Invoice to this list.

Zoho Invoice is free cloud-based invoicing software that helps you craft professional invoices, send payment reminders, keep track of expenses, log your work hours, and get paid faster.

To export invoices to Zoho Invoice, users with sufficient permission can simply go to MIDAS Admin Options → Import / Export → Export → Invoices.

Select the “CSV File (Zoho Invoice)” option and click the “Export” button.

MIDAS will generate a CSV file of your invoices that you can download and then import directly into Zoho Invoice.

For more information, please see our KB article: How to exporting invoices to Zoho Invoice.

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