3 minute read time · Updated February 11, 2025 · First published 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.
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.
5 minute read time · Updated May 8, 2023 · First published 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.
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.
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!
3 minute read time · Updated July 21, 2023 · First published April 1, 2022
For MIDAS v4.30 we’ve added a couple of new “Database Tools” to our software.
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.
1 minute read time · Updated April 19, 2023 · First published March 29, 2022
Our MIDAS scheduling software allows administrators to export invoices from their booking system for use in a range of 3rd party financial applications.
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.
Export Invoices from MIDAS to Zoho Invoice
MIDAS will generate a CSV file of your invoices that you can download and then import directly into Zoho Invoice.
