Posts Tagged: invoicing

Tax Exempt Clients

The next substantial update to our popular web based room booking and resource scheduling software is just around the corner, and throughout this month, we’re outlining some of the new features and improvements you can expect to see in the upcoming v4.07 release….

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.

Making Clients Tax Exempt
Tax Exempt Client

New Flexible Venue Rates

We’re introducing even more flexibility when it comes to setting your venue rates in MIDAS v4.06!

Currently, you can already set up hourly/daily rates for each of your rooms, and have different rates depending upon the day of the week.

In MIDAS v4.06, we’ve extended this to also allow you to define rates based upon the length of the booking as well!

For example, you can now set up a venue’s rates so that bookings lasting say less than 4 hours could be charged and invoiced at a higher rate than those lasting more than 4 hours.

You can also now define rates as “per booking” as well as “per hour” and “per day”. The new “per booking” option charges a fixed set amount for bookings.

Flexible Venue Rates
Flexible Venue Rates

So, as per the above screenshot, let’s say you define the following rates for “Meeting Room 1”:

  • $100 per hour for bookings lasting 1+ hours
  • $80 per hour for bookings lasting 4+ hours
  • $450 per booking for bookings lasting 6+ hours

Bookings for “Meeting Room 1” would then be charged as follows:

Length of BookingTotal Charge
1h$100 ($100 x 1)
2h$200 ($100 x 2)
3h$300 ($100 x 3)
4h$320 ($80 x 4)
5h$400 ($80 x 5)
6h$450 ($450)
7h$450 ($450)
8h$450 ($450)

We believe this additional flexibility when it comes to charging and invoicing for use of your venues will be great benefit to our customers. Of course, for those who don’t require this level of flexibility, MIDAS can be simply set to charge a single rate for “all bookings”:

Setting a single Venue Rate
Setting a single Venue Rate

Invoicing Improvements in v4.05

Well, it’s Black Friday once again (more about that later!), and if you’re a regular reader of our blog then you’ll already know about some of the upcoming features in MIDAS v4.05 including improved iPad and touch-screen device support and a new Venue “Blocking” feature.

So we thought we’d take a moment to reveal some of the other improvements you can expect with the next update to our powerful web based room scheduling solution, this time in Invoicing:

Improvements to Invoicing

Previously, the “Booking Notes” associated any booking for which an invoice was generated were automatically included in the “Invoice Notes” area of the corresponding invoice.

In MIDAS v4.05, you’ll be able to disable this behavior, or choose a different booking field (including custom fields) to include in the “Invoice Notes” section of your generated invoices.

Itemize Invoice Notes

What’s more, we’ve included an “Itemize” option so for invoices containing multiple bookings, MIDAS can automatically denote which “notes” apply to which bookings:

Itemized Invoice Notes
Itemized Invoice Notes

After feedback from a couple of our customers, we’re also introducing a way to completely remove the “Tax” line from your invoices if you don’t charge tax, and don’t want to show a 0% tax rate on your invoices. In MIDAS v4.05, setting the “Default Tax Amount” blank (rather than just 0%) will hide the tax line on invoices where there is no tax element (existing invoices which contain a tax element will not be affected and will still show the tax line)

Now, back to Black Friday – if you’re not following us on Twitter (@mid_as), then right now you’re missing out on some incredible deals – for today only – for both new AND existing customers of our MIDAS web based room scheduling software


Invoicing Improvements in MIDAS v4

As we’ve previously mentioned, in MIDAS v4 you’ll be able to do more directly from the booking grid. One such new improvement will allow you to…

Generate Invoices Directly from the Booking Grid!

Prior to v4, if you wanted MIDAS to generate an invoice for a booking, this had to be generated at time of booking. In v4, whilst that option still remains, you’ll also find a new icon when selecting a booking in the grid, which will allow you to instantly generate an invoice for that booking (provided one hasn’t been previously generated)

Generate Invoices
One-Click Invoice Generation

We’ve also further improved the invoicing capabilities for MIDAS v4, as it will allow you to…

Retrospectively Generate Invoices for Clients

Retrospective Invoicing
Retrospective Invoice Generating

In v4, you can select a client, and a date range, and MIDAS will generate a single invoice incorporating all that client’s bookings over the selected date range! …and what’s more, MIDAS will ignore any bookings for which invoices have already been created, meaning that you’ll never invoice for the same booking twice! You can also select the “All Clients” option, and MIDAS will generate a separate invoice for each client with bookings across the date range you select.

This feature will be ideal if you have one person adding bookings, and another looking after the invoicing side, as it will allow them to, for example, generate an invoice for a client one month at a time in arrears!

We’ve also added a couple of new invoicing settings:

Invoice Settings
Invoice Settings

Include zero value invoice items? – If selected, venues and resources for which there is no charge will still be included on invoices for completeness and/or if you need to denote that the client is getting something free of charge. If this option is not selected, items who’s total charge is zero will not appear on generated invoices.

Create invoices even if invoice total is zero? – If unselected, MIDAS will only generate invoices where the invoice total is greater than zero. If selected, MIDAS will generate invoices regardless of invoice total.