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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Often it can be useful to know how much the hire of your facilities would cost be without having to first generate an invoice. In v4.11 we’re making that possible, by providing the option to indicate charges for your venues/resources directly on the “Booking Availability Screen” before a booking is even added!

This feature can be extremely useful if, for example, a potential customer telephones you up inquiring as to how much it would cost to hire a couple of your rooms for a few hours. With just a couple of clicks you’ll be able to let them know the hire cost, and then if they want to go ahead and book, you can do that instantly right from the same screen!

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