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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The first new feature we’re unavailing is “Tentative” bookings.

What are Tentative bookings?

Currently, bookings in MIDAS can be thought of in one of two ways; either as “confirmed” bookings, or an unconfirmed “booking requests“.

“Confirmed” bookings are fairly self-explanatory. Unconfirmed “booking requests” are those which first require approval from an administrator in order to become a confirmed “booking”.

With the introduction of the optional ability to also make “Tentative” bookings, you can add bookings which only persist for a certain amount of time before being automatically removed. That is, unless you change them to be “confirmed”.

How are tentative bookings useful?

Let’s say you have a client who wants to book “Room 1” a month from today. They may also need “Room 2” at the same times as well. However, they don’t know for sure yet whether they’ll need the extra room until next week.

In v4.14, you’d be able to a regular “confirmed” booking for the client to “Room 1”. You can also a “tentative” booking (or “hold”) for the client to “Room 2”. This ‘tentative’ hold could be set to auto-expire for example two weeks from today.

Once these bookings have been added, then for the next two weeks, both Room 1 and Room 2 will be booked for the client. If you hear nothing further from your client in relation to Room 2, then after two weeks have elapsed, the “tentative” booking in Room 2 will be automatically removed. This then frees up and releases that slot for other potential bookings. Alternatively, if you do hear back from the client before the tentative booking would expire, and they confirm that they do also want Room 2, you can simply update the “tentative” booking and make it “confirmed”.

Whether a booking is added as a “confirmed” or as a “tentative” booking is determined by its “Booking Type”.

Tentative Booking Types

“Booking Types” allow you to categorize and color-code your bookings, and by default all booking types are “confirmed” bookings.

MIDAS v4.14 allows you to set individual booking types to instead make bookings that are assigned that particular type, “tentative”. For each booking type you make “tentative”, you can also set how long tentative bookings of this type should persist for:

You can specify a duration (in minutes, hours, or days) that tentative bookings of the selected type will persist for. Also, whether this period is measured from the point in time the booking is added, or counting back from the start time of the tentative booking.

For example, if a tentative booking is added to the system at 7am on a given day to take place at 4pm the same day, then;

1. A booking type with a tentative persistence of “4 hours after being added”. The booking would be automatically removed from the system if it hasn’t been confirmed by 11am. or;
2. A booking type with a tentative persistence of “2 hours before booking is due to commence”. The booking would be automatically removed if it hasn’t been confirmed by 2pm.

You can set different tentative persistence settings for each of your booking types. This provides you with maximum flexibility over your tentative booking types.

When “tentative” bookings are being added, they will be clearly indicated on user’s Booking Availability Screens:

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