MIDAS v4.14 is the forth feature-rich update to MIDAS in this our 10th anniversary year. We’re really excited about this release, so keep reading to find out more…

New & Improved in MIDAS v4.14:

• New: “Tentative” bookings which auto-expire if not “confirmed”
• New: Features for hotel/overnight accommodation businesses, including:
  • The ability to book by number of nights
  • The ability to set check in/check out times
  • The ability to limit maximum length of stay
• New: Bulk approve/reject booking requests
• New: Add internal notes to invoices which are not visible to clients
• New: View complete history log for each invoice
• New: Ability to pre-select a default booking type on a per-client basis
• New: Easily upload/change your corporate logo
• Improved: Ability to define multiple closed from/until dates for each venue
• Improved: You can now control whether the Booking Alternatives feature offer earlier/later times or previous/next days
• Improved: Security Audit now checks for potentially excessive MIDAS user permissions
• Improved: MIDAS now alerts when Web Requests are enabled, yet no venues are set to be publicly requestable
• Improved: Overdue invoices now indicate the number of days they’re overdue by
• Improved: Handling of apparent “hangs” when using the “SMTP Test” button
• Improved: Plain text versions of emails now include alternative text of any included images
• Improved: Email compatibility with older email clients
• Improved: Email composer when querying a booking request now includes all accessible booking fields by default
• Security enhancements
• Fixed: Cumulative roll-up of various fixes for issues discovered since v4.13 – see bugs.mid.as for details

How To Get MIDAS v4.14…

If you have any questions about MIDAS, why not drop us an email, or reach out to us through social media – We’d love to hear from you!

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Clicking the “Reject All” button typically allows you to optionally enter a brief reason why you’re rejecting the requests. This reason will then be included in the rejection email notifications sent to the affected client.

If the “Approve/Reject requests silently” option is selected, clicking “Reject All” shows a confirmation of the number of booking requests to be rejected which if confirmed will then reject all those requests.

The “Approve All” button will also provide an indication of the number of booking requests to be approved. If confirmed MIDAS will then attempt to automatically approve all these requests.

Booking Approval Order

The order that these requests are automatically approved in is important. It may not be possible to automatically approve all booking requests. For example, if two requests are made by two different clients for the same venue and times, they can’t both be approved.

In such instances, a “Bulk Approval Order” setting (found via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Web Requests) determines the order (priority) in which booking requests will be bulk processed for approval. The four possible options for this setting are as follows:

1. Earliest Requested First (Requests that were made earlier will be approved before requests that were made more recently)
2. Latest Requested First (Requests that were made more recently will be approved before requests that were made earlier)
3. Earliest Commencing First (Requests for bookings starting sooner will be approved before requests that start further in the future)
4. Latest Commencing First (Requests for bookings starting further in the future will be approved before requests that are due to start sooner)

You can read more about some of the other exciting improvements coming in v4.14 here!

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Additionally, you can also setup discounted room rates based upon the booking type assigned to each booking. Using the above example, you may want to charge external users of your facilities “full price”, but offer a discount to internal users.

Normally, when adding new bookings on the “Add Bookings” screen, you’d have to select the client that the booking is for, and also separately select the booking type. However, wouldn’t it save time if when you selected a client, the appropriate booking type was automatically pre-selected for you? Of course it would!

That’s why with MIDAS v4.14, you’ll be able to set a default booking type for each of your clients. When a user then selects the client on their Add Bookings screen, the associated default booking type will be pre-selected accordingly. (The user may then manually change the booking type for that booking if desired)

You can read more about some of the other exciting improvements coming in v4.14 here!

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Now, the ability to “close” individual venues to bookings over a custom date range has long been a staple of MIDAS.

This has allowed users to, for instance, close a particular venue over a holiday period or when a venue is out of action due to a period of scheduled maintenance or refurbishment, etc.

The limitation of this feature has until now been that only one “closed from” and “closed until” date range could be defined for each venue at any given time.

Based upon feedback from our customers – notably including those in educational sectors – in v4.14 we’re improving the ability to close venues between dates, by now allowing multiple “closed” date ranges to be defined for each of your venues:

From this screen, simply select a date from the calendar as the “Closed From” date, and a second date as the “Closed Until” date. Clicking the small “+” icon in the lower right corner will then allow you to specify additional “Closed From” and “Closed Until” dates.

Dates that fall within these “Closed Between” date ranges will be unavailable to regular users for booking. (Administrative users however who have been specifically granted the special “Can book outside operating hours” permission can still book even when your venue(s) are closed to regular bookings)

Taking the example of a school/college/university – This improvement for v4.14 will now allow staff to enter dates for all the holiday periods throughout their academic year and beyond!

You can read more about some of the other exciting improvements coming in v4.14 here!

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We’ve made a couple of notable improvements around invoice “auditing” in v4.14 to help make it easier for you to keep tabs on your invoices. These new improvements will allow administrators with access to the invoicing capabilities of MIDAS to:

View the complete history log for each invoice

Whilst MIDAS keeps a log of all actions and activity relating to each invoice, in previous versions of MIDAS, only the most recent action on an invoice has been displayed on screen.

However, when viewing an invoice in v4.14, you’ll be able to click the latest invoice status line at the top of an invoice to open the complete history log for that particular invoice:

Store internal notes & comments with each invoice

The ability to add visible “notes” to an invoice, which are then included on the finalized printed or emailed invoice sent to a client have been around in MIDAS for a while now.

However, we’ve also received a number of requests from customers who’d like to have the ability to additionally add “internal notes” to invoices as well (notes which don’t appear on invoices themselves and which are therefore hidden from clients), so that they can better keep tabs on each invoice.

To that end, in v4.14 we’ve added a “Comments” icon to the Invoice toolbar that’s shown whenever you view an invoice. Clicking this icon will allow you to view or edit internal notes/comments for the selected invoice:

As these notes/comments are “internal”, they are only visible to those MIDAS users able to access the invoice. Internal notes/comments are never included on an actual printed/emailed invoice and therefore are not disclosed to the end client an invoice is for.

Continue reading about some of the other exciting improvements coming in v4.14 here!

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To better accommodate those businesses that book facilities “by the night” – like hotels, guest houses, B&B’s, hostels, and camping & caravan sites – we’re introducing an exciting enhancement to v4.14. This will allow the ability to book by a number of nights stay.

MIDAS already allows you to control the type of time selector each user sees on their Add/Modify Bookings screen. These can be different for each user if required.

By default, these are simple start/finish time selectors. However, they can be changed to a start time + duration, or a drop-down list of predefined time periods.

Book By Nights

For MIDAS v4.14, there’s now an alternative option of booking by a number of “Nights”:

For users with this option enabled, they can simply select a check in date and a number of nights stay. MIDAS will then do the rest!

Administrators can predefine your check in and check out times, as well as the maximum number of nights stay permitted.

For example, let’s assume that your hotel’s check in time is 2pm and check out time is 11am. A user would then select their check in date and the number of nights stay. The result being a continuous booking starting at 2pm on the check-in date and running until 11am on the check-out date.

Furthermore, if you’ve enabled the Public Booking Request features of MIDAS, administrators can also enable the ability for the public to request by number of nights also!

We believe these enhancements further increase the flexibility of our scheduling software. It makes MIDAS even more flexible for hotels, guest houses, B&B’s, hostels, camping & caravan sites… and more!

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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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