Here’s What’s New & Improved in v4.15

• New: Public “Book Online” feature
• New: Booking “Spacing” settings – maintain fixed “gaps” between bookings
• New: Un-Invoiced Bookings Report
• New: “Individual/Manual” or “Automatic/From Group” venue selection settings for Public Bookings/Requests
• New: Password reset link validity setting
• Improved: Repetitive dates generator now includes an “on the last…” option
• Improved: Limit the number of bookings users can add to each calendar week
• Improved: Booking Type Discounts can now accept absolute amounts as well as percentages
• Improved: Booking approval entries in the Recent Activity log can now be clicked to jump to date of booking
• Improved: Approved/Rejected Booking Requests now also log requested venue in Recent Activity log
• Improved: User filter on Recent Activity Log now sorts alphabetically
• Improved: Focusing on venue rate input auto-selects current value
• Improved: Renaming/Removing a custom field will update/remove associated %CUSTOM..% variables in templates
• Improved: Filename when “saving” (printing) an invoice/receipt as a .pdf file now defaults to invoice number
• Security enhancements
• Fixed: Cumulative roll-up of various fixes for issues discovered since v4.14

How To Get MIDAS v4.15…

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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From the very outset MIDAS has included an ability to allow non-users to check availability of your facilities and submit booking “requests” online. “Non users” are visitors to your website, members of the public, etc.

These booking “requests” then go into a pending booking requests queue. Administrative users can quickly approve or reject each request. Approved booking requests then become “confirmed” bookings.

You can find out more about how this works in our “Accept Booking Requests Online” video tutorial.

We know that our customers love this long-standing feature of MIDAS. Put simply, it makes their lives significantly easier. That’s because it allows people to check room availability themselves, without having to phone/email/speak to an administrator.

We also know that some of our customers would like the Public Booking Request features to go one step further. You’d like to allow non-users to check availability, book and pay for their booking instantly there and then (rather than having to be invoiced for their booking at a later date)

That’s why in addition to the “Web Request” features of MIDAS, for v4.15 we’re also introducing a “Web Booking” feature.

The “Web Booking” process is very similar to the traditional “Web Request” process. The difference being the addition of a payment step, allowing the individual to pay to confirm their booking.

Here’s How It Works:

1. A person selects the date(s)/time(s) they wish to book, and MIDAS checks their availability.
2. If available, the person can enter more details about their booking and continue to the payment page.
3. At this point, the booking is temporarily added as a “tentative” booking until the person completes payment. At this point the tentative booking automatically becomes a “confirmed” booking.

If the person fails to complete their payment in a timely manner, the temporary tentative booking will automatically expire, and the person would need to re-start the booking process. By default, this time frame is set to 15 minutes, but can be changed by an administrator.

As per the native invoice payment methods offered within MIDAS, both PayPal (with IPN correctly configured) and Stripe are available for Web Booking payments. Stripe however is recommended over PayPal.

The “Web Request” and “Web Booking” features share a set of common settings. So we’ve redesigned the previously named “Web Request” tab on the Manage MIDAS screen to become the “Public Settings” tab:

As you can probably tell from the above screenshot, the new auto-venue selection option we unveiled earlier this month, will also be available for “Web Booking”.

The combination of new auto-venue selection and Web Bookings helps make MIDAS even more suited for hotels, B&B’s, hostels, and other overnight accommodation businesses. Your customers will now be able to truly “book online”!

You may like to check out some of the other features of MIDAS v4.15 too!

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Resulting from customer feedback (which we love getting by the way!), we’re introducing new global settings for v4.15 allowing administrators to enforce fixed spacing (or “gaps”) between adjacent bookings.

This can be useful to allow for room setup, breakdown, reset or cleaning periods between adjacent bookings.

Two new settings are available in this regard. The first controls the amount of free time to maintain before each booking. The second, the amount of free time after each booking finished before the next one can commence.

For example, with the booking spacing settings shown in the screenshot about (15 minutes before / 30 minutes after), and a booking taking place between 2pm-3pm;

• The latest allowed finish time of a booking added earlier in the day would be 1.45pm,
• The earliest allowed start time of another booking added later on the same date would be 3.30pm.

You may like to check out some of the other features of MIDAS v4.15 too!

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As you may be aware, MIDAS is capable of generating a wealth of printable reports, graphs, and statistics allowing you to gain valuable insight into the state of your bookings, venues, clients, invoices, and more.

The Invoicing section of this reporting allows you to see which clients or organizations have been invoiced over any given period, how much has been paid, and how much remains outstanding.

For MIDAS v4.15 we’re improving this reporting to also include an “Un-invoiced Bookings Report”. This new report shows a breakdown of the number of bookings each client/organization has over a given period which have so far not been invoiced for. This is a great way to quickly check whether you’re forgotten to invoice a particular client/organization.

You can check out some of the other reports MIDAS can generate to help you gain insight into your facilities at https://mid.as/help/statistics

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To make a public booking request, a requestor would go to https://your_midas_url/request. If requests have been enabled they can then select a venue (or venues), date (or dates), times, and resources, and check availability accordingly. They can then enter their details, and any additional details relating to their request and submit their request online.

For v4.15, we’re giving administrators more flexibility when it comes to the initial venue selection step of the Public Booking Request process.

Previously, a requestor would need to manually select the venue (or venues) they wish to request. However, in v4.15 an administrator can instead replace the traditional individual/manual venue selection for Public Booking Requests with automatic venue selection instead.

If the automatic venue selection option is enabled, a requestor simply selects a venue group. MIDAS will in turn automatically select a venue from within the selected group accordingly.

This is ideal if you allow public requesting of similar rooms. For example, if you have 10 identically sized/equipped meeting rooms, a requestor doesn’t necessarily care which one of these rooms their meeting takes place in. These new options would allow them to simply select that they wish to request a “Meeting Room”, and MIDAS will allocate a meeting room accordingly.

How MIDAS allocates venues when the automatic venue selection option is enabled may be configured by an administrative user….

Auto Venue Selection options include:

• Random – MIDAS will attempt to select an available venue at random from the all publicly requestable venues within the selected venue group.
• Venue Order – MIDAS will attempt to select the next available venue from the all publicly requestable venues within the selected venue group, based on the order your venues are configured to appear within MIDAS.
• Least Used (Number of Bookings) – MIDAS will attempt to select an available publicly requestable venue from the selected venue group with the least number of existing bookings in it.
• Least Used (Venue Utilization) – MIDAS will attempt to select an available publicly requestable venue from the selected venue group with the most free time in it (i.e. the least utilized venue)

These exciting new option for Public Booking Requests allow far grater flexibility, make it easier for people to make booking requests, and ensure more balanced usage of your venues!

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