Today, we’re excited to announce that the latest update to MIDAS (v4.19) is now available!

As our customers have come to expect from our regular releases, this latest update boasts a variety of new and improved features, many of which are as a result of customer feedback.

Here’s What’s New & Improved in v4.19:

• New: “per person” venue rate – set hire charges based on number of attendees
• New: MIDAS now detects email addresses in Booking Notes & custom booking fields and offers them as additional recipients of booking confirmations
• New: “Most Used By” venue report showing who uses each venue the most
• New: %USER% and %USER_FIRSTNAME% variables available in email templates
• New: “View Only” option for “Can use invoicing” user permission
• New: Setting to specify that all outgoing email should appear sent from a single email address
• Improved: Simplified password reset process
• Improved: Individual client statistics now include indication of client’s most used venue
• Improved: Venue column width in booking grid now automatically increases in size if you add a venue with a longer name than current set column width
• Improved: Exporting invoice summaries in Excel format now formats “Invoice Dates” as Excel dates
• Improved: Buttons added to the final public booking/request screens to make another booking/request
• Improved: Remove Obsolete Bookings tool can now be limited to a specific booking type
• Improved: MIDAS will indicate if there are no venues assigned to the currently displayed venue group in the booking grid
• Improved: Unticking the “Calculate Totals?” box on a create/modify invoice screen now allows tax amount and grand totals to become editable
• Change: Client’s Invoices data in the Booking Information Panel now lists invoices in descending order (previously ascending)
• Security enhancements
• Fixed: Cumulative roll-up of various fixes for issues discovered since v4.18 – see https://bugs.mid.as for details

How To Get MIDAS v4.19…

Thank you for your continued support of our software, and we hope you’ll enjoy the new and improved features that MIDAS v4.19 has to offer!

The post MIDAS v4.19 Out Now! appeared first on MIDAS - Room Booking System | Blog.

We often receive ideas and suggestions from our customers as to what new features and improvements they’d like to see. May of these suggestions relate to the invoicing capabilities of MIDAS. Taking these on board, our next update (v4.19) will feature…

A new “View Only” option for the “Can use invoicing” user permission

Existing MIDAS administrators will know of the powerful set of permissions that can assigned to accounts on a per-user basis.

One of the available permissions is the “Can use invoicing” setting. This setting allows administrators to allow/deny each user the ability access to MIDAS’ Invoicing features.

Previously, this permission had three possible settings:

• No – User has no access to any of the invoicing features
• Yes – User has full access to all of the invoicing features
• Limited – User may create/generate invoices, but may only view/modify/delete invoices which they created/generated. (They will not have access to invoices added by other users)

For v4.19 we’re adding a forth option to this permission – “View Only“. User’s who’s “Can use invoicing” permission has been set to “View Only” will be able to view all invoices, but will not be able to modify, delete, email or print them, nor will they be able to generate or create new invoices.

This new option is useful to organizations who wish to grant “read only” access to their invoices, for example, for the purposes of auditing.

Exporting invoice summaries in Excel format will format “Invoice Dates” as Excel dates (rather than as text)

In the previous update to MIDAS (v4.18), we introduced the ability to export invoice summaries in native Excel (.xlsx) format.

We’re made a small improvement to this for v4.19. Invoice dates will now be formatted as Excel dates rather than as regular text strings.

This allows for easier manipulation/format of dates when viewing your exported invoice summaries in Excel.

Tax Amount and Grand Total fields become editable

After generating or create a new invoice in MIDAS, its contents may be modified prior to “finalizing” it. A “Finalized” invoice is one which has been printed/emailed to the client.

When editing invoices, by default, MIDAS will automatically re-calculate totals when you make changes. For example, if you charge $50/hour for room hire and you’ve invoiced for 2 hours, the line total on the invoice would be $100. If you then manually change the quantity from 2 to 3 hours, MIDAS will automatically re-calculate the line total of the invoice to $150, and the grand total of the invoice accordingly.

A small “Calculate Totals” tick box is present when modifying invoices. If un-ticked this will prevent MIDAS from automatically calculating totals, allowing you to specify manual amounts if necessary.

However, in earlier version, with the “Calculate Totals” box un-ticked whilst you could modify item rates, quantities, line totals, and tax rate, the tax amount value and grand total values would still be automatically calculated and couldn’t be manually adjusted.

We’ve changed this for v4.19 so that when the “Calculate Totals” box un-ticked, you’ll be able to manually modify the value of any field on your invoice.

We’ve also made one other small change relating to invoices for v4.19. This relates to the way that a client’s “Paid in Full” and “Outstanding” invoices were displayed in the Booking Information Panel.

Previously, these lists were sorted in ascending order. This meant that the client’s oldest paid invoice would appear at the top of the list “Paid in Full” list of invoices.

We’ve changed this sort behavior to descending order for v4.19. Now, the client’s most recently paid/outstanding invoices will be shown at the top (rather than the end) of each respective list.

Click here to continue reading about some of the other new & improved features in MIDAS v4.19!

The post Invoicing Improvements appeared first on MIDAS - Room Booking System | Blog.

Due to the secure way passwords are stored by MIDAS, it’s not possible to “recover” a forgotten password. The only option if a password is forgotten is to request a password reset.

In the past, this process has been as follows:

1. User clicks the “Forgot Your Password?” link on their MIDAS login screen.
2. The user then enters their email address and clicks “Reset My Password”.
3. MIDAS then emails the user with a reset confirmation link.
4. The user clicks the reset confirmation link.
5. MIDAS emails the user a new temporary password (which they’re required to change upon their next login).

We’re simplifying this process and so from v4.19 the process will instead be as follows:

1. User clicks the “Forgot Your Password?” link on their MIDAS login screen.
2. The user then enters their email address and clicks “Reset My Password”.
3. MIDAS then emails the user with a temporary login link.
4. The user clicks the temporary login link and is prompted to enter a new password after which the user is logged in.

Better Password Resets

This simplified password reset process removes the sending on two emails to users (a reset link followed by a temporary password), as just a single email will be sent. This also strengthens security as a temporary password is no longer sent via email.

This improved flow also addresses the issue of multiple password reset attempts and emails arriving out-of-order. For instance, take the following scenario:

1. User initiates a password reset, receives an email with a reset link and clicks it.
2. Whilst the user is waiting for a new temporary password to be sent to them, the initiate a further password reset and click the reset link in that corresponding email.
3. The original temporary password email arrives, and the user attempts to use the temporary password. However, as they since initiated a second password reset request, the first temporary password is no longer valid.

This caused confusion for a handful of users who’d attempted to reset their password several times within a matter of minutes couldn’t understand why the temporary password they received wasn’t being accepted.

Multiple Password Resets

The improved password reset flow for MIDAS v4.19 completely eliminates this. Even if a user initiates multiple password reset requests the links they receive via email will all permit the user to set a new password, until they have done so.

We’re sure these improvements will make it easier and stress free for users to reset their own passwords.

Along with these changes, administrators can also still specify how long password reset links are valid for (the default is 2 hours). This setting may be found via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Security. For more information, please refer to the help documentation.

Of course, if a user isn’t able to reset their own password, any other administrative user who has been granted the “Can Manage Users & Permissions” user permission can reset a user password on their behalf.

Click here to continue reading about some of the other new & improved features coming in MIDAS v4.19!

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Sometimes, you may wish these booking confirmation notifications to go to multiple recipients in addition to the primary client that the bookings are for.

That’s why MIDAS (v4.19 and later) automatically detects any email addresses added to the standard “Booking Notes” field, or any text custom booking fields, and offer these as additional “CC” email addresses for the booking confirmation notification to also be copied to.

Here’s an example to illustrate:

Two email addresses have been added to the “Booking Notes” field for the above booking. When “Check Availability and Book” is clicked, the following “Booking Availability” screen is shown:

Notice how MIDAS has detected these email addresses and offered each as an optional “cc” recipient for the booking confirmation email to the client.

Please Note: Cloud-hosted editions of MIDAS will detect a maximum of 5 additional email addresses in booking fields when MIDAS is configured to send via an external SMTP server, or a maximum of 2 additional email addresses when configured to send via the Sendmail option. There are no limits imposed in self-hosted editions.

MIDAS can be configured to send outgoing email via SMTP/Sendmail via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Email. For more information, please refer to the “Manage Email Settings” documentation.

This isn’t the only new feature to be added in v4.19. There are a number of other new & improved features in MIDAS v4.19 too!

The post Additional Recipients for Booking Confirmations appeared first on MIDAS - Room Booking System | Blog.

MIDAS already allows specifying different “room rates” for different days of the week, and for different lengths and types of bookings. In addition, venues can be charged “per booking”, “per hour” or “per day”.

For more information on setting venue rates, please see our short video tutorial:

For our upcoming v4.19 release, we’re introducing a new “per person” venue rate:

When a venue rate is set to “per person”, the charge for hire of the venue will be determined by the number of attendees for the given booking.

For example, suppose you set a “per person” venue rate of $5, and you then add a booking with 10 attendees. The total charge for hire of that venue would be 10 x $5 = $50.

You’ll still also be able to setup different rate types for different lengths of bookings too. For instance, this would allow you to charge a reduced rate for lengthier bookings.

Click here to continue reading about some of the other new & improved features coming in MIDAS v4.19!

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