Posts Tagged: v4.39

MIDAS 2025 Year in Review: Product Updates, Features, and Improvements

9 minute read time · Updated December 26, 2025 · First published December 26, 2025

2025 marked 20 years since work first began on the concept of our MIDAS booking system, with the very first version “0.01” coming into existence on 10th December 2005.

None of those very early 0.xx versions were ever made public and were instead used to test and refine the functionality of the software and to fix bugs.

The first “public” release, v1.00, came just a few months later in early 2006, which means that 2026 will mark MIDAS’ “official” 20th anniversary.

Our software certainly has longevity and a proven track record, and two decades later remains in active development. We regularly release booking software updates with new and improved features, and in this post we thought we’d summarize some of the highlights over the past 12 months.

💬 Unrivalled Customer Support

As well as the peace of mind our longevity gives to users, we know that customers also care about good customer service. This is just one of the areas that our customers regularly praise us for.

At the start of the year, we reviewed how responsive our support service had been over the previous 12 months, and you can read our customer support performance review.

♻️ Reduced Environmental Impact

Given our high levels of service, we clearly care about our customers. But we also care about the environment too.

As with any online or cloud-based business, computer and server equipment runs on electricity.

The Website Carbon Calculator is an innovative initiative which analyzes five key metrics to estimate the carbon emissions of any website.

Back in 2021 we were “greener” than 86% of all websites globally.

By 2025, we are now greener than 91% of all websites, and have reduced our carbon footprint by 5% over that period.

🇺🇸 US Tariffs

In April 2025, US President Donald Trump announced he would be imposing new ‘Tariffs’ on the majority of countries in the world, including the UK (where we’re based).

Concerned US customers were reaching out to ask whether the cost of MIDAS was affected by these tariffs. The good news was that tariffs only applied to physical or tangible goods – they didn’t apply to “services”, and therefore our prices for US customers were unaffected.

Politics aside, here’s what else happened in MIDAS in 2025…

⏱️ Staying “Signed In”

In April 2025, MIDAS v4.29 introduced a brand new “Stay signed in” option that truly allowed users to remain signed in between sessions. This was a game-changer for many who were frustrated at having to sign-in each time they opened their browser.

Of course remaining signed-in was something that could already be achieved with Single Sign-In (SSO) support via Active Directory – something MIDAS has supported for some time.

🔐 Improved Single Sign-On (SSO) support

In August 2025, for v4.40, we improved Single Sign-On support by expanding support to include SAML 2.0 Identity Providers.

🚪 Venues, Rooms, Spaces, and more

When we first came up with the concept of MIDAS two decades ago, we needed a term to refer to the “spaces” being booked. If you don’t know, MIDAS was originally written for a school environment, and we didn’t want to use “room” for facilities like sports halls or dance studios. We settled on the generic term “venue” to refer to a “bookable space” within the software, and this terminology has been in use ever since.

However, this year we introduced a brand new setting to replace the term ‘venue’ with something more applicable to what each organization uses MIDAS for. So if you’re a bowling alley, you can change the term to “lane”. Or if you’re running a complex of recording studios, you can change venue to “studio”.

🧾 Invoice Improvements

Invoicing is arguably the one area in MIDAS that receives the most user suggestions for new and improved features. That’s certainly not to say that the extensive invoicing capabilities of MIDAS aren’t good enough – it’s simply that every organization invoices differently – there’s no “standard that everyone uses”. That’s even more true as we have customers in dozens of countries around the world, and accounting/audit rules differ between jurisdictions.

Our most recent improvement to invoicing in 2025 was to support setting tax rates to three decimal places. Now, in most places in the world, tax rates are given to two decimal places, but there are actually a few exceptions!

Here are some examples:

  • Washington (United States):
    Washington law allows certain local sales/use tax rate increases in 0.001% increments. 
  • California (United States):
    California’s district sales taxes commonly use 0.125% increments. 
  • New York City (United States):
    8.875% is the combined sales tax rate in New York City. It comprises 4.00% (New York State sales tax), 4.50% (New York City sales tax), and 0.375% (Metropolitan Commuter Transportation District (MCTD) surcharge).

Allowing for tax rates to be specified to three decimal places, ensures MIDAS can accurately support regional and local tax rules across different jurisdictions.

This year, we also made invoices searchable and allowed the order of invoice items to be changed. Plus we provided greater control over unsent invoices by allowing an administrator to specify a date each month when unsent invoices are automatically sent to customers. This improvement better accommodates organizations that typically invoice on a specific date every month.

⬇️ Import Improvements

The ability to import data into a MIDAS resource scheduling system is crucial. Many customers who make the switch to MIDAS naturally wish to import data from their previous venue booking system.

The import tool in MIDAS allows for this. However, every booking software application is different – there’s no standardized format for how an application chooses to store and present data.

So our import tool strives to accommodate as many different data formats and “peculiarities” as possible for maximum compatibility when migrating from other booking systems.

In 2025, we introduced support for importing ‘dynamic’ .csv files. Traditionally, a Comma Separated Values (or CSV file) contains “one record per line”.

Some booking systems export to .csv files in a non-standard way, where data may actually be split across multiple lines. MIDAS can now support importing such files.

MIDAS also now supports importing multi-venue bookings. Traditionally, each record or “row” in a CSV file containing bookings should equate to a single booking (i.e. one row = one booking). However, some booking systems, such as Skedda, export multi-room bookings (where a booking takes place across multiple bookable spaces) as single records.

When importing such data into MIDAS, the software can now correctly identify and process such records.

📋 Logging and Audit Improvements

Every MIDAS booking system includes a “Recent Activity” log. In this audit log, every user action which takes place in the booking system is timestamped and logged. This allows administrators to keep track of all activity occurring within the system.

We’ve made a number of improvements in this area in 2025, including:

  • The Recent Activity log now differentiates between custom booking and client fields
  • The Recent Activity log now differentiates between removed obsolete and unsent invoices
  • Changing MIDAS core settings is now recorded to the Recent Activity Log
  • Dynamically duplicated or moved bookings are more clearly identified in the Recent Activity log

👩‍💼New User Permissions

Audit logging is certainly very useful – but we also provide administrators the ability to set an extensive range of permissions to individual user accounts. In 2025, we’ve added two additional new user permissions:

📲 User interface improvements

The user interface – or UI – of MIDAS has evolved considerably since 2005. This has been driven by advancements in new web technologies, browsers, and style trends. At the same time, we also know that functionality and familiarity are also key drivers for our users.

We’ve made a number of UI improvements to MIDAS this year, including;

♿️ Accessibility Improvements

Accessibility on web pages and web apps simply wasn’t a “thing” back in 2005 when MIDAS was born. Today, it’s not only important, it’s an essential consideration for many.

We first built in keyboard shortcuts to MIDAS well over a decade ago, and not long after introduced a special “high-contrast” visual theme too. Since then newer technologies and accessible web standards have emerged, and we continually strive to make MIDAS more accessible with every update.

This year, we’ve made a number of tweaks including better contrast for text on the booking availability grid display on public booking/request screens. We’ve also revamped the included help documentation for our most recent update, v4.41, to make it more accessible.

✅ Optimizations

Whilst many of the changes we introduce with each new version are visible, many take place behind the scenes.

We frequently review the code that makes up our software, and we’re always looking for ways to make it more efficient and run faster. A couple of years ago we experimented with using AI to assist with code optimization, and the results were impressive.

We continue to use AI to assist with this task this year to realize some small performance optimizations Rest assured, we certainly don’t let AI loose on the source code, and a human review of all AI generated code optimizations is carried out before the changes are accepted.

In addition to code optimization, we also look at database query optimization. These are the “commands” that MIDAS sends to the backend storage database, and the data it receives back in response. Communication with the database is actually one of the biggest factors that can affect performance, and so any gains in this area are always welcome.

We’ve made a number of optimizations to both code and database queries in 2025 to further improve performance and responsiveness of our software.

➕ New Add-ons

This year saw the introduction of two exciting new optional “add-ons” for MIDAS, allowing you to;

🔎 Looking ahead to 2026

As we mentioned at the top of this article, MIDAS officially celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2026, so watch this space for exciting updates in the coming months…

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Change the order items appear on invoices

3 minute read time · Updated April 10, 2025 · First published April 10, 2025

MIDAS booking software includes powerful invoicing features. These extensive capabilities mean that you won’t need a separate accounting package to handle the finances in relation to the hire and use of your facilities. (Of course, we do also support exporting invoices from MIDAS into 3rd party accounting packages too!)

With just a couple of clicks, MIDAS can generate an invoice for a booking, or indeed a series of bookings. You can also manually create new invoices at any time.

Once an invoice has been generated or created it can then be printed or emailed to your customer from within the system.

Before an invoice is finalized (before it is printed or emailed), its contents may be freely edited.

This allows you to add or remove items on the invoice or update quantities or charges.

However, until now, there’s not been an easy way to ‘move’ items up or down on invoices to change the order in which they appear.

Why might you want to reorder items on an invoice?

If you’re retrospectively generating an invoice for all a customer’s bookings over a period of time, MIDAS will include these bookings on the invoice in chronological order.

If the client has booked multiple rooms on a number of different dates, you may prefer bookings for the same room to appear consecutively together on the invoice.

Alternatively, if you use the “Merge Invoice” tool in MIDAS to combine two or more invoices for the same client, MIDAS will simply append each invoice’s items onto the end of the first invoice. This may result in items listed on the invoice not being in a logical order.

Introducing the ability to change the order of items on invoices

Starting with MIDAS v4.39, we’ve introduced the ability for you to move items up or down on invoices prior to them being finalized.

Modifying an invoice in MIDAS v4.39
Modifying an invoice in MIDAS v4.39

On the create/modify invoice screen, to the left of each invoice item you’ll now see both a small up and down arrow.

Moving items up and down on invoices
Moving items up and down on invoices

Clicking the up arrow alongside an invoice item will move that item above the previous invoice item.

Likewise, clicking the down arrow will move that invoice item below the following item.

Clicking the “Save Invoice” button will then save the changes you’ve made to the order of invoice items, along with any other changes you’ve made to the invoice.

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When the term “Venue” doesn’t quite fit

3 minute read time · Updated April 9, 2025 · First published April 7, 2025

Ever since the first version of MIDAS, we’ve used to the term “venues” to refer to the rooms or bookable spaces you can manage using our scheduling software.

Why did we choose the term “venue”?

There are a number of reasons why we originally settled on the term “venues” to describe bookable spaces.

Firstly, MIDAS was initially development for a large school in Manchester, England. The software which it had replaced at the school also used the term “venue”. So for consistency, the “venue” terminology was carried over into MIDAS.

Secondly, the school that MIDAS was originally designed for had not only rooms, but also sports facilities, a recording studio, a courtyard, and a theatre available for booking – so the term ‘room’ didn’t quite fit when it came to addressing things like football (soccer) pitches.

We also didn’t want to use the word “resources” to denote bookable spaces, as “Resources” in MIDAS are things like equipment and consumables that you can ‘add’ to bookings.

“Venues” don’t work for everyone!

From its first release nearly 20 years ago, MIDAS has since found booking applications across a whole host of industries and settings.

Today, MIDAS is used by bowling alleys, libraries, village halls, recording studios, cruise ships, vehicle rental companies and many more!

As such, the term “venue” we use to describe a bookable ‘thing’ isn’t necessarily always the most appropriate in all scenarios.

Changing the term “venue”

Now, self-hosted MIDAS customers have always been able to modify the included language packs to change the wording and terminology within their booking system. That way they can tailor the language used in their MIDAS system to their specific operations.

However, this can be quite a cumbersome process, and there’s been no way for cloud-hosted customers to make such changes (unless they have the optional Custom Branding addon)

But we’re improving this for MIDAS v4.39.

For new self-hosted or cloud-hosted installations of v4.39 (or later), the first time you login you’ll be prompted to select the term which best describes the primary ‘things’ you’ll be booking.

Setting up the terminology for the things you'll be booking in MIDAS
Setting up the terminology for the things you’ll be booking in MIDAS

The 10 terms initially available to choose from are:

  • Areas
  • Desks
  • Facilities
  • Lanes
  • Locations
  • Rooms
  • Spaces
  • Studios
  • Vehicles
  • Venues

…so if you’re using MIDAS for managing bookings at a recording studio, you could select “Studios”. Alternatively, if you’re using MIDAS for desk booking in a library, you could select “Desks”

MIDAS will then replace all references to “venues” with your chosen terminology throughout the software.

Should you wish to change the term MIDAS uses in place of “venues”, you can update this setting at any time. You’ll find it via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Appearance → Language.

Changing the term 'venues' to something more relevant
Changing the term ‘venues’ to something more relevant

A couple of things to note…

The ability to change the ‘venue’ terminology as described above is only available when MIDAS is displaying in an English language variant.

You’ll still see references to ‘venues’ across our website. For example, in our online documentation, there are references to the “Manage Venues” screen. However, if you’ve set your MIDAS system to use the term “Rooms” instead, your “Manage Venues” screen will be a “Manage Rooms” screen.

The local documentation which accompanies your MIDAS system – and which is accessed via the [Help] links – will automatically update reflect the specific terminology you’ve set.

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New “Stay Signed In” feature

4 minute read time · Updated April 4, 2025 · First published April 4, 2025

Have you ever hit the reload/refresh button in your browser whilst logged into MIDAS? Were you surprised to be bounced back to a login screen when you did? Well no more!

We’ve redesigned and improved the sign-in experience for MIDAS v4.39.

In previous versions, two options were offered on the sign-in screen..

Remember Me

Remember Me

Previously, the login screen included a “Remember Me” tick box. If this was selected when a user logged in, MIDAS would store their credentials in a cookie. The next time they accessed the login screen in the same browser, MIDAS would read this cookie and automatically populate the various fields on the login screen.

Auto-Login

Auto Login

An optional “Auto-Login” box was also present on the login screen whenever the “Remember Me” box was selected.

If “Auto-Login” was also selected, then the next time the user accessed the login screen, MIDAS would not only read the ‘remember me’ cookie and automatically populate the fields on the login screen, but also automatically click the “Login” button.

Drawbacks

There were a number of drawbacks to this approach. The primary drawback being that the “Remember Me” option stored a user’s credentials in a cookie. Whilst this data was encoded and obfuscated, it is no longer best practice to store such data in this manner.

The “Remember Me” option is also now somewhat outdated redundant. It was first introduced some 16 years ago – way back with MIDAS v2 in September 2009. Back then, password managers weren’t really a thing, and web browsers themselves didn’t provide a means to remember logins to websites.

Nowadays, all modern browsers off users the ability to remember credentials to websites and webapps. In addition, third party password managers are now also common place.

So it was time to give the “Remember Me” function a complete overhall.

In doing so, we also wanted to address a frustration which a number of our customers have reported over the years. If, when using MIDAS, they accidentally hit their browser’s reload/refresh button, MIDAS jumps them back to a login screen. (That is, unless they had selected both the “Remember Me” and the “Auto-Login” options when they initially logged in).

To combat this frustration, and to simplify the number of options on the MIDAS login screen, starting with v4.39 users will see a single “Stay signed in” option on their sign in screen.

The previous “Remember Me” and “Auto-login” options have been removed.

Staying signed in

Selecting this new “Stay signed in” option when signing in will keep the user signed-in to MIDAS on that browser until they sign out (or until their session times out, based upon the security settings setup by an administrator in your booking system.

Here’s how the new sign-in screen looks:

MIDAS sign-in screen with the new 'Stay signed in' option
MIDAS sign-in screen with the new ‘Stay signed in’ option

Like the previous “Remember Me” option, the new “Stay signed in” option also stores data in a cookie. However, unlike the former, the new “Stay Signed In” option only stores a randomly generated and unique session ID. No credentials themselves are stored in a cookie.

Refreshing and Reloading

Regardless of whether the new “Stay signed in” option is selected on a user’s sign-in screen, once the user has signed in, hitting refresh or reload in their browser will no longer jump the user back to a login screen – they will remain signed in!

With the “Stay signed in” option selected (and assuming the user isn’t accessing via a private/incognito browser window), the user can completely close their browser, and the next time they open it and access your MIDAS URL, they will still be signed in.

Security Considerations

Naturally, if the browser/device you use is shared by multiple people, then you should not select the “Stay signed in” option when signing in to MIDAS.

An administrative setting also exists to prevent the “Stay signed in” option from being shown to users.

An administrator may also still wish to force user’s sessions to expire if there is an extended period of no activity. To accommodate this, new settings have been added to the Session Control section of the security screen. This screen may be accessed via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Security.

New Session Control security options in MIDAS v4.39
New Session Control security options in MIDAS v4.39
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