Posts Tagged: venue rates

Setting Venue Rates just got more flexible!

As you may know, our MIDAS room booking software includes integrated invoicing, allowing you to generate invoices for your client’s use of your venue.

What initially started off as quite basic functionality for setting your room rates, over the years as we’ve heard more from our customer’s specific pricing and charging scenarios – some of which have been quite complex!

As a result, over the years, we’ve constantly been developing more flexibility into how you can have MIDAS automatically calculate how much to charge your clients.

We’re now excited to announce that we’re adding even more options to venue rates, which we know will benefit a number of our customers!

More about that later, but first, let’s take a look back at some of the notable improvements we’ve made to MIDAS over the years to deal with a whole host of different pricing and charging structures.

September 2009

We first introduced invoicing capabilities with MIDAS v2.00 way back in September 2009.

From the outset, the initial invoicing features allowed administrators to define either “per booking”, “per day”, or “per hour” rates for each of their venues.

A different rate could also be set for each day of the week.

January 2011

Whilst the initial offerings of “per booking”, “per day”, or “per hour” charging rates worked well for many customers, since the introduction of invoicing in MIDAS, we’d heard from a number of customers who needed more flexibility.

Specifically, we have customers who charged different rates depending upon the “type” of booking taking place.

For example, internal users may be offered room hire at a discounted rate to that of external users.

We facilitated this scenario by introducing a new “Booking Type Discounts” feature from MIDAS v3.11.

This allowed for venue rates to be discounted by a specific percentage depending upon which Booking Type was assigned to the booking.

May 2014

The Booking Type Discounts feature certainly offered a lot more flexibility to venue charging in MIDAS.

But since its introduction, we’d also heard from customers who wanted to be able to charge different rates depending upon the length (duration) of bookings.

For instance, if a client wanted to book a space for a single hour, it would be charged at one hourly rate, whereas if they wanted to book the space for a longer period, it would instead be charged at a reduced hourly rate.

Eager to support as many different charging scenarios as practically possible, for MIDAS v4.06 we allowed setting different venue rates for different lengths of bookings.

September 2015

We made a small improvement to Booking Type Discounts for MIDAS v4.10.

Previously, Booking Type Discounts were just that – they “discounted” the standard venue rate.

For v4.10 we also allowed Booking Type Discounts to be set negative, effectively allowing venue rates to be increased from their standard rate for certain booking types.

April 2017

Further improvements came to Booking Type Discounts for MIDAS v4.15.

Discounts could now be set to take off a fixed (absolute) amount – rather than a percentage – of the standard rate.

July 2018

Another usage scenario was highlighted by a customer who wanted the ability to be able to charge for room hire based upon the number of people in attendance.

We therefore introduced a new “per person” venue rate option in MIDAS v4.19. This complimented the existing “per booking”, “per day”, and “per hour” options.

August 2019

Now, setting up (or modifying) your venue rates is something that you’ll likely do infrequently.

That said, as we’ve added numerous options to how your venue rates can be setup, it could become time consuming to set rates individually for each of the 7 days of the week.

So for MIDAS v4.22, we included an “All Days” tick box. When selected, this allowed an administrate to set the rates for just a single day of the week, but when saving have them applied to all seven days.

July 2020

Up until this point, MIDAS included a “global” tax setting that could be used to add a tax charge onto your invoice as required.

A further usage case was presented by a customer who only wanted to be able to charge tax on certain venues, with either a reduced tax rate, or zero tax on other venues.

To accommodate this, for MIDAS v4.25 we introduced “per venue” tax rates.

This allows you to setup a tax rate (percentage) for each individual venue in the software.

And now…

So that’s a brief overview of how we’ve constantly been improving the capabilities of our booking software over the years to meet our customer’s needs.

For MIDAS v4.32 we’re going even further!

A number of customers have requested the ability to be able to charge different rates depending on the time of day that a booking takes place.

For example, they may charge one hourly rate before 5pm and a different rate after 5pm.

That’s now possible starting with MIDAS v4.32!

You can set a rate based upon a booking’s start time within a given day.

NEW: Set Rates based upon the time of day a booking starts
NEW: Set Rates based upon the time of day a booking starts

These new “time of day” features can of course be used in conjunction with the other options for setting your venue rates.

You can still specify rates as either “per hour”, “per booking”, “per day”, or “per person”, have different rates for different lengths of bookings – at different times of the day, and on different days of the week!

The possibilities are immense and we hope this will cover almost every conceivable pricing structure that our customers have!


Improved Bulk Venue Modification

In the very early days of MIDAS, each “venue” (room/bookable space) you added to the system could have a name and a maximum occupancy level (capacity) setting.

Over the years as MIDAS has developed and improved, the number of venue options has greatly increased. Today, you can set hours of operation, simple and complex hire rates, venue managers, blocking rules, alternatives, and rich HTML descriptions.

These additional options have given our software even more flexibility for a wider range of applications. However, increasing the number of individual venue settings/options available, can increase the time it takes to set up or make changes to a venue.

That’s why last March, in response to customer feedback, we introduced a way to allow you to “bulk modify” venues. Users now no longer have to modify settings for each venue one at a time.

Manage Venues Screen
Manage Venues Screen

Doing Things In Bulk

The “bulk modify” venue feature allowed more than one venue to be selected at a time from the Manage Venues screen. When the “Save Changes” button was clicked, the current venue settings/options would be applied to all selected venues.

However, some users didn’t appreciate that settings including capacity, rates, hours, and managers would be blanket applied to all selected venues.

Therefore, in order to provide even grater flexibility for users, for v4.21, we’re making it even simpler!

Now, when you have multiple venues selected on the Manage Venues screen and you click ‘Save Changes”, MIDAS will prompt you to select which settings to save to the selected venues:

Bulk Modify venues in MIDAS
Bulk Modify Venues Options

This new additional dialog gives users full control by making it easier to make specific bulk changes to venues. We’re sure you’re going to love the enhanced flexibility!

Check out some of the other new and improved features coming in v4.21 here.


New “Per Person” Venue Rate

We love giving customers flexibility over how they charge clients for use of their rooms and spaces.

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:

How to set venue rates

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

Per Person Venue Rate
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!


New Flexible Venue Rates

We’re introducing even more flexibility when it comes to setting your venue rates in MIDAS v4.06!

Currently, you can already set up hourly/daily rates for each of your rooms, and have different rates depending upon the day of the week.

In MIDAS v4.06, we’ve extended this to also allow you to define rates based upon the length of the booking as well!

For example, you can now set up a venue’s rates so that bookings lasting say less than 4 hours could be charged and invoiced at a higher rate than those lasting more than 4 hours.

You can also now define rates as “per booking” as well as “per hour” and “per day”. The new “per booking” option charges a fixed set amount for bookings.

Flexible Venue Rates
Flexible Venue Rates

So, as per the above screenshot, let’s say you define the following rates for “Meeting Room 1”:

  • $100 per hour for bookings lasting 1+ hours
  • $80 per hour for bookings lasting 4+ hours
  • $450 per booking for bookings lasting 6+ hours

Bookings for “Meeting Room 1” would then be charged as follows:

Length of BookingTotal Charge
1h$100 ($100 x 1)
2h$200 ($100 x 2)
3h$300 ($100 x 3)
4h$320 ($80 x 4)
5h$400 ($80 x 5)
6h$450 ($450)
7h$450 ($450)
8h$450 ($450)

We believe this additional flexibility when it comes to charging and invoicing for use of your venues will be great benefit to our customers. Of course, for those who don’t require this level of flexibility, MIDAS can be simply set to charge a single rate for “all bookings”:

Setting a single Venue Rate
Setting a single Venue Rate