How To Book By Time Periods

This tutorial covers changing settings to allow booking by predefined time periods or "slots".

Topics covered in this tutorial:

Setting up a list of predefined time periods
Assigning users to a predefined list of times
Booking by predefined time periods

Tutorial Video Transcript

Hello and welcome to MIDAS tutorials.

Now normally on your Add Bookings screen, you'll see a start and finish time selector, allowing you to set the times that each booking takes place.

If you work in an educational environment, like a school, where there are fixed periods throughout the school day, it can become a little tedious task to manually set the time for each booking.

So MIDAS allows you to enter all your school periods and then you can book by that period.

So to do this we go to MIDAS Admin Options.

We select "Manage MIDAS" from the drop-down, and on the "Fields" tab we locate the "Times" field and click "Edit", and we want to edit time lists.

We're going to create a new time list, so we click Add, and we'll call this "School Day".

The type of time list we're creating is a "Period" list.

So now we can enter the names of our periods.

So let's say Period 1 starts at 9:00 a.m. and runs till 10:00.

Period 2 runs from 10:00 to 11:00.

Period 3 can run from 11:00 to 12:00, and then let's say we have lunch which runs from 12:00pm till 1:00pm.

Period 4 from 1pm till 2pm, and finally Period 5 which runs from 2pm to 3pm.

So again this is a simplistic example.

Your school day probably is different to this, but you can obviously customize the times the peer is to suit your particular needs.

So we'll click "Save Changes" here.

So now that we've created our times list, we need to assign this, which we do on a per user basis.

So we close window and from the drop down we select "Manage Users & Permissions".

We select the user that we wish to change the time selector for, in this case we want to change it for ourselves, and we scroll down and right at the bottom here is a time selector.

We're going to change this to our times list that we've just created - School Day - and we click Save Changes.

So now on our Add Bookings screen, you'll see the start and finish time selectors completely gone, and instead it's been replaced with a drop-down list of periods.

So if we want to book a room during Period 2, we select "Period 2", select the room, enter the client, "Check Availability & Book", and there it is, Period 2, 10 'till 11.

There's no limits in MIDAS to the number of different times lists you can create.

So you can create different ones for different users, or you can allow some staff to be able to book by the original start and finish discrete times.

How you book in MIDAS really is quite flexible!

Thanks for watching and be sure to check out some of our other video tutorials online, where I'll cover other ways you can customize the time selector.