How To Setup Resources & Add Them To Bookings

Topics covered in this tutorial:

• Adding new resources to a MIDAS system
• Categorizing resources.
• Making resources available for public booking/requesting.
• Limiting resources to specific rooms/venues.
• Setting resource quantity limits.
• Setting resource charges/rates.
• Adding resources to a booking.

Tutorial Video Transcript

In this tutorial I'm going to show you how you can set up resources in MIDAS.

Now resources are additional items you can add to each of your bookings, and we manage these by going to MIDAS Admin Options and selecting Manage Resources.

Now there are three categories for resources in MIDAS: Equipment, Consumables, and Staffing, and each one behaves slightly differently as we'll see.

So we're currently in the equipment category so let's add a new piece of equipment.

So let's add a laptop.

The "public" box here would make this resource publicly requestable if we have enabled the public features of MIDAS.

Now this is all covered in a separate video tutorial so we will ignore that box for now.

Below that the "limit to" allows us to only make this resource available to specific venues or all venues.

So if you have a resource that is only available in one particular space, for example, you might have basketball nets that would only be applicable to your sports venues and not in your meeting rooms.

You could change that here and limit the resource to only be available in specific rooms.

I'm going to select "All Venues" to make this laptop available anywhere.

We can also enter the maximum quantity of laptops we have available at any one time.

So let's say we have five laptops in total and we can also specify a hire charge for the laptop and this will be charged per booking.

So let's say to hire a laptop we're going to charge $30 and then when we're done, we click "Add", and our resource appears there.

Let's add another equipment resource, let's say flipchart, and let's say we have seven of those available and the charge to hire those is $15.

Add - There we go, so we've added a couple of items of equipment there.

We'll now go to our consumables category and add some consumables.

Now these are items we can add to bookings that can only be used once.

So these might be things like refreshments or seeing as we've just had a flip chart, let's add flip chart pens and let's say we have 20 sets of these available and we charge $5 for these.

And if we've got our flip charts and flip chart pens we probably need flip chart paper as well, so let's add flip chart paper and let's say we've got 20 paper pads available we charge $8 for those.

So consumables behave similarly to equipment in the way they're charged i.e. per booking.

But unlike equipment, the quantity available of consumables decreases each time we add them to our bookings.

The final category is staffing.

This is where we can add our staff.

So let's say we have a duty manager.

Then let's say we have two duty managers available and they're charged at a rate of $40.

Now for our staffing category - whereas with our equipment and consumables they were per booking - for staffing the charges are per hour.

So let's go "Add".

So, now we can see in equipment we have flip charts and laptops.

Consumables flip chart paper and pens - note that the 20 available of each of those at the moment - and in staffing we have duty manager.

So let's add those to some bookings to see how they work.

Back in our booking grid let's make a booking lasting two hours for John Smith and then in the resources section here we click "Add Resources", and you'll see these are the resources that are added to our system.

So let's add a flip chart and let's add a couple of laptops, and also add a flip chart paper pad and a set of pens, and a duty manager.

In fact, what we'll do, we'll go back to equipment, and let's just - for the sake of argument - have 20 laptops.

Now I know we've not got 20 laptops on the system, but let's see what MIDAS does.

So you'll see then all those resources that we wish to add are listed here, and we can remove any of those from the booking if we wish by clicking the cross icon.

But we'll continue to the booking availability screen, and you'll see now as well as venue availability we also get resource availability.

They're all available apart from the laptops, where there's only five available.

So if we continue to add this booking then five laptops will be assigned, rather than the twenty we specified.

So we'll go "Book All Available".

There's our booking.

If I hover over it you can see the resources listed in the booking information panel.

I can also generate an invoice for this booking, and if I view that invoice you'll see our resources are also included on there with their rates, and for the duty manager it's the rate per

hour.

Because the booking was two hours we have a quantity of two.

So one final thing to show you, because we added a couple of consumables to that - the flip chart paper and the flip chart pens - if we go back into our "Manage Resources" screen, and we go to our "Consumables" category, you'll see the quantity available of each of those has now been decreased by one, because it's assumed that these resources or consumables that once they've been used for a booking, they can't be used again.

You can also use the Watch features of MIDAS to receive automated alerts when your consumable levels drop below a specific threshold, and this is covered in one of our other video tutorials.

So for now thanks for watching and be sure to check out our other video tutorials online.