Posts Tagged: v4.15

MIDAS v4.15 Out Now!

With Easter over for another year (and with what seems like enough chocolate to keep us going until the next!), we’re excited to announce the availability of MIDAS v4.15, our powerful web based room booking and resource scheduling software.

Here’s What’s New & Improved in v4.15

How To Get MIDAS v4.15…

New To MIDAS?

We are committed to fair and accessible pricing for all organizations regardless of size. We’re totally upfront and transparent about our pricing structure. In fact, with the affects of “Brexit”, our international prices are some 13% lower right now than they were 12 months ago – so there’s never been a better time to buy!

“Self Hosted” Customers:

Self-Hosted customers with ongoing Annual Support Subscriptions will be able to update to v4.15 in the next few days. It only takes a couple of clicks – simply log in to your MIDAS system and go to MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Update

“Cloud Hosted” Customers:

Cloud-Hosted customers don’t need to do anything! – All our active Cloud-Hosted MIDAS customers have already been automatically updated to the latest version of MIDAS over Easter!

If you have any questions about MIDAS, why not drop us an email, or reach out to us through social media – We’d love to hear from you!


New Public “Book Online” feature

With MIDAS v4.15 just around the corner, we’re offering a “first look” at some of the highlights coming in the next update to our web based room booking and resource scheduling software.

From the very outset MIDAS has included an ability to allow non-users to check availability of your facilities and submit booking “requests” online. “Non users” are visitors to your website, members of the public, etc.

These booking “requests” then go into a pending booking requests queue. Administrative users can quickly approve or reject each request. Approved booking requests then become “confirmed” bookings.

You can find out more about how this works in our “Accept Booking Requests Online” video tutorial.

We know that our customers love this long-standing feature of MIDAS. Put simply, it makes their lives significantly easier. That’s because it allows people to check room availability themselves, without having to phone/email/speak to an administrator.

We also know that some of our customers would like the Public Booking Request features to go one step further. You’d like to allow non-users to check availability, book and pay for their booking instantly there and then (rather than having to be invoiced for their booking at a later date)

That’s why in addition to the “Web Request” features of MIDAS, for v4.15 we’re also introducing a “Web Booking” feature.

The “Web Booking” process is very similar to the traditional “Web Request” process. The difference being the addition of a payment step, allowing the individual to pay to confirm their booking.

Here’s How It Works:

  1. A person selects the date(s)/time(s) they wish to book, and MIDAS checks their availability.
  2. If available, the person can enter more details about their booking and continue to the payment page.
  3. At this point, the booking is temporarily added as a “tentative” booking until the person completes payment. At this point the tentative booking automatically becomes a “confirmed” booking.

If the person fails to complete their payment in a timely manner, the temporary tentative booking will automatically expire, and the person would need to re-start the booking process. By default, this time frame is set to 15 minutes, but can be changed by an administrator.

As per the native invoice payment methods offered within MIDAS, both PayPal (with IPN correctly configured) and Stripe are available for Web Booking payments. Stripe however is recommended over PayPal.

The “Web Request” and “Web Booking” features share a set of common settings. So we’ve redesigned the previously named “Web Request” tab on the Manage MIDAS screen to become the “Public Settings” tab:

New Public Settings
New Public Settings

As you can probably tell from the above screenshot, the new auto-venue selection option we unveiled earlier this month, will also be available for “Web Booking”.

The combination of new auto-venue selection and Web Bookings helps make MIDAS even more suited for hotels, B&B’s, hostels, and other overnight accommodation businesses. Your customers will now be able to truly “book online”!

You may like to check out some of the other features of MIDAS v4.15 too!


Maintain fixed spacing between bookings

Work on the next update to our popular web based room booking and resource scheduling, MIDAS, is nearing completion. We’re excited to reveal some of the exciting improvements you can look forward to first here on our blog…

Resulting from customer feedback (which we love getting by the way!), we’re introducing new global settings for v4.15 allowing administrators to enforce fixed spacing (or “gaps”) between adjacent bookings.

Maintain Spacing (Gaps) Between Bookings
Enforce a “gap” between adjacent bookings in MIDAS

This can be useful to allow for room setup, breakdown, reset or cleaning periods between adjacent bookings.

Two new settings are available in this regard. The first controls the amount of free time to maintain before each booking. The second, the amount of free time after each booking finished before the next one can commence.

For example, with the booking spacing settings shown in the screenshot about (15 minutes before / 30 minutes after), and a booking taking place between 2pm-3pm;

  • The latest allowed finish time of a booking added earlier in the day would be 1.45pm,
  • The earliest allowed start time of another booking added later on the same date would be 3.30pm.

You may like to check out some of the other features of MIDAS v4.15 too!


New Un-invoiced Bookings Report

Work on the latest feature-rich update to our web based room booking and resource scheduling, MIDAS, is nearing completion, and so we’re excited to reveal some of these exciting new and improved features first here on our blog…

As you may be aware, MIDAS is capable of generating a wealth of printable reports, graphs, and statistics allowing you to gain valuable insight into the state of your bookings, venues, clients, invoices, and more.

The Invoicing section of this reporting allows you to see which clients or organizations have been invoiced over any given period, how much has been paid, and how much remains outstanding.

For MIDAS v4.15 we’re improving this reporting to also include an “Un-invoiced Bookings Report”. This new report shows a breakdown of the number of bookings each client/organization has over a given period which have so far not been invoiced for. This is a great way to quickly check whether you’re forgotten to invoice a particular client/organization.

New Uninvoiced Bookings Report

You can check out some of the other reports MIDAS can generate to help you gain insight into your facilities at https://mid.as/help/statistics