Every village hall has one person who knows everything. Where the spare key is, which invoice the WI still owes, whether the Scouts moved to Thursdays, when the electrical inspection is due. It is a huge amount of knowledge to keep in one head, and it usually is one head.
Hallie is an AI assistant built into Village Hall Hub that answers questions about your hall in plain English. She sits in the corner of every screen, and you ask her the way you would ask that person.
What Hallie is, in one paragraph
Hallie answers two kinds of question: what is going on at your hall, and where something is in the system. She does it by looking things up in your own records rather than by knowing anything herself. Every number she gives you came out of your bookings, your invoices or your compliance diary. She can see your hall and no other. And she never changes anything - the most she will do is put a draft on screen with a button under it for you to press.
What you can actually ask her
These are not marketing examples. They are the things she is built to look up.
What is on
- "What is on next week?"
- "When are the Scouts next in?"
- "How often does Pilates run?"
- "Is there a completely clear day in October?"
Money
- "Who has not paid me?"
- "What have I not billed yet?"
- "How much did the WI spend with us last year?"
- "What did we take in June, and what is still outstanding?"
That second one is the one halls tell us they did not know they needed. Confirmed bookings that have happened and never made it onto an invoice are the quiet leak in most village hall finances. Asking "have I missed anything" and getting a list is worth the subscription on its own for some committees.
Availability and prices
- "Can we have the main hall on Saturday afternoon?"
- "Is anything on the morning of the 14th?"
- "What would we charge a local group for the hall, 2pm to 6pm, on a Saturday in December?"
The availability answer accounts for other bookings, your changeover buffer and days the hall is closed, so it is the real answer rather than a glance at a calendar. The price answer is worked out the same way the invoice would be, including seasonal rates and that hirer's own rate card if they are already on your books. It is the whole cost of the hire, not an hourly rate you then have to do sums with.
Compliance
- "What is overdue?"
- "What compliance is due in the next two months?"
Where things are
- "Where do I change my prices?"
- "How do I add a new hirer?"
She will tell you where in the admin to go. This turns out to matter more than we expected. The barrier to a volunteer committee using any software is rarely the software being bad, it is nobody wanting to admit at a meeting that they cannot find the thing.
Describe a booking in a sentence
The one that surprises people. You can type something like "the WI want the main hall every second Tuesday from September to Christmas, 7 til 9" and Hallie will work out every individual date, check each one for clashes, and put the whole series on screen as a draft.
Then you look at it and press the button, or you do not. She has not created anything. The same works for invoices: she can put together what a hirer owes and show it to you, and it becomes an invoice when you say so.
What Hallie will not do
This part matters more than the feature list, because the reason committees are wary of AI is that they have all read about a chatbot confidently making something up.
- She does not do her own arithmetic. Every figure she quotes came back from a query against your records. She is not adding up invoices in her head.
- She says "I do not know". If the answer is not in your records, that is the answer. She is built to prefer that to a plausible guess.
- She cannot see another hall. Not another customer's, not the one down the road. Only yours.
- She does not change anything on her own. No booking is created, no invoice sent, no price altered, until a person presses a button.
- She is not a legal adviser. She will tell you your fire risk assessment is overdue. She will not tell you what to write in it.
Why this matters for a volunteer committee
Most software for community buildings assumes somebody will learn it. That is a fair assumption in an office where using it is the job. It is a poor assumption for a committee of volunteers where the bookings secretary is 74, took the role because nobody else would, and does it in the hour before Countdown.
Being able to ask a question in your own words removes the bit that puts people off. There is no menu to learn, no report to build, no filter to set. "Who has not paid me" is not a query, it is a sentence.
The second thing it does is spread the knowledge out. When the answers live in a system anybody on the committee can ask, the hall stops being one house move or one bereavement away from losing how everything works. That is a real risk for village halls and it is the one nobody puts on the agenda.
What it costs
Hallie is included on the Standard and Professional plans:
- Standard, £24.99 a month: fifteen questions a month
- Professional, £39.99 a month: seventy five questions a month
If a hall runs out - usually the month somebody discovers her and asks her forty things - extra questions can be bought in bundles: 25 for £5, 60 for £10, or 150 for £20. Prices exclude VAT, like the rest of our pricing.
An allowance rather than unlimited use is a deliberate choice. Each question costs us real money to answer, and we would rather include a sensible number in the price everyone pays than charge every hall more to cover a handful of heavy users. Most halls do not come close to their allowance.
She is not on the Community plan. If you want to try her, the Standard plan is included in the 30-day free trial, and the trial does not ask for a card.
Try asking her something awkward
The honest test of an assistant like this is not whether she can answer "what is on tomorrow". It is whether she says "I do not know" when she should, and whether the number she gives you matches the number in your accounts.
So when you try her, ask her something you already know the answer to. Ask who owes you money when you know exactly who owes you money. That is the question worth spending one of your fifteen on, because the answer tells you whether to trust the other fourteen.
You can see the rest of what the platform does on the features page, or the plans on the pricing page.