Everything we have changed, and when

Fix 24 August 2026

If your hall is on a trial and we do not have a card for you, the billing page now says so plainly: the date your trial ends, what happens when it does, and a button to add a card.

It used to say you were subscribed to your plan and leave it at that, which was true but not the whole truth - without a card nothing is taken and the plan simply stops on the trial end date. One hall wrote in asking how to pay us, and they were quite right that there was no obvious way to.

You can also move between monthly and annual now. If your hall was put on one at sign-up, the other used to show as your current plan and could not be chosen - so there was no way to change your mind. The button now says which one it would move you to.

Cards are handled entirely by Stripe. We never see or store them.

Thanks to Gwernymynydd Village Centre for asking the question.

Fix 24 August 2026

If you went looking for your key safe code under Booking Settings this morning and could not find it, you were not imagining it. A change earlier in the day removed that whole section from the page by mistake. Nothing was lost - your code, the number of days before a booking and your note about where the safe is were all still saved, and the emails carried on going out exactly as before - but there was no way to see or change any of it for a few hours.

It is back, and there are now tests that check every section of that page is present, so a section cannot quietly disappear again.

Thanks to Whatfield Village Hall for spotting it and saying so.

New feature 24 August 2026

Three things asked for by a hall going through it with its committee.

New under Compliance: Key Contacts. Somewhere for the window cleaner, the plumber and the man with the mower - the people you ring who have no contract and no renewal date, and whose numbers otherwise live in one committee member phone. Nothing is required beyond a name.

New under Bookings: Facilities. Write down what your hall has - the projector, the PA, the kitchen, the stage - and they appear as a tick list when you take a booking, so whoever opens up knows what needs to be out. You can add a note to each one for whoever sets it up, which the hirer never sees. This is not the same as Extras and never touches an invoice: wanting to know whether the kitchen is in use is not the same as charging for it.

And the bookings list can now show a Private column, so you can see at a glance which bookings are named on your public calendar and which are not. Turn it on with the columns button above the list.

Thanks to Whatfield Village Hall for all three.

Fix 23 August 2026

All three came from one hall using it properly for an afternoon, and all three had the same fault: something looked as though it had worked when it had not.

Extending a repeat booking by opening it and changing the last date saved the date but did not add the sessions, so the diary carried on stopping where it did before. It adds them now, and tells you how many. There is still the quicker way from the bookings list if you prefer it.

Adding a hirer no longer emails them their portal link on its own. There is a tick box on the last step of adding one, and it starts turned off - because adding somebody while you work out whether you can even take the booking is not the same as inviting them, and an email that has gone cannot be brought back. You can still send it any time from their record.

The document store now stores documents. Files were being uploaded and then quietly dropped, so every document saved with a title, a category and nothing attached - which is why some appeared not to arrive and why none of them could be opened. Anything filed before today will need uploading again, and I am sorry for that.

You can open them, too. There is an Open button on the list and the file itself on the document page, with its size, and documents keep the name you gave them rather than being renamed - so what you download is recognisable.

Thanks to Binfield Memorial Hall, who found all three and described them clearly enough to fix.

New feature 23 August 2026

Repeats could be weekly, fortnightly or monthly, so a group using the hall on more than one day meant setting up a separate repeat for each day and then keeping them all in step. There is now a "Certain days each week" option: tick Monday to Friday, or Tuesday and Thursday, and one booking covers the lot at the same time on each day.

It works well with term time. Put your school holidays into Holidays and Closures, tick "Term-time only - skip holidays", and the sessions step over the holidays instead of filling your diary with dates that are not happening.

Thanks to Whatfield Village Hall, whose village school has the place every weekday in term time.

Fix 23 August 2026

The first hall to put this on its site sent back a list, and all of it is done.

Clicking an event, or the "See all events" button, gave visitors a browser error when the listing was embedded. Links now open in the page rather than inside the frame, which is what was wrong.

If your page already has its own "What is on" heading, ours no longer has to sit underneath it. And if you have your own events page you can point the button at it, or take the button off altogether. You will find these listed under Settings, Embed on Your Website.

The colours come from your brand colour under Settings, Branding, rather than ours, so an embed looks like the rest of your site.

One fix as well: ticking "Advertise this on our website" on a repeating booking and applying it to the later dates did not carry, so only the first date appeared. It does now.

Thanks to Hambridge and Westport Village Hall, who found every one of these within an hour.

New feature 23 August 2026

The booking request form inside a hirer portal asked less than your public enquiry form: nothing about drink, no offer of a look round, and not your own question either. So a hall got answers from strangers but not from its regulars, with nothing to say which was which.

Both forms now ask the same things. A hirer signing in still does not have to type their name and address, because you already have those, but everything you need to know before saying yes is asked either way.

On the public form, "I would like a look round the hall" has moved above the Additional Information section. It is an offer rather than a detail of the booking, and it reads better standing on its own.

Thanks to Whatfield Village Hall for both.

New feature 23 August 2026

Your enquiry form let you add one question of your own, and it had to be answerable with Yes or No. That suited halls charging two prices and nobody else.

You can now add up to three, and choose how each one should be answered: Yes or no, a short answer on one line, or a longer answer in a box. You can also say whether each one has to be answered or is merely nice to know.

That means you can ask things a tick cannot answer. One hall needs to know who will be responsible on the day, which is often not the person doing the booking, and had been asking for a name, an email and a telephone number inside a Yes or No question with the answer left in the message box.

The answers appear on the booking and in the email that reaches you, each one with the question beside it. They are kept that way on purpose: if you reword a question next spring, what somebody told you last autumn still reads correctly against the question they were actually asked.

Anything you have already set up carries over on its own, and is asked exactly as it was. You will find it under Settings, Booking Settings, in a section called Questions of Your Own.

Thanks to Whatfield Village Hall for the push.

New feature 21 August 2026

If you have "Send the key safe code before each booking" switched on, the code now also appears in the portal, on the hirer dashboard and against the booking it is for. Nothing changes about the email - it still goes out exactly as before.

It follows the same rule the email does, so there is nothing new to set up. The code shows only on a confirmed booking, only within the number of days before the hire that you chose, and it stops showing once the hire is over. Somebody has to enter their PIN to see it, and they only ever see their own hall.

There is one thing the portal does that an email cannot. If you change the code, every hirer with a booking coming up sees the new one straight away - nothing to resend, and no old code sitting in an inbox waiting to be tried. Your code is stored encrypted either way.

Thanks to a hirer at Binfield Memorial Hall for the idea.

New feature 21 August 2026

If you keep a list of events on your website, you have been typing everything twice - once into your diary here and once into your website. Not any more.

There is a new tick box on a booking called "Advertise this on our website". Tick it, write a line or two about the event and add a poster or a photograph if you have one, and it appears on your own What is on page. Each event shows its name, the date, the time, how long it runs and which room, with your description and picture beside it. Visitors can search it and jump to a particular month.

There are two ways to show it. A list, which answers what is coming up, and a month calendar, which answers whether anything is on a particular weekend. The calendar puts the name of each event on the day itself rather than a dot, so somebody can see what is on without clicking anything, and picking a day shows just that day underneath. Visitors switch between the two themselves.

Nothing else in your diary goes anywhere near that page. Only the bookings you tick appear, private bookings can never be advertised at all, and anything cancelled or already past drops off on its own, so there is no tidying up to do.

For a repeating booking, write the description once on the first one and every date says the same thing - though you can still say something different on a single date if you want to.

Photographs taken on a phone are fine. They are usually far too big to upload, so we shrink them for you before they are sent - you do not have to resize anything, and the page still loads quickly for somebody looking at it on their phone.

There is also a short version for your home page: the next few events as a row of cards that slides sideways, with a button through to the full list. It is meant to sit alongside everything else a home page says rather than take a page of its own.

You will find the address and the code to paste into your website under Settings, Embed on Your Website, alongside the calendar and enquiry form snippets. That page also folds up now, so you can open the one you want instead of scrolling past the others. It comes with the Standard plan, the same as those. Thanks to Hambridge and Westport Village Hall for asking.

New feature 20 August 2026

Not something you will see, but worth writing down.

Our platform dashboard led with the number of halls signed up and the number of accounts created. Both only ever go up, so neither could tell us anything was wrong - and a hall whose trial had quietly run out looked the same as one that had never started.

It now leads with what is actually coming in, what is about to stop, how many trials turn into halls that stay, and how many halls have not opened it in a month. That last one matters most to you rather than to us: a hall that has stopped using it is usually one we have failed to help, and now we can see it rather than waiting for it to go quiet.

Fix 19 August 2026

Two things reported within a day of the utilisation page going out, both of them ours.

**Hours available was too high.** It was being multiplied by the number of rooms you have, so a hall with three rooms setting the range to four Saturdays at fourteen hours saw 168 where it should have seen 56. Hours available now means what you would expect - the hours your doors are open - and does not change with how many rooms you have.

Hours hired has changed to match. Two rooms hired at the same time is one hour in which the hall was open and busy, not two, so overlapping bookings are counted once. That matters more than it sounds: the old way made a hall with three rooms look about a third as busy as it really is, which is the last thing you want in a grant application.

Your room by room table still shows each room its own hours, because that is where you look to see whether the smaller room is earning its keep.

**And it was slow enough to lock up.** Every figure on the page was fetching the same bookings over again - the headline, each breakdown, and the hirer table - and because the date and opening hours are live, every tick of a checkbox did the whole lot again. It now reads them once.

Our thanks to Binfield Memorial Hall, who checked the arithmetic against a month they had worked out by hand and told us the day after we shipped it.