Made with care for the volunteers who keep Britain's halls running.
Product updates
Everything we have changed, and when
Most of what is on this page started as an email from a village hall. We write these in the same words we send our
halls, so you can see for yourself how often this thing actually moves.
Hallie, the assistant behind the chat button, could only look up bookings, hirers, money, rates and compliance. Ask her anything else about your own hall and she would say she was not certain, which is honest but not much use.
She can now also answer on your committee and whose term is running out, your meetings and whether the minutes have been written up, your documents and when they expire, your safety checks and what is overdue, your insurance and supplier contracts - including the date you have to give notice by, rather than only the renewal date - the grants you have applied for, who at your hall has a login and what they can do, how your hall is set up, and anything sitting waiting for somebody to deal with.
She is also much better at finding her way round. Asking where to put your logo on an invoice, or how tags work, or where to change the type of event, used to find nothing at all, because she could only search the words printed on the menu. She now knows the words a person would actually use.
One change worth knowing about: Hallie now answers to your login as well as your hall. She will only look up what you could have found yourself on the screens, so somebody on a read-only login can still ask her where things are but not what is on them. Nothing changes for owners and administrators, who could already see everything.
She still sends nothing to do with contacting people - no email addresses, no telephone numbers, no postal addresses, no payment details, and never your key safe code. The wording on the GDPR page has been updated to say plainly what she does send.
New feature
Hire types have a screen of their own
Colouring your calendar by what kind of booking something is has been possible for a while, but only from inside a booking: you had to open one, find the "Type of hire" box, and click a small pencil beside it. There was no list, no way to tidy them up and no way to see why two things had ended up the same colour. If you never found it, that is our fault rather than yours.
There is now Hire Types under Bookings. It shows every type you have, its colour and how many bookings use it, and you can add, rename and recolour them there. The pencil on the booking form still works exactly as before.
It sits directly above Hirer Types, and this is the bit worth reading, because the two names are one letter apart and do completely different jobs. Hire Types is what kind of booking something is and what colour it shows on your calendars. Hirer Types is what kind of group a hirer is, and it decides which rate they pay. Each screen now says what the other is for. There is also a "Type of event" box on the booking itself, which is just a note to yourself and changes nothing.
One thing to know before you start: where a booking has a type of hire with a colour set, that colour is used instead of the room colour, on your own calendar and on every public one. Leave the colour blank on a type and the room colour carries on as before. Thanks to Eric at Gwernymynydd Village Centre for asking where the settings were.
New feature
The app is on the App Store
The Village Hall Hub app is out for iPhone and iPad. Search the App Store for Village Hall Hub, or go to villagehallhub.co.uk/app where there are screenshots of every screen and a link straight to it.
There is nothing to pay and nothing to sign up for. It is included on every plan, you sign in with the same email address and password you use here, and it uses the same permissions - if you cannot do something on the website you cannot do it in the app either.
Your diary, what you are owed, your safety checks and your hirers, in your pocket. It keeps working in a hall with no signal: anything you record is kept on the phone and sent the moment you are back in range. Your hirers can use it too, with the portal link and PIN they already have.
Android is built and working, and it is Google holding it up rather than us. Before a new app can go on the Play Store, twelve people have to be signed up as testers and stay signed up for a fortnight - not twelve who try it once. If you have an Android phone and can spare two weeks of using it for your own hall, you would genuinely be getting this over the line for everybody. Put your name down at villagehallhub.co.uk/app.
Your regular hirers count towards those twelve as well. Send us the email address their phone uses for Google Play - usually a gmail.com one - and we will add them.
One more thing: your hirers are now told the app exists. The email that sends them their portal link says so, and there is a single line on invoices and payment reminders too, so they can put your bookings and invoices on their own phone without you having to explain it. It is one line rather than an advert - these are your letters about your money. Halls on Professional are left out of that, because you pay to have our name off what your hirers see and the app carries it.
New feature
Advertise the class time, not the booked time
A hirer who books quarter of an hour either side to set the room up and clear it away was being advertised at the booked times. A ten o'clock class booked from 9.45 to 11.15 appeared on What is on as starting at 9.45 and running an hour and a half, which is not the class anybody was being invited to.
On any booking you are advertising there are now two optional boxes: what time the class actually starts and finishes. Fill them in and that is what the village is told, including how long it runs. Leave them blank and nothing changes.
Your diary, your invoices and your public calendar all still use the times the room is booked for, because that is when the room is genuinely in use.
On a repeating booking it applies to the whole run like everything else, so you set it once.
Thanks to Binfield Memorial Hall, who had resorted to typing the real class time into the description.
New feature
See which date a repeating booking starts on
The Repeats column on your Bookings list used to show the same icon whether a booking started a series or was one of the later dates, with the difference hidden in a tooltip. The first date now has an orange flag and the rest keep the grey repeat arrow, so you can see at a glance which is which.
There is also a new filter, Repeating bookings, with three choices: the first date of a series, the later dates, or one-off bookings. If you have entered a term half at a time, or in whatever order made your dates match your old system, you no longer have to remember which one came first.
Thanks again to Binfield Memorial Hall, who asked for exactly this.
New feature
Put the heating on the calendar
New under Booking Settings: Heating. Name the kinds of activity your hall hosts and the temperature each one wants - very active 16, active 18, seated 20, warmest 22, or whatever suits your hall.
Once you have set them, every booking gets a Heating box where you pick the activity rather than remembering the number, and the temperature appears on your Booking Calendar beside the booking, in orange. If you programme your heating a week at a time, you can now do it straight from the calendar instead of opening each booking.
Change what a level means and every future booking that uses it follows, so deciding that seated activities want twenty-one degrees is one edit rather than forty.
It is also on the booking itself under Attendees and notes, and there is a Heating column you can switch on from the Bookings list. Your hirers never see any of it - it is your arrangement, not theirs.
Leave the levels empty and nothing changes anywhere: no box on your bookings, nothing on your calendar.
Thanks to Binfield Memorial Hall, who asked for it and then explained exactly why the calendar was the place for it.
New feature
Decide what your enquiry form insists on
New under Booking Settings: What You Must Be Told. Tick any of Phone number, Organisation, Address and Postcode and nobody can send you an enquiry without filling them in.
Everybody already has to give you their name, email address, room, date and times, because an enquiry without those is not an enquiry. The four above have always been optional. Now it is up to you.
A field you have ticked shows a red star on your enquiry form, so somebody can see it is needed before they press the button rather than after, and if they miss one the message names the box rather than saying "the phone field is required".
It applies to the form on your own page and to the version embedded on your website - the same rules, in one place, so the two cannot go out of step.
Change nothing and nothing changes: all four stay optional exactly as they are today. Do think twice before ticking all of them, though. Every extra box is another reason for somebody to give up and ring the hall down the road instead.
Thanks to the hall who spent a wet day setting the system up and asked for it.
New feature
Ask your hirers how it went
New under Booking Settings: Asking Hirers How It Went. It is off unless you turn it on, and nothing changes for your hirers until you do.
Switch it on and every hirer gets a Feedback tab in their portal. They can tell you how their booking went, and separately report anything broken or missing - a heater that would not come on, a mop that has gone. The two arrive in different places, because a kind word is read once and a broken heater has to be chased.
Feedback lands on a new Feedback screen under Bookings. Anything reported as broken goes on its own Reported Issues list, with a count beside it in the menu so you cannot miss one, and it stays there until somebody marks it resolved. You can note what was done, and reopen it if the same thing goes wrong again a fortnight later. A reported issue also emails whoever gets your enquiries; ordinary feedback does not, because a hall that got an email for every compliment would stop opening them.
You can set up to three questions of your own for each - one set for how it went, another for something broken - exactly the way you already set questions on your enquiry form. Leave them all blank and your hirers still get a box to write in.
There is also an option to email each hirer the morning after their booking with a link straight to the form. This is where the care went: you set how many days to leave between asking the same hirer, and it defaults to 90, which is about a term. A group that books every Tuesday is asked once, not every Tuesday.
Thanks to Binfield Memorial Hall, who asked for all three things and spotted the pestering problem before we did.
New feature
Invoice lines now say which day of the week
Invoice lines now name the day of the week, so a line reads "Playgroup - Main Hall, Tue 8 Sep 2026, 6:30pm to 9:30pm" rather than leaving you to work out which dates were Tuesdays.
If you invoice a group that books more than one day a week, checking an invoice used to mean going back to the calendar. Now the line says it.
The hours have come off the end of the description at the same time, because the quantity column next to it was already saying the same thing. That leaves room for the day without the line running on.
Invoices you have already raised are unchanged - what a hirer has been sent stays exactly as it was sent. This applies to invoices raised from now on.
Thanks to Binfield Memorial Hall, who asked for the weekday and spotted the duplication in the same breath.
New feature
The portal link now reaches everybody who needs it
The portal invitation now goes to everybody you have named on a hirer's People tab, not just their main email address. A group whose secretary books and whose treasurer pays has two people who need the link, and only one of them was being told the portal existed.
Anybody named for both jobs is only written to once.
New feature
Email a hirer all their bookings at once, and keep a record of it
If you set up a term of bookings for a regular hirer, there was no way to tell them. Confirmations only ever went out when you approved an enquiry, so bookings you made yourself reached nobody - and if you invoice in arrears, the first the hirer heard of twelve Mondays was the bill.
On the Bookings screen, tick the dates and choose Email these to the hirer from Bulk actions. They get one email listing the lot, each with its day, time and room, rather than one email per date.
If any of the dates are provisional the email asks them to confirm, and you can set a date to confirm by. There is also a box for anything you want to add in your own words.
It goes to whoever you have named as making bookings and whoever receives invoices, since the person paying usually wants to tally the bill against something.
Every send is written up in that hirer's communication log with the dates named and the day it went, so if anybody ever says they were not told, you have the record.
Thanks to Binfield Memorial Hall for setting out exactly why it was needed.
New feature
Professional: your hirers' emails carry your name, not ours
On the Professional plan, emails to your hirers now carry your hall's name at the top and in the footer, with our name and our links gone entirely. As far as your hirers are concerned, the email is from you.
This is the same thing that already takes our name off your invoices, your public calendar and your What's On page. Emails were the one place it did not reach.
On the other plans the email still carries our name at the top, but the sender now says your hall either way.
Most of this came from a village hall asking
If your hall needs something this does not do yet, say so. That is how nearly everything above got built.