Everything we have changed, and when

Fix 1 September 2026

Every email the system sent a hirer was recorded twice on their communication log, with the same date and the same wording, which made a portal invitation look as though it had gone out two or three times. It was only ever sent once. The log now has one line per email, as it always should have. Existing duplicates stay where they are rather than being tidied away behind your back. Thanks to Binfield Memorial Hall for reporting it.

Fix 1 September 2026

Where a hirer had more than one person ticked as booking the hall, only the first of them was ever written to. A garden club with a secretary who books and a separate member who turns up with the key had named both, and the person actually opening up was the one person not getting the door code.

Both the portal invitation and the door code now go to everyone ticked as booking the hall, and the portal invitation also goes to everyone ticked for invoices. Tick one person and nothing changes; tick two and both hear from you. Somebody with an end date against them stops being written to as before. Thanks to Binfield Memorial Hall for spotting it.

New feature 31 August 2026

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.

Fix 31 August 2026

If you had uploaded a logo for your hall under Settings, then Branding, it stopped appearing on invoice PDFs, statements and grant applications. Nothing was wrong with your logo and nothing you did caused it: the part of our system that builds PDFs refuses to open files outside a list of folders it is given, and after a change to how the site is deployed your uploaded images were sitting just outside that list. It failed quietly, which is why it went unnoticed. Your logo is back on your invoices with nothing for you to do, and there is now a test that will not let it happen again. Thanks to Eric at Gwernymynydd Village Centre for spotting it.

New feature 31 August 2026

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 31 August 2026

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 31 August 2026

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.

Fix 31 August 2026

On the thirty-first of a month, any month with thirty days in it was named as the one after. Your public calendar could be headed October while showing September, the arrows either side of it stepped to the wrong months, and the Month filter on your Bookings list offered "October 2026" for your September bookings.

Nothing was ever booked, moved or shown on the wrong date - the bookings were always right, it was the month written above them that was wrong. It corrected itself the next day, which is presumably why nobody had reported it.

Fixed everywhere it appeared: your public calendar, the embedded one, the hirer portal calendar, your own booking calendar and the Bookings month filter.

Fix 31 August 2026

Some of your screens were not checking what somebody was allowed to do before letting them do it, so a person you had given the Read Only role could still change things. In particular they could tick rows on a list and use Delete selected - on almost any screen - and they could add or remove extras, facilities, hirer types, key contacts, closures and committee members.

We are not aware of anybody losing anything to this, and it needed somebody already signed in to your hall to do it. But Read Only should mean read only, and it now does.

Everything is checked in the same way across every screen, and we have added a test that fails if a new screen is ever added without those checks, so it cannot quietly come back.

Two things changed for the better while we were in there. Trustees can now write and edit meeting agendas and minutes, which they could only read before - a chair had to be made an Admin to record what her own committee had decided, which also handed her the invoices and the settings. And deleting a payment is now held to whoever may delete an invoice, rather than being open to anybody.

If you have given somebody Read Only and meant them to be able to change things, they will need a different role - Booking Secretary, Treasurer or Trustee, depending on what they do for you.

New feature 30 August 2026

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.

Fix 30 August 2026

Setting a heating level on a repeating booking and choosing "every date in the series" set it on that one date and quietly left the rest of the term alone. The field was added to the booking form the day before without being added to the list of things a series shares, so every other change carried and this one did not.

It carries now, whichever date of the series you edit and whether you choose the whole series or this date and the ones after it. If you have already set temperatures a date at a time, they are still there - nothing has been changed behind you.

Thanks to Binfield Memorial Hall for spotting it the morning after it shipped.

Fix 30 August 2026

If you deleted the date a repeating booking started on, every other date stayed in the diary but quietly stopped being a series. They still looked like a run and still appeared on the right days, but editing them together no longer did anything, and nothing on screen said why. The confirmation only promised to remove that one date, which is exactly what anybody would have believed.

Deleting the first date now hands the series to the next one: it takes over the repeat settings and the remaining dates follow it, so the run carries on being a run. Deleting any other date behaves as it always has, and deleting a whole term still clears it.

The confirmation now says so too, naming the date that will become the new first date.

If this has already happened to one of your regular bookings, get in touch and we can put it back together for you rather than you editing the dates one at a time.

Thanks to Binfield Memorial Hall, whose Friday class turned out to be the thing that showed us.