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.
Some halls charge two prices - one for people who live in the village, another for everybody else. The trouble is that the enquiry form never asked which one you were dealing with, so you had to email back and ask before you could quote.
You can now put one question of your own on your enquiry form. Go to Booking Settings and look for "One question of your own". Type your question - for example, "Are you a resident of Hambridge or Westport?" - and optionally a line of explanation underneath it.
Anyone enquiring is asked it as a plain Yes or No, and has to answer before they can send the form. The answer comes to you in the enquiry email and sits on the booking, so you can pick the right rate card straight away.
It is your wording, so it does not have to be about residents. It could ask whether they are a member, whether they are booking for a registered charity, or anything else that decides what you charge.
Leave the box empty and nothing is asked, which is how every hall starts.
New feature
Charge one fixed price for the whole hire
Not every hire is priced by the hour. Plenty of halls charge one figure for an evening party or a wedding weekend, however long the hirers actually stay - and until now there was nowhere to put that figure.
You will find it on a rate card, under Room Rates. Add or edit a room and it now asks how that room is charged: by the hour, as before, or one fixed price for the whole hire. Choose the fixed price, type the figure, and every booking on that rate card is that figure. It also arrives on the invoice as a single line saying what it is, rather than a first hour and a further seven.
If a hire takes more than one room, the fixed price is charged once for the hire and not once for each room. So an evening package that includes the main hall and the committee room is one fee, not two.
If you have been getting round this by putting the whole fee in the "first hour" box and nothing in the hourly box, it is worth changing those over. That trick gives the right answer for a long booking and the wrong one for a short one - and for a booking under an hour it charges nothing at all. A fixed price does not have that problem.
Nothing changes if you hire by the hour. Leave the setting on "by the hour" and every price, booking and invoice is exactly as it is today.
New feature
We chase your unpaid invoices - and you can now stop us
When an invoice you have sent goes unpaid, we email the hirer about it: a week before it falls due, on the day, a week after, and a fortnight after. Each is sent once and never repeated. Nothing is ever sent about a draft invoice, or one that has been paid.
This has been running for a long time, quietly, in your hall's name. There was no setting for it and nothing on any screen that said it was happening, which was not right - those are your hirers and it is your name on the email.
It is now in Payment Settings, under "Chasing Unpaid Invoices", where it says exactly what goes out and when. It stays on unless you turn it off.
Some halls will want to turn it off, and that is a perfectly good decision. If your hirers are the same dozen people you see every week, a reminder email a fortnight after the invoice is not how you would raise it, and now you do not have to.
New feature
Tell us if you are a registered charity
Most village halls are registered charities, and the Charity Commission asks things of them it does not ask of anybody else - the annual return, the accounts, the governing document, the trustee details, each with its own deadline and income thresholds.
We have always tracked those. What we had not done was give you any way of telling us you were a charity, so unless we had ticked a box for you behind the scenes, those four items simply never appeared on your compliance list. If you went looking for them and found nothing, that is why, and we are sorry - you were not imagining it.
There is now a Charity Status page under Compliance. Turn it on, add your charity number, and the four Charity Commission items become available on your compliance list straight away.
It is open to trustees as well as owners and admins, because a trustee is usually the person who knows the charity number.
New feature
Click the Outstanding figure to see the invoices behind it
The Outstanding total on your Reports page is now a link. Click it and you get your invoice list filtered to exactly the invoices that make up that figure - nothing paid, nothing drafted, just what is still owed.
A treasurer told us she could see the number and had no way of asking what was in it, so she was going to the invoice list and filtering by hand every time. Now she does not have to.
There is a matching "Overpaid" filter on the invoice list too, for the rare case where somebody has paid over the amount.
New feature
Sign your minutes off, and have them stay signed
The Charity Commission expects a charity to be able to produce minutes that were approved and signed. Until now the furthest this went was marking them Published - and published minutes could still be edited afterwards, and put back to draft. Nothing on the screen told the minutes your committee agreed from the ones somebody tidied up last Tuesday.
There is now a third step. Minutes go Draft, then Circulated, then Signed.
Write them up as usual and press "Circulate minutes" when they are ready for your committee to read. Then, once they have been approved at your next meeting, press "Record the signature". It asks who signed - normally the chair, and your chair is listed first - the date, and which meeting approved them.
From that moment the minutes are closed. They cannot be edited, the meeting cannot be deleted, and the PDF carries a signature block naming who signed and when, which is exactly what you would want to hand over if anyone ever asked.
It also records who entered the signature, which is usually the secretary rather than the chair. Both are on the record, because they are different questions.
If something turns out to be wrong, there is a "Reopen these minutes" button. It asks you why, and your reason is added to the end of the minutes - so a change to a signed record shows up on the record rather than beside it.
Nothing has changed for minutes you have already written. They stay exactly as they are until you choose to sign one.
New feature
Keep track of your utility and supplier contracts
Every renewal date we watched for you belonged to something you do for other people - your insurance, your DBS checks, your compliance items. The contracts the hall holds for its own building were nowhere.
That is how a hall ends up back on a standard tariff: the electricity contract rolls over because the trustee who knew the date stood down two years ago, and nobody finds out until the bill arrives.
There is a new screen under Compliance called Utilities & Contracts. Put in your electricity, gas, oil, water, broadband, telephone, waste collection, cleaning, grounds, fire alarm servicing, boiler servicing, and any licences or subscriptions the hall pays for.
The field that makes it worth doing is "Notice you have to give". Most contracts renew themselves unless you give notice first, and it is often 30, 60 or 90 days. Tell us the notice period and we will remind you from the date notice is actually due - not the date the contract ends, which is far too late to be useful. A contract ending in March with three months of notice needs dealing with in December, and December is when you will hear from us.
Contracts needing attention appear on your Compliance dashboard alongside everything else. When one ends, turn off "This contract is still running" rather than deleting it, so you keep the history and stop being reminded.
Your insurance is not included here on purpose - it already has its own screen with a policy number and sum insured, and having two renewal dates for one policy is how a hall ends up watching neither.
New feature
Regular hirers can request a whole term at once
There is a new "Request a booking" tab in the hirer portal.
The portal could only be read before, which had it backwards. The hirers who get most out of it are your regulars - the playgroup, the yoga class, the parish council - and those are exactly the people who never make a one-off booking. What they want in September is the whole autumn term.
So they can now ask for one. They pick the room, the day and the times, tick "This is the same slot every week or every month", choose weekly, fortnightly or monthly, and say when the sessions should stop. As they fill it in, it tells them how many sessions that actually is - because nobody typing "weekly until December" knows whether that is twelve or forty, and neither do you until somebody counts.
It arrives as one enquiry, not as thirty bookings in your diary. You see the pattern they asked for, you check the diary, and you decide. Nothing is booked until you say so.
The enquiry email tells you when a request is for a repeating booking, so a term of sessions and a single evening do not arrive looking the same.
New feature
Your hirers can now answer a pencilled booking themselves
When you pencil a date in as Provisional, the hirer now sees two buttons in their portal: "Yes, confirm it" and "No, cancel it".
Whichever they press, you get an email straight away, and the diary is already right by the time you read it. If they confirm, it becomes a confirmed booking and any deposit you normally ask for is applied, exactly as if you had done it yourself. If they cancel, the date is free again.
That saves the round of emails that used to sit in the middle - you asking, them replying, and you going back into the diary to change it by hand.
Only pencilled bookings in the future can be answered this way. A confirmed booking is an agreement you may already have invoiced, and that is not something we let a hirer undo from a link in an email.
On the booking itself you will see when the hirer answered, so a booking you confirmed and one they confirmed are told apart - which matters on the rare occasion somebody rings up disputing it.
New feature
Credit notes, for when you agree not to charge
A late cancellation. A hire spoiled because the heating packed up. A session the committee decides to let go. Until now there were two ways to record that and both were wrong: void the invoice, which loses all record of the hire it was for, or enter a payment that never actually arrived, which makes your year's income read high and your bank reconciliation impossible.
You can now issue a credit note instead. Open Invoices, find the invoice, and choose "Issue a credit note" from the menu on the right. Say how much to take off and why.
The important part is what it does not do. A credit note reduces what the hirer owes without ever being counted as money received - so it comes off Outstanding, it does not go into Total Received, and your income for the year stays honest. The invoice keeps its total and its lines, so you can still see what the hire was and what it would have cost.
Credit the whole amount and the invoice is settled and stops being chased. Credit part of it and the rest is still owed as normal.
You cannot credit more than is left owing on an invoice. Money going back to a hirer who has already paid is a refund, which is money leaving your bank account - a different thing, and not something we will pretend a credit note can do.
Each note gets its own number, CN-00001 upwards, separate from your invoice numbering. It records who issued it and why. If you issue one by mistake you can withdraw it, and the debt goes straight back - but the number it used is never given to another one, so nobody can ever find two documents claiming to be the same credit note.
New feature
Send the key safe code automatically, just before the booking
If your hall has a key safe, you no longer have to remember to send the code.
Go to Booking Settings and look for "Getting In". Turn it on, put in your code, say how many days before a booking it should go out, and add a line about where the safe is and anything else the hirer needs to know.
From then on, anyone with a confirmed booking is emailed the code that many days beforehand - two or three days is usual. Each booking gets it once. Nothing goes out for a booking that is only pencilled in, or one that has already been and gone.
Sending it near the date rather than with the confirmation is deliberate, and it is how Airbnb does it for the same reason. A code sent in September for a booking next April is a code you will have changed by then, and the hirer is left standing outside. It also means an old code is not sitting in the inbox of somebody who has no reason to be in the building any more.
When you change the safe, change the code here. The new one goes out with the next bookings and nobody is sent it twice.
**On keeping it safe.** Your key safe code is stored encrypted, in the same way your bank details already are - it is not readable in our database, and neither are your access notes, since those usually say exactly where the safe is. It is worth saying plainly, because a key safe code is the key to your building.
New feature
Charge a regular hirer a flat sum each month
If you have a hirer in most weeks - a playgroup, a dance school, a church - you can now charge them one flat sum a month instead of billing every session.
The point of it is the standing order. A per-session bill is £180 in a month with four Tuesdays and £225 in a month with five, and nobody can set a standing order up against a figure that keeps moving. A flat monthly charge is the same every month, so they set it up once and it pays itself - which makes it the one invoice your treasurer never has to chase.
To use it, put a figure in Monthly charge on the hirer, under Type and rates. Then on their booking you will see a new switch, "Covered by their monthly charge". Leave it on and that session is not invoiced separately, because the monthly charge has already paid for it. Set it on a repeating booking and every session in the series follows.
Anything they book on top is charged as normal - turn the switch off on that one booking and it invoices the usual way. So a playgroup on £220 a month that also takes the hall for a Christmas party gets their monthly invoice and a separate one for the party.
When you want to raise them, go to Invoices and press "Raise this month's rent invoices". One draft per hirer, and nothing is sent to anybody until you send it. Press it twice by mistake and nobody is billed twice - it spots the invoices already raised and leaves them alone.
Nothing changes if none of this applies to you. Leave Monthly charge empty and every hirer, booking and invoice behaves exactly as it does today.
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.