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.
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.
Fix
Phone numbers for the people on your team
There was nowhere at all to put your own phone number. Team Members showed a Phone number column and, if you opened somebody's record, told you they could set their contact details on their own profile - but My Details only ever had your name, your email address and your password. The one screen was pointing at the other, and the other did not have the box.
My Details now has a phone number box. Fill it in, or clear it, whenever you like.
If you run the hall, you can also set or correct a phone number for anybody else on your team from the Team Members screen, without waiting for them to get round to it. Their name and email address stay theirs to change, because the email address is what they sign in with, but a phone number is the committee's to keep and yours to tidy up.
Thanks to the hall who wrote in and pointed out that the button they had been sent to look for was not there.
Fix
Deleting one of your own enquiry questions now works
If you added a question of your own to your enquiry form and then wanted rid of it, pressing the red dustbin and saving brought it straight back - and asked you to choose an answer type for a question you had just deleted.
Three things were going wrong at once, and all three are fixed. Deleting a question now sticks, whether you are removing one of several or the last one you have. The answer type you chose shows as chosen when you open the page, rather than appearing blank. And halls that used the older single-question setting can now clear it properly instead of having it handed back each time.
Nothing you have already been asked on past enquiries is affected - the answers on those bookings still show the question that was put to them.
Thanks to Wistaston Memorial Hall and Community Centre for reporting it so clearly.
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.
Fix
Short invoices no longer spill onto a second page
A single booking was pushing invoices onto a second page carrying one line. The blocks above and below the table were spending most of a page before the table even started.
The addresses at the top are set more tightly, and the payment details now sit beside how to pay rather than in a long column underneath. Nothing has been taken off the invoice - it is the same document, set closer.
The invoice number and dates now sit beside the word INVOICE at the top, and who is being billed sits under your own details, rather than both being repeated in a panel underneath.
A month of weekly sessions now fits on one page where a single booking did not. A genuinely long invoice still runs on, as it should.
Thanks again to Binfield Memorial Hall.
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.
New feature
Invite all your hirers to the portal at once
You can now invite all your hirers to the portal at once, rather than opening each one in turn.
Go to Hirers, tick the ones you want - or tick the box at the top to select the lot - and choose Send portal invitations. Each hirer gets their own link and PIN, so they can see their bookings, their invoices and what is still owed.
Anybody without an email address is skipped, as is anybody whose address has already bounced, and it tells you how many were left out so you are not left wondering. Hirers who already have a PIN keep the one they have, so nobody who has written theirs down is locked out.
New feature
Emails to your hirers now come from your hall, and replies come back to you
Emails to your hirers now show your hall's name in the sender, not just in the subject line. Where they used to arrive from "Village Hall Hub", they now arrive from "Binfield Memorial Hall via Village Hall Hub" - your hall's name, with ours after it.
The address itself stays ours. That is the part the email checks are published against, and sending as your own address would put the lot in a junk folder. The name is the bit a person actually reads, and that now says who it is from.
More important: replies now come to you. Until now, a hirer who simply pressed Reply to an invoice was writing to us rather than to the hall, and you would never have seen it. Replies go to your hall's email address, or to whoever you have named to handle invoices if the email is about money.
This covers invoices, payment reminders, statements, portal invitations, booking confirmations and entry codes.
Thanks to Binfield Memorial Hall for asking how their hirers were meant to know which emails to open.
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.