Everything we have changed, and when

Fix 25 August 2026

A month on your public calendar is never just that month. It starts on the Monday of the week the 1st falls in and ends on the Sunday of the week the last day falls in, so up to six days at each end belong to the month either side.

Those days were being drawn empty. A booking on the 1st of September did not appear when somebody was looking at August, even though August drew a box for it, and the same was true of the calendar you embed on your own website.

They now show. Nothing was ever lost from your diary and nobody could double-book over it, but anybody looking at the end of a month was being shown a quieter hall than you actually had. Apologies for that.

New feature 25 August 2026

Hallie has been caught up on everything added over the last few weeks, so you can ask her about it rather than going looking.

She can now answer questions about taking card payments from your hirers, paying us by bank transfer when the hall has no card, sending a hirer a statement of what they owe, putting your diary or What's On page onto your own website, advertising an event, making a booking private, repeating a booking on certain days each week, charging for extras like the kitchen, how a hirer gets the key safe code, adding your own questions to the enquiry form, and where documents and key contacts live.

She can also tell you how busy the hall has been. Ask her something like how busy were we last month, or which evenings are quiet, and she will give you the hours booked against the hours you count yourself open, broken down by month, by day of the week and by morning, afternoon and evening. It is the same figure the Utilisation screen shows, and it is usually the one a grant application asks for.

As before, she only ever sees your own hall, she cannot change anything, and every figure she quotes comes from a lookup rather than from her own arithmetic.

New feature 25 August 2026

When a regular hirer gets behind, chasing them meant sending one reminder per invoice - and none of those showed the whole picture. There is now a statement.

Open a hirer and press Statement for a PDF of every invoice in the period: what was invoiced, what has been paid, what is still owed, and which ones are past their due date. Press Email statement instead and it goes to them with the PDF attached, with room for a line of your own if you want to offer to split it.

Pick the period from This year so far, The last twelve months, This financial year (from 1 April), Everything, or two dates of your choosing.

It is on the Invoices screen too, under Statement for a hirer, since that is usually where you are when you notice somebody is behind. The list there shows what each hirer owes, so you can see who needs one before you choose.

Drafts and voided invoices are left off, because neither has been sent to anybody and neither is money the hirer owes.

Thanks to Binfield Memorial Hall for the suggestion.

New feature 25 August 2026

Most village halls run on a bank account that needs two signatures rather than a card, so asking for card details was asking for something a lot of committees simply do not have.

Your billing page now offers to invoice you instead. Choose a plan under "No card? Pay by bank transfer" and we will email your hall an invoice with our bank details and a reference to quote. Pay it by transfer whenever your committee is ready, and we turn the plan on when the money arrives - dated from the day it landed, not the day we noticed, so nothing is lost while you gather signatures.

Annual is usually simpler for a treasurer: one payment a year instead of twelve. If you would rather be invoiced monthly, just ask.

Nothing changes for halls paying by card, and asking for an invoice changes nothing on your account until it is paid.

Thanks to Binfield Memorial Hall for explaining exactly why a card was the wrong thing to ask for.

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.