Everything we have changed, and when

New feature 7 August 2026

If your hall is a registered charity there is now somewhere to keep track of what the Charity Commission expects, alongside your fire risk assessment and your insurance. Four new categories under Compliance: your annual return, with the ten month deadline spelt out because that is the date nobody remembers; your accounts and trustees' annual report, with the income thresholds for filing and for examination said plainly rather than left as "it depends"; your governing document - your objects and schedule - which has no renewal date but does need to be to hand; and keeping the Commission's list of your trustees up to date. Each one carries a due date, a status and reminders, exactly like everything else in there, and each says what the law actually asks of you. They only appear if you have told us your hall is a registered charity. Your register of trustees already exists, by the way - that is your Committee Members list under Governance, where you can mark who is a trustee and record when their term runs out. Thanks to Binfield Memorial Hall for the idea.

New feature 7 August 2026

If the same person runs two groups - Rainbows and Brownies, with one secretary and one email address - you do not need to invent separate names for them to be invoiced separately. Invoicing already raises one invoice per hirer, so two hirers means two invoices, however many contacts they share. What can happen is that the bookings end up under the wrong one: a booking made through your public enquiry form is matched to an existing hirer by email address, so the second group's dates can land under the first group's name and then get billed with them. You can now put that right without opening each booking. On a hirer's Bookings tab, tick the ones that belong elsewhere and choose "Move to another hirer". Anything already invoiced stays where it is, because the invoice names the hirer it was raised for. Thanks to Binfield Memorial Hall for the question.

New feature 7 August 2026

Put in a recurring booking and you get every date in the diary, including the weeks that are not actually being booked - half term, Christmas, the week the hall is being decorated. Getting rid of those meant opening each one, which is both slow and how the wrong week gets removed. There is now a Delete button on each row, both on a hirer's Bookings tab and on the "All dates in this series" tab of a repeating booking, and you can tick several and delete them together. Anything that has already been invoiced is protected: it offers Cancel instead, because deleting it would leave the invoice charging for something it can no longer name. Nothing is emailed to the hirer either way. Thanks to Binfield Memorial Hall for the suggestion.

New feature 7 August 2026

The three things somebody rings a village hall to ask were the three Hallie was worst at. She can now answer all of them. "Is the hall free on Saturday afternoon?" - she checks the actual time you ask about rather than the whole day, so an afternoon still counts as free when there is a toddler group in that morning. She uses the same clash check the booking form uses, keeps to your changeover buffer, and tells you if the hall is closed that day. "How much would that cost?" - she prices it exactly the way the invoice would, including the hirer's own rate card if they are already on your books, and she is clear that the figure is the whole cost of the hire rather than an hourly rate. And a question from your side of the desk rather than the caller's: "what have I not billed for yet?" - she lists the confirmed hires that have happened and never reached an invoice, with what they would come to. She can also tell you what your rooms are and what each one seats. Nothing she quotes holds a booking - it is the diary as it stands, and somebody still has to make the booking.

New feature 7 August 2026

Tell Hallie "I want to raise an invoice for the Rainbows" and she finds every hire of theirs that has not been billed yet, works out what each one comes to, and puts them on a card with a tick box against each line and a running total. Untick the ones you do not want - the week they cancelled, the session you have agreed not to charge for - and the total follows as you go. Ticking costs you nothing, so it is a better way to change your mind than asking her again. Press the button and it is raised as a draft under Finance, Invoices, exactly as if you had made it yourself. Nothing is sent to the hirer: you look it over and send it when you are happy. She will not invoice anything that is already on an invoice, anything free of charge, or anything that has not happened yet, and if somebody else bills one of the hires while the card is sat on your screen it is quietly left off rather than billed twice. If you are not somebody who is allowed to raise invoices, the button is not there.

New feature 7 August 2026

Some halls run their own website, or their own server, and would rather the booking diary appeared there than only here. There is now a way to do that. Village Hall Hub has an API - a door in the side of the system that a website or a program can knock on and be handed your bookings, so your own pages can show what is on without anybody copying dates across by hand. To start with it can be asked three things: what is in the diary, the details of one booking, and when a particular room is free. The free-time answer is worked out exactly the way the booking form works it out, including your changeover buffer and the days you have marked the hall closed, so it will not offer somebody a slot that the form would then refuse. Access is by a key you make yourself, under Settings, API keys. Making one takes a moment: name it so you know later what it was for, tick what it is allowed to do, and choose whether it should stop working on its own after a few months. The key is shown once, when you make it, and never again - so copy it there and then, and hand it to whoever looks after your website rather than sending it round the committee. If a key is ever shared by mistake, or the person who had it moves on, one button stops it working. Only an owner or an admin can make a key, because a key is used by a machine and misuse of one is much harder to notice than misuse of a login. A key only ever opens the one hall it was made for, and can only do the things you ticked. Bookings you have marked private stay private: the time is shown, so nothing gets double-booked, but the name of the event is given out as "Private booking" and never leaves the building. Hirers' names are only included if the key was specifically given permission to see them, so a key made purely to publish a diary cannot come back with a list of who booked. Every request is written down. This is the first part of something larger, and it is deliberately read-only for now - nothing reachable through it can change your bookings, your invoices or your money. Thanks to Dorridge Hall for making the case for it, and for being blunt about why systems that keep their API to themselves are frustrating to live with.

New feature 6 August 2026

The monthly table on the reports page could tell you what you invoiced and what you received, and neither of those is the question asked at a committee meeting: how much did we take in September. If you bill a whole term of weekly hires on one invoice, or invoice in arrears, September's hires can sit entirely in July's or December's billing, and nothing on the page told you otherwise. There is now a Booked column at the front of the monthly breakdown - the value of the confirmed bookings that took place in that month, whenever they happened to be billed. Where a booking has been invoiced it counts what you actually charged, so last spring is counted at last spring's prices rather than today's, and bookings not yet invoiced are priced from your rate card. Free bookings and cancellations are left out, and a hall registered for VAT sees the figure before VAT, the same as every other income figure on that page. It is in the Income Summary export too. Thanks to Binfield Memorial Hall for asking.

New feature 6 August 2026

Hallie was good at your hall's own information - who has how many bookings, when a group is next in - and vaguer about the system she lives in. Asked whether committee members are emailed when you set up a meeting, she said she did not know. She now has proper answers to that sort of question: what gets sent out on its own and what only goes when you press a button, the difference between team members and committee members, who receives a hirer's invoices, and where your own details live. She has also been told not to answer questions about Village Hall Hub from general knowledge about booking systems - if she does not have the answer she will say so, rather than telling you what a system like this usually does. For the record on that first question: no, nothing is sent to your committee when you add a meeting.

New feature 6 August 2026

There was nowhere to do this. If you married, or your email address changed, or you simply wanted a new password, there was no screen for it - which somebody found by asking Hallie where it was. Settings now has My Details at the top: your name, your email address and your password, all in one place. It is your own login, separate from your hall's name and address. Changing your password asks for the current one first, so somebody walking past your open laptop cannot change it for you.

New feature 6 August 2026

A hall told us their team were being turned away with "login expired" when they tried to accept an invitation. The link only lasted an hour, which is no use at all when the invitation arrives while somebody is at work and gets opened that evening. It now lasts 24 hours, and the email says so. The bigger problem was on the Team Members page: the Resend Invite button only appeared for people who had done nothing at all since being invited. Somebody whose invitation had run out, who then signed themselves up to have another go, no longer counted - so the hall was left with nothing on the page they could press for the one person who needed help. The button is now always there. For somebody who has never got in it sends a fresh invitation. For somebody who already has their own account it sends a note saying they have been added to your hall and asking them to sign in, because we will not set a password for an account that is not ours to set.

New feature 6 August 2026

If you belong to no hall, signing in takes you straight to the page for registering one - there is nowhere else to send you. That is fine when you really are new, and no use at all if you already belong somewhere and something has gone wrong, because the only screen you can reach is the one that makes a second, empty hall. One person spent a week in exactly that loop and ended up with three accounts. Registering a hall now either creates it with you on it or does neither, so an account cannot be left belonging nowhere, and a half-finished registration cannot leave an empty hall behind. If you are ever told to register a hall you know you already belong to, do not - email us and we will put it right in a minute.

New feature 6 August 2026

The reports page worked out what you had received by looking at the invoice rather than the payment, so an invoice raised in July and settled in August was counted as July money. If you were checking the page against your bank statement, the two never agreed. Received now means what actually came in during the period you are looking at, on the date it came in - so a payment in August shows in August, even when it settles an invoice from last year, which the old figures left out altogether. The Outstanding column beside each month has changed with it: it now shows what is still owed on the invoices raised that month, rather than that month billing minus another month cash. Invoices you brought in from another system as already paid still count, on the invoice date, because that is the only date those have.