Everything we have changed, and when

New feature 21 August 2026

If you have "Send the key safe code before each booking" switched on, the code now also appears in the portal, on the hirer dashboard and against the booking it is for. Nothing changes about the email - it still goes out exactly as before.

It follows the same rule the email does, so there is nothing new to set up. The code shows only on a confirmed booking, only within the number of days before the hire that you chose, and it stops showing once the hire is over. Somebody has to enter their PIN to see it, and they only ever see their own hall.

There is one thing the portal does that an email cannot. If you change the code, every hirer with a booking coming up sees the new one straight away - nothing to resend, and no old code sitting in an inbox waiting to be tried. Your code is stored encrypted either way.

Thanks to a hirer at Binfield Memorial Hall for the idea.

New feature 21 August 2026

If you keep a list of events on your website, you have been typing everything twice - once into your diary here and once into your website. Not any more.

There is a new tick box on a booking called "Advertise this on our website". Tick it, write a line or two about the event and add a poster or a photograph if you have one, and it appears on your own What is on page. Each event shows its name, the date, the time, how long it runs and which room, with your description and picture beside it. Visitors can search it and jump to a particular month.

There are two ways to show it. A list, which answers what is coming up, and a month calendar, which answers whether anything is on a particular weekend. The calendar puts the name of each event on the day itself rather than a dot, so somebody can see what is on without clicking anything, and picking a day shows just that day underneath. Visitors switch between the two themselves.

Nothing else in your diary goes anywhere near that page. Only the bookings you tick appear, private bookings can never be advertised at all, and anything cancelled or already past drops off on its own, so there is no tidying up to do.

For a repeating booking, write the description once on the first one and every date says the same thing - though you can still say something different on a single date if you want to.

Photographs taken on a phone are fine. They are usually far too big to upload, so we shrink them for you before they are sent - you do not have to resize anything, and the page still loads quickly for somebody looking at it on their phone.

There is also a short version for your home page: the next few events as a row of cards that slides sideways, with a button through to the full list. It is meant to sit alongside everything else a home page says rather than take a page of its own.

You will find the address and the code to paste into your website under Settings, Embed on Your Website, alongside the calendar and enquiry form snippets. That page also folds up now, so you can open the one you want instead of scrolling past the others. It comes with the Standard plan, the same as those. Thanks to Hambridge and Westport Village Hall for asking.

New feature 20 August 2026

Not something you will see, but worth writing down.

Our platform dashboard led with the number of halls signed up and the number of accounts created. Both only ever go up, so neither could tell us anything was wrong - and a hall whose trial had quietly run out looked the same as one that had never started.

It now leads with what is actually coming in, what is about to stop, how many trials turn into halls that stay, and how many halls have not opened it in a month. That last one matters most to you rather than to us: a hall that has stopped using it is usually one we have failed to help, and now we can see it rather than waiting for it to go quiet.

Fix 19 August 2026

Two things reported within a day of the utilisation page going out, both of them ours.

**Hours available was too high.** It was being multiplied by the number of rooms you have, so a hall with three rooms setting the range to four Saturdays at fourteen hours saw 168 where it should have seen 56. Hours available now means what you would expect - the hours your doors are open - and does not change with how many rooms you have.

Hours hired has changed to match. Two rooms hired at the same time is one hour in which the hall was open and busy, not two, so overlapping bookings are counted once. That matters more than it sounds: the old way made a hall with three rooms look about a third as busy as it really is, which is the last thing you want in a grant application.

Your room by room table still shows each room its own hours, because that is where you look to see whether the smaller room is earning its keep.

**And it was slow enough to lock up.** Every figure on the page was fetching the same bookings over again - the headline, each breakdown, and the hirer table - and because the date and opening hours are live, every tick of a checkbox did the whole lot again. It now reads them once.

Our thanks to Binfield Memorial Hall, who checked the arithmetic against a month they had worked out by hand and told us the day after we shipped it.

New feature 19 August 2026

The part of the day you were missing. Alongside month by month and day by day, there is now a table showing mornings, afternoons and evenings, so you can see whether it is your weekday mornings going begging rather than the whole of Tuesday.

The three parts follow whatever opening hours you set, rather than a notional day. If you count the hall as open nine to five, you are not shown an empty evening you never had to sell - and the three always add up to your day.

We have also corrected the share of use column in the who is using the hall table. Where two groups were meeting at the same time in different rooms, the shares could add up to more than 100%. Each hirer keeps the hours they actually booked, because a group that took two rooms did use both, and the column now says plainly that it is a share of the hours hired.

New feature 19 August 2026

The communication log on each hirer was a book you wrote in yourself. Nothing the system sent was recorded there, so a hall that had invited half a dozen hirers to the portal had no way of telling whether any of it had gone out.

Every email we send a hirer now writes its own line: portal invitations, invoices, payment reminders, booking confirmations and door codes. Each says what it was and which address it went to.

That includes the ones nobody presses a button for. The door code goes out two days before a booking and the payment chaser at nine in the morning, both on a schedule with nobody logged in - and those are precisely the ones worth having a record of.

You can still add your own entries as before. A phone call or a conversation at the door is not something we can log for you.

New feature 19 August 2026

A hirer wrote to her hall to say the portal was easy to use, but that she could not tell whether a date was free without asking. The hall had been sending her the link to the public calendar by hand.

There is now a **What is on** tab in the hirer portal. It shows everything already booked, month by month, with a filter by room if you have more than one, and a button that takes them straight through to asking for a date. So seeing a free Tuesday and requesting it is one step rather than an email to you.

It shows exactly what your public calendar shows and nothing more. Anything you have marked private appears only as busy, the same as it does to anybody else.

Our thanks to Claire at Binfield Memorial Hall, who asked for it.

New feature 18 August 2026

Three things we have built recently now have proper explanations behind them, for anybody weighing us up or wanting to understand what they are looking at.

The features page explains how to see **how much your hall is actually used** - hours hired against hours available, cut by month, by day, by room and by hirer - and why funders ask for it. It also covers what happens **when an email to a hirer never arrives**, and how we offer to send it again once you have corrected the address.

Our compliance guide now has a **Charity Commission** section: the annual return, the accounts and trustees' annual report, the governing document, the trustee register and serious incident reporting, with the income thresholds that decide which apply to you. Most village halls are registered charities and the page had been silent on it.

There are also four new guides queued for the blog, on measuring utilisation, writing a fair booking policy, Charity Commission duties, and why invoices go unpaid when it is not the hirer's fault.

Fix 18 August 2026

If you have a wide monitor you may have noticed a band of empty space down each side of every page, and found that the right-hand end of your bookings list ran off the edge so the three dots button could not be reached. Folding the menu down to icons did not help.

Those were the same fault. Every page was being held to a fixed width and centred, which left the empty margins, and the tables were held to that same width - so the widest ones overflowed however large your screen was, and folding the menu away only re-centred the same narrow column.

Pages now use the full width of your window. Your bookings, invoices and other wide lists have room to show every column, the buttons at the end of each row are where they should be, and the empty margins are gone.

Our thanks to Binfield Memorial Hall, who reported both halves of it.

Fix 18 August 2026

An invoice could sit in the Overpaid list having been paid exactly what it was for. A hall spent an afternoon going through a hirer's payments looking for money that had never been overpaid.

The cause was two figures disagreeing. The invoice screen adds up the payments behind it, but the Overpaid filter read a separate stored figure - and that figure was only being brought up to date when a payment was recorded, not when one was corrected or removed. So an invoice that had been amended down, with its payment corrected to match, was still carrying the old total underneath.

That now happens whichever way you change a payment: recording one, correcting one, deleting one, or deleting several at once, from the payments tab on the invoice or from your Payments list.

If you have an invoice showing as overpaid that you do not believe is, tell us and we will put the figure right for you - the fix stops it happening again but does not correct one that has already gone wrong.

Our thanks to Binfield Memorial Hall, who worked through it carefully enough to prove the invoice was correct and the list was wrong.

New feature 18 August 2026

Your Committee list and your Team Members list are two different things, and nothing on either screen said so. Committee is the record of who holds which post - trustees, terms of office, who represents which organisation. Team Members is who can actually sign in. Adding somebody to your committee never gave them a login, so halls quite reasonably reported it as a fault when a new trustee did not appear.

Your committee list now has a **Can log in** column, so you can see at a glance who has access and who is on the committee only.

Where somebody has no login and you have their email address, there is a **Give them a login** button on their row. Choose what they should be able to do - the same six roles you get when adding a team member - and they are sent an invitation to set a password. They then appear under Team Members like anybody else, and the two records are joined up from then on.

It will not offer to invite somebody who can already sign in, including where they were added to both lists separately in the past.

Our thanks to Binfield Memorial Hall, who kept asking why their trustee was not showing up.

New feature 18 August 2026

If you told us your hall was a registered charity, we said your Charity Commission items were "now available under Compliance". They were not, in any sense you could see. Ticking the box only added four extra options to the category list on the form for adding a compliance item - somewhere you had no reason to go looking. A hall quite reasonably reported the whole thing as missing.

Now the four go straight onto your compliance list when you tick the box: your annual return, your accounts and trustees' annual report, your governing document, and the trustee details the Commission holds. Every registered charity owes all four, so there is no version of this where you would not want them.

They arrive with no due date and a status of Unknown, and that is deliberate. Your annual return is due ten months after your financial year end, which we do not know, and a wrong date against a legal duty is worse than an honest blank. Each one carries a note of what the law actually requires - including the income thresholds for filing and for independent examination - so whoever puts the dates in has it in front of them.

If you had already added any of them yourself, yours is left exactly as it is. Saving the page twice does not add them twice. And if you turn the tick off, the items stay: they are your records, and a mistaken tick should not delete work.