Everything we have changed, and when

New feature 18 August 2026

A new Utilisation page under Bookings, showing the hours your hall was hired against the hours it could have been.

You get the headline figure, then the same thing month by month - which is where term times and the quiet weeks show themselves - day by day, so you can see which evenings are going begging, and room by room, so you can tell whether the smaller room is earning its keep. Underneath, a table of who is using the hall, in hours, with each hirer's share of the total. Trustees are responsible for a fair booking policy, and that table is the evidence for it.

**You decide what counts as available.** Set the hours you treat the hall as open and tick the days you would take a booking on, and every figure follows. We have not guessed a denominator for you, because a percentage you cannot explain is no use in a grant application. Change the hours and watch the figures move - that is the point.

Two things are deliberate. Only the part of a booking inside your open hours is counted, so a hire running past closing cannot push you over 100%. And enquiries and cancellations are left out, while provisional bookings are counted, because the room was held and nobody else could have had it.

There is a download of every booking behind the figures, on Standard and Professional plans, for anything you would rather work out in a spreadsheet.

Asked for by Binfield Memorial Hall, for their trustees and their grant applications.

Fix 18 August 2026

Your documents area took PDFs, Word files and photographs, and quietly refused spreadsheets. A treasurer asked to put the hall's cashflow somewhere the trustees could read it, and simply could not - the file picker would not accept it and nothing said why.

Excel, CSV and OpenDocument files are accepted now, alongside everything that already worked. Up to 10MB, the same as any other document.

Anybody whose role lets them see your documents can open it, so a cashflow or a set of draft accounts can be shared with the trustees without emailing it round as an attachment.

New feature 17 August 2026

If you type a hirer's email address with a letter missing, everything you send them disappears. The invoice, the reminder, the portal invitation - all of it goes nowhere, and until now there was no way for you to find out. It happened to a real hall last week: a hirer was invited to their booking portal, the address had a doubled letter in it, and nobody knew for a fortnight.

That is fixed in three parts.

**You get told.** When an email to one of your hirers comes back undelivered, we email you to say so - which hirer it was, which address, and what we were trying to send them.

**You can see it.** The address is flagged on the hirer, both on your Hirers list and on the hirer's own screen, so anybody opening it knows the address does not work. The flag clears itself the moment you save a corrected address. There is no button to dismiss it, on purpose: a hall that has retyped the address has already told us everything it knows, and one that has not should still be being warned.

**We send it again.** This is the part that matters. Correcting the typo does not help on its own - the invoice that bounced last week is still unpaid and your hirer still has not seen it. So once you have fixed the address, a button appears on the hirer offering to send again everything that never arrived: invoices, reminders, portal invitations, booking confirmations and door codes from the last month. It tells you exactly what it is about to send before it sends anything.

Two deliberate choices in that. It never sends automatically - fixing a typo takes a second and re-sending three old invoices does not, and you should not discover you have posted last quarter's bills a second time without being asked. And each one is rebuilt as it stands today rather than replayed from a copy, so an invoice that has since been paid says so, and a reminder goes out as a plain reminder rather than a demand about money you were never actually chased for.

New feature 17 August 2026

Your Holidays & Closures list could only ever hold one kind of entry: a period that term-time repeat bookings skip over. That works for half terms and Christmas, but it could not do the other thing halls need it for - saying the hall is genuinely shut and nobody should be booking at all.

When you add a period now, you choose which it is.

**Holiday** is what every entry on your list already is, and it behaves exactly as before. Term-time repeat sessions skip those dates, and anybody can still enquire about them. That is deliberate: half term is precisely when somebody wants the hall for a children's party, and refusing those would cost you bookings.

**Hall closed** is the new one. Repeat sessions skip it as before, and on top of that nobody can enquire about those dates at all - not through your booking page, not through the embedded form, not through the app. Anyone who tries is told the hall is closed and which period it is, using the name you gave it, so they can pick another week without having to ring and ask. Use it for building work, a new floor, or anything else that shuts the doors.

**Nothing on your list has changed.** Every period you have already added is a holiday and carries on working exactly as it did. The new behaviour only ever applies to a period you have marked as a closure yourself.

Our thanks to St Paul's Church and Centre, who were setting up their school terms, found the list could not tell us about their maintenance week, and told us so.

New feature 17 August 2026

If you typed a phone number as +44(0)1234 567890 - a perfectly ordinary way to write a British number - it was refused as invalid, and you could not save the record until you retyped it. The message did not say which part was wrong, because as far as we were concerned nothing was.

Fixed everywhere a phone number is asked for: hirers, their contacts, committee members, suppliers and your hall's own details. Brackets, spaces, dashes, a leading plus and the trunk zero are all accepted now, in whatever combination you happen to write them.

Our thanks to the hall who tripped over it.

New feature 17 August 2026

A repeating booking made all its sessions at the moment you set it up, and changing the finish date afterwards did nothing. So a group carrying on after Christmas had to be set up all over again as a second booking, which then sat in your diary knowing nothing about the first.

Open the menu at the end of any repeating booking and you will see **Add more sessions**. Give it a later date and the sessions between the old finish and the new one are added to the booking you already have.

It skips anything it should: a date that falls in one of your holidays or closures, and any date where the room is already taken by something else. It tells you how many it added and how many it skipped, so you can see at a glance whether a session went missing for a half term.

Running it twice does no harm - the sessions already in your diary are left exactly as they are, and only genuinely new dates are added.

New feature 17 August 2026

Enquiries went to the email address typed in when your hall first signed up. You could not change it - you had to ask us - and it could only ever be one inbox, which is no use at all if more than one person takes the bookings.

Go to Booking Settings and you will find "Where Enquiries Go". Type in as many addresses as you like, pressing Enter after each. Everybody on the list gets their own copy of every enquiry, whether it came through your booking page, the form embedded on your own website, or the app.

Each person gets a separate email rather than one addressed to all of you, so nobody's address is published to the rest of the list.

Leave it empty and nothing changes: enquiries carry on going to your hall's address exactly as they do now.

New feature 16 August 2026

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.

Fix 16 August 2026

There were two boxes on your rooms and your rate cards called Half-day rate and Full-day rate. They saved what you typed and they showed it back to you, and no booking has ever been charged from them. If you filled them in, your bookings were still priced from the hourly rate.

That was our fault and it should never have been there. The boxes have gone.

What you typed into them has not been deleted, and no price you are charging today has changed. But it is worth ten minutes checking two places, not one.

**Your rooms.** Open Rooms and look at each. If a room had a day rate and no hourly rate, it had no working price at all and a booking in it would come to nothing. That room now shows all three price boxes empty, which is the honest answer, and tells you at a glance which still need a price.

**Your rate cards.** This is the one that is easier to miss. Open each rate card and look at the room prices inside it. A card set up for something priced by the day - an election, a wedding, an all-day fair - may have a day rate on it that has never charged anything, in which case that hire has quietly been billed by the hour instead. Nothing came to nothing, so you would have had no reason to notice; the bill was simply not the one you meant to send.

If a room or a card is genuinely priced as a flat fee rather than by the hour, the new fixed price setting is where it belongs. Do not simply copy an old full-day rate across without thinking: a fixed price is charged whatever the length of the booking, so a £100 day rate moved over would also charge £100 for a two hour hire. Move it across where the hire really is a fixed price whatever the hours - and leave it hourly where it is not.

If you are not sure what yours should be set to, reply to this email and we will go through them with you.

New feature 16 August 2026

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 16 August 2026

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 16 August 2026

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.