Everything we have changed, and when

New feature 16 August 2026

The Outstanding total on your Reports page is now a link. Click it and you get your invoice list filtered to exactly the invoices that make up that figure - nothing paid, nothing drafted, just what is still owed.

A treasurer told us she could see the number and had no way of asking what was in it, so she was going to the invoice list and filtering by hand every time. Now she does not have to.

There is a matching "Overpaid" filter on the invoice list too, for the rare case where somebody has paid over the amount.

Fix 16 August 2026

If a hirer ever paid you more than an invoice was for, the extra was taken off the Outstanding total on your Reports page. It should never have been.

That is worse than an odd-looking number. A hall owed £60 by one hirer, with £40 overpaid by another, was told it was owed £20 - so £40 of real debt was hidden behind somebody else's overpayment, and a treasurer reading the report had no way of knowing. In one case the figure went below zero and showed as a minus.

It is fixed. Every invoice is now counted at nothing or more, never less, so Outstanding is what you are actually owed.

Money paid over the invoice amount is now shown separately, underneath, with a note saying what it is: a credit owed back to the hirer, not a debt cancelled. If nobody has overpaid you, you will not see it at all.

It is worth glancing at your Reports page if you have ever reconciled against it, because the total may have moved. It has moved to the correct figure.

New feature 16 August 2026

The Charity Commission expects a charity to be able to produce minutes that were approved and signed. Until now the furthest this went was marking them Published - and published minutes could still be edited afterwards, and put back to draft. Nothing on the screen told the minutes your committee agreed from the ones somebody tidied up last Tuesday.

There is now a third step. Minutes go Draft, then Circulated, then Signed.

Write them up as usual and press "Circulate minutes" when they are ready for your committee to read. Then, once they have been approved at your next meeting, press "Record the signature". It asks who signed - normally the chair, and your chair is listed first - the date, and which meeting approved them.

From that moment the minutes are closed. They cannot be edited, the meeting cannot be deleted, and the PDF carries a signature block naming who signed and when, which is exactly what you would want to hand over if anyone ever asked.

It also records who entered the signature, which is usually the secretary rather than the chair. Both are on the record, because they are different questions.

If something turns out to be wrong, there is a "Reopen these minutes" button. It asks you why, and your reason is added to the end of the minutes - so a change to a signed record shows up on the record rather than beside it.

Nothing has changed for minutes you have already written. They stay exactly as they are until you choose to sign one.

New feature 16 August 2026

Every renewal date we watched for you belonged to something you do for other people - your insurance, your DBS checks, your compliance items. The contracts the hall holds for its own building were nowhere.

That is how a hall ends up back on a standard tariff: the electricity contract rolls over because the trustee who knew the date stood down two years ago, and nobody finds out until the bill arrives.

There is a new screen under Compliance called Utilities & Contracts. Put in your electricity, gas, oil, water, broadband, telephone, waste collection, cleaning, grounds, fire alarm servicing, boiler servicing, and any licences or subscriptions the hall pays for.

The field that makes it worth doing is "Notice you have to give". Most contracts renew themselves unless you give notice first, and it is often 30, 60 or 90 days. Tell us the notice period and we will remind you from the date notice is actually due - not the date the contract ends, which is far too late to be useful. A contract ending in March with three months of notice needs dealing with in December, and December is when you will hear from us.

Contracts needing attention appear on your Compliance dashboard alongside everything else. When one ends, turn off "This contract is still running" rather than deleting it, so you keep the history and stop being reminded.

Your insurance is not included here on purpose - it already has its own screen with a policy number and sum insured, and having two renewal dates for one policy is how a hall ends up watching neither.

New feature 16 August 2026

There is a new "Request a booking" tab in the hirer portal.

The portal could only be read before, which had it backwards. The hirers who get most out of it are your regulars - the playgroup, the yoga class, the parish council - and those are exactly the people who never make a one-off booking. What they want in September is the whole autumn term.

So they can now ask for one. They pick the room, the day and the times, tick "This is the same slot every week or every month", choose weekly, fortnightly or monthly, and say when the sessions should stop. As they fill it in, it tells them how many sessions that actually is - because nobody typing "weekly until December" knows whether that is twelve or forty, and neither do you until somebody counts.

It arrives as one enquiry, not as thirty bookings in your diary. You see the pattern they asked for, you check the diary, and you decide. Nothing is booked until you say so.

The enquiry email tells you when a request is for a repeating booking, so a term of sessions and a single evening do not arrive looking the same.

New feature 16 August 2026

When you pencil a date in as Provisional, the hirer now sees two buttons in their portal: "Yes, confirm it" and "No, cancel it".

Whichever they press, you get an email straight away, and the diary is already right by the time you read it. If they confirm, it becomes a confirmed booking and any deposit you normally ask for is applied, exactly as if you had done it yourself. If they cancel, the date is free again.

That saves the round of emails that used to sit in the middle - you asking, them replying, and you going back into the diary to change it by hand.

Only pencilled bookings in the future can be answered this way. A confirmed booking is an agreement you may already have invoiced, and that is not something we let a hirer undo from a link in an email.

On the booking itself you will see when the hirer answered, so a booking you confirmed and one they confirmed are told apart - which matters on the rare occasion somebody rings up disputing it.

New feature 16 August 2026

A late cancellation. A hire spoiled because the heating packed up. A session the committee decides to let go. Until now there were two ways to record that and both were wrong: void the invoice, which loses all record of the hire it was for, or enter a payment that never actually arrived, which makes your year's income read high and your bank reconciliation impossible.

You can now issue a credit note instead. Open Invoices, find the invoice, and choose "Issue a credit note" from the menu on the right. Say how much to take off and why.

The important part is what it does not do. A credit note reduces what the hirer owes without ever being counted as money received - so it comes off Outstanding, it does not go into Total Received, and your income for the year stays honest. The invoice keeps its total and its lines, so you can still see what the hire was and what it would have cost.

Credit the whole amount and the invoice is settled and stops being chased. Credit part of it and the rest is still owed as normal.

You cannot credit more than is left owing on an invoice. Money going back to a hirer who has already paid is a refund, which is money leaving your bank account - a different thing, and not something we will pretend a credit note can do.

Each note gets its own number, CN-00001 upwards, separate from your invoice numbering. It records who issued it and why. If you issue one by mistake you can withdraw it, and the debt goes straight back - but the number it used is never given to another one, so nobody can ever find two documents claiming to be the same credit note.

New feature 16 August 2026

If your hall has a key safe, you no longer have to remember to send the code.

Go to Booking Settings and look for "Getting In". Turn it on, put in your code, say how many days before a booking it should go out, and add a line about where the safe is and anything else the hirer needs to know.

From then on, anyone with a confirmed booking is emailed the code that many days beforehand - two or three days is usual. Each booking gets it once. Nothing goes out for a booking that is only pencilled in, or one that has already been and gone.

Sending it near the date rather than with the confirmation is deliberate, and it is how Airbnb does it for the same reason. A code sent in September for a booking next April is a code you will have changed by then, and the hirer is left standing outside. It also means an old code is not sitting in the inbox of somebody who has no reason to be in the building any more.

When you change the safe, change the code here. The new one goes out with the next bookings and nobody is sent it twice.

**On keeping it safe.** Your key safe code is stored encrypted, in the same way your bank details already are - it is not readable in our database, and neither are your access notes, since those usually say exactly where the safe is. It is worth saying plainly, because a key safe code is the key to your building.

New feature 15 August 2026

If you have a hirer in most weeks - a playgroup, a dance school, a church - you can now charge them one flat sum a month instead of billing every session.

The point of it is the standing order. A per-session bill is £180 in a month with four Tuesdays and £225 in a month with five, and nobody can set a standing order up against a figure that keeps moving. A flat monthly charge is the same every month, so they set it up once and it pays itself - which makes it the one invoice your treasurer never has to chase.

To use it, put a figure in Monthly charge on the hirer, under Type and rates. Then on their booking you will see a new switch, "Covered by their monthly charge". Leave it on and that session is not invoiced separately, because the monthly charge has already paid for it. Set it on a repeating booking and every session in the series follows.

Anything they book on top is charged as normal - turn the switch off on that one booking and it invoices the usual way. So a playgroup on £220 a month that also takes the hall for a Christmas party gets their monthly invoice and a separate one for the party.

When you want to raise them, go to Invoices and press "Raise this month's rent invoices". One draft per hirer, and nothing is sent to anybody until you send it. Press it twice by mistake and nobody is billed twice - it spots the invoices already raised and leaves them alone.

Nothing changes if none of this applies to you. Leave Monthly charge empty and every hirer, booking and invoice behaves exactly as it does today.

Fix 15 August 2026

If you set up a repeating booking and ticked "this is a free booking", it saved the first session and then stopped with an error, and none of the repeats were created. You were left with one booking in the diary, no explanation worth reading, and no way to tell whether anything had saved at all.

That is fixed. A free hire repeats exactly like a charged one.

It was free bookings only, which is the unlucky part: a weekly service, a playgroup or a scout troop is precisely the sort of hire that repeats and precisely the sort that is often free, so this landed on the halls most likely to hit it. If you gave up on a repeating free booking in the last few weeks, it will work now.

Worth checking your diary if you did try: the first session may still be sitting there on its own without its repeats. Delete it and set it up again, and the whole series will appear.

Fix 13 August 2026

Every invoice said payment could be made "by BACS, cheque, or card", and the hirer portal had a Pay Now button, on a system that had no way to take a card at all. The button opened a page showing your bank details, which is not paying now, and any hirer who tried it will have wondered what they were missing.

Both now tell the truth. An invoice mentions a card only when your hall has actually connected one, and the portal button says "Pay now" when a card can be taken and "How to pay" when it cannot. Sorry - that wording had been there a while.

New feature 13 August 2026

Your hirers can now pay their invoices by card. They open the invoice link you already send them, press Pay, and the invoice marks itself as paid - no cheque to bank, no waiting for a transfer to land, and nothing for the treasurer to type in afterwards.

The money goes straight into your hall's own bank account. It does not pass through us and we take nothing from it. Stripe handles the card and charges its own fee, currently around 1.5% and 20p on a UK card, which comes out of the payment the same way it would anywhere else.

To turn it on, go to Finance, then Payment Settings, and press Connect Stripe. If your hall already has a Stripe account - some do, for the fete or a donation page - you can sign in to that one. If not, you can create it as you go. You will need the hall's bank details and some ID for whichever trustee sets it up, because Stripe has to know who it is paying.

A few things worth knowing. Only what is still owed is charged, so a hirer who has already paid half is asked for the other half and not the whole invoice. The payment is recorded against the invoice with its Stripe reference, so your treasurer can match it up in the Stripe dashboard. And Stripe sometimes wants more information from a charity before it will let payments through - if so, we say that plainly rather than letting a hirer find out by trying.

Nothing changes if you would rather not. Leave it alone and your invoices carry on asking for a bank transfer exactly as they do now.