Everything we have changed, and when

New feature 13 August 2026

Halls charge for more than the room. A supplement when somebody uses the kitchen, the projector, corkage on a private party, an extra clean afterwards, tables taken away. Until now the only way to bill those was to type a line onto every invoice by hand, which is fine once and a nuisance by the fiftieth time.

New under Bookings: Extras. Put your price list in once - a name, what it costs, and whether it is charged as a one-off or per table, per hour, per chair. Then when you take a booking there is an Extras section: choose the thing, say how many, and it is done.

Each one comes out as its own line on the invoice with its own price, so your hirer can see that fifteen pounds of their bill was the kitchen rather than wondering why the hall cost more than the rate card says.

Three things worth knowing. Your prices are copied onto the booking when you add them, so putting the projector up to twelve pounds next April cannot rewrite what somebody was charged for it last March.

Retiring something you no longer offer leaves every booking that already had it exactly as it was. And if you have agreed a flat price for the hire itself, the extras are still charged on top - agreeing a hundred and forty for the hall was never meant to include the projector. If your hall is registered for VAT, each extra carries its own rate, because hiring a room out is usually exempt and hiring a projector usually is not, and the two need to sit on one invoice at different rates.

This is separate from your refundable damages deposit, which has not changed: a deposit is money you are holding and giving back, an extra is money you have earned. Thanks to Karen at Hambridge & Westport Village Hall, who asked where this was and was quite right to expect it.

New feature 13 August 2026

Plenty of halls sell an evening where the hirer gets the main hall and the committee room together, or a wedding that takes the lot. Until now that meant taking the same booking twice, once per room, and remembering to change both every time anything moved.

When you take a booking there is now a box under Room called "Also books these rooms". Tick the other rooms and it is one hire: every room is properly booked and held in your diary, so nobody can book over any of them, and your clash warnings work on each room exactly as they always have.

From then on it behaves as one thing. Move it an hour later and every room moves. Approve it, decline it or cancel it and every room follows. Delete it and the whole hire goes, rather than leaving a room held for an evening that is not happening any more.

It is billed as one invoice with a line for each room, so your hirer sees "Main Hall" and "Committee Room" priced separately on the one document instead of getting two bills for one evening. The deposit and any extras are charged once for the hire, not once per room.

Worth knowing for the wedding sort of booking: a hire has always been able to run past midnight into the next day, so an evening that carries on to eleven the following morning is one booking with an end date of the next day, not two.

Nothing changes for an ordinary booking in a single room. Leave the box empty and it is the same three fields it has always been.

New feature 13 August 2026

There is now a video for every job in here, at villagehallhub.co.uk/tutorials. Taking a booking, raising an invoice, setting up a rate card, logging a DBS check, working through Martyn's Law, recording a meeting, handling a subject access request - forty two of them, grouped into the order somebody new to the hall would work through them. Most are under a minute.

Nobody wants to sit through a webinar to find out where the invoice button is, so none of them ask you to. Underneath each video the same guide is written out step by step, because plenty of people would rather read it than watch it, and plenty of committee rooms have no sound. Each written step shows the moment it happens in the video, so if you are halfway through and stuck on one bit you can jump straight to that bit rather than scrubbing back and forth looking for it.

There is a search box and a filter for each series, so you can type "closure" or "deposit" and go straight to the one you want - the search reads the written steps as well as the titles, so it finds guides whose names never mention the word you typed.

You do not have to go looking for any of this: open Help & Guides in your own menu and every guide there now lists the videos for the job it describes, so the one you want is beside the words you were already reading. Nothing is behind a login, either. Send the link to a new booking secretary before they have an account, or to a trustee who only needs to see one thing once.

New feature 11 August 2026

Your bookings list could be narrowed by room, by hirer, by what was on and by whether it repeated - by everything except the one thing a hall actually works in, which is a month. So finding August meant paging through the whole diary ten rows at a time, and once a hall has a few hundred bookings the page numbers skip the middle, leaving you clicking forward over and over. There is now a Month box in the filters. Open Filters, choose a month - only the months you actually have bookings in are listed, newest first - and the list is just that month. Beside it is a Date range, with a From and an Until, for anything that is not a calendar month: a school term, a season, the fortnight either side of the fete. You can fill in one end and leave the other empty, so "everything from September" and "everything up to today" are each a single date. Whichever you use, the dates you have chosen are shown above the list so you can see at a glance what you are looking at, and clear it with one click. As with the other filters, your choice is remembered while you are signed in, so opening a booking and coming back does not lose it. Thanks to Sarah at Binfield Memorial Hall for asking for this, and for explaining exactly why the page numbers were the problem.

New feature 11 August 2026

Three things for halls that take one-off hires - parties, wakes, christenings - where the money and the paperwork work differently to a regular weekly class. First, you can raise the invoice from the booking itself. Open a booking and there is now a "Generate invoice" button at the top, so making the hirer, making the booking and billing it is one journey instead of three. Second, that button can split the invoice. If you take something to hold the date and the rest nearer the time, type the holding amount and the date the balance is due, and the invoice lays both out on the one document your hirer is looking at - "Holding deposit £50, due today" and "Balance £250, due 15 September". The balance is worked out for you, so the two can never fail to add up to the total. It fills in three weeks before the booking to start with; change it to whatever you agreed. This is not the same thing as the refundable damages deposit that already lives on a booking, and it does not touch it: money here is your hirer paying their bill in two goes, so it counts as income and carries VAT the same way the hire does, and there is no question of giving it back. Third, your conditions of hire. Under Settings, Booking Settings there is now a box to paste them into. Once they are in, every hirer sees a Conditions of Hire tab in their portal where they can read them and agree to them, and you get a record of who agreed and when, which shows on the booking. Rewriting your conditions starts a new edition, and anybody who agreed to the old wording is asked again - because an agreement that cannot say which words were agreed to is not much use on the day you need it. Nothing changes for a hall that does not use any of this: invoices without a split behave exactly as they always have, and no conditions means no new tab and no new section. Thanks to Sarah at Binfield Memorial Hall, who described the whole party-booking journey in one go and made it obvious these were one job rather than three.

New feature 10 August 2026

If you have ever added a line to an invoice by hand - because the hire was not in your diary, or you were matching an invoice from your old system - you may have noticed the Items list showing a dash in its Booking column, with no way to fill it in. There is now a box under the line that asks which booking it is for, offering that hirer's hires you have not invoiced yet. Two things quietly went wrong without it, and both are worth knowing about because they may have happened to you. On your reports, income from a typed line had no room against it: a line finds its room through the booking it was raised from, and a typed line had no booking to find one through. So the money collected in a row headed "No Room", which sounded like a fault and was not - it was simply income that had nothing to file itself under. That row is now called "Added by hand (not a booking)", which is what it always meant, and the count beside it is headed "Invoice lines" rather than "Bookings", because that is what it counts. The more serious one: a hire you had billed by hand still counted, to us, as never invoiced. It stayed in the pile waiting to be invoiced, so the next time you generated invoices in bulk covering that date, your hirer would have been billed for it a second time. Pointing the line at its booking closes that off - the hire counts as invoiced from then on and cannot be picked up again. If you have typed lines onto invoices in the past it is worth opening them and setting the booking, and if you would like a hand working out which ones, just ask. Nothing about your invoices, amounts or payments changes when you do it. Thanks to Sarah at Binfield Memorial Hall, who found £144 she could not account for and, in chasing it, found this for all of us.

New feature 10 August 2026

Not every hall charges by the hour. Plenty quote a single figure over the phone - a hundred and forty pounds for the hall on a Saturday night, whatever time the party finishes - and until now there was nowhere to write that down. The Cost and deposit part of a booking asked for a rate card and a deposit, and a hall that uses neither was left with a booking that priced itself off an hourly rate nobody had ever quoted. There is now a box on a booking called "Hire charge for this booking". Type what you agreed, and that is what the booking costs and what appears on the invoice - one line, with the date and the time on it and no hours or hourly rate for anybody to query. Leave it blank and nothing changes at all: the booking is priced from your rate cards exactly as it always has been, so if you charge by the hour there is nothing here you need to do. A few details worth knowing. On a booking that repeats, the figure you type is the charge for each session, so a weekly hire at forty pounds bills at forty pounds a session and a month of them comes to a hundred and sixty. If you mark a booking free, free wins, even if there is still a figure sitting in the box. If your hall is registered for VAT, the figure is treated the same way as any other price you set, so what you quote is what the hirer pays. And if you have both a hire charge and a rate card on the same booking, the hire charge is the one that counts. Thanks to Digswell Village Hall for setting up a real booking, finding there was nowhere to put the price, and telling us so plainly.

New feature 9 August 2026

Somebody who has never set foot in your hall usually wants to see it before they book it for their daughter's wedding, and at the moment that means you emailing to ask, them emailing back, and the pair of you settling it over three or four messages. Your enquiry form can now ask them outright. Turn it on under Settings, Booking Settings - there is a new part headed "Showing People Round" with one switch in it - and a tick box appears on your enquiry form saying "I would like a look round the hall before my event", along with a line telling them you will be in touch to arrange a time. It is off unless you turn it on, so nothing changes for a hall that would rather not offer it. Anybody who ticks it is named in the enquiry email that lands in your inbox, in bold, so you know before you have opened anything. It is also on the booking itself, and there is a filter on your Bookings screen for everybody still waiting to be shown round - so nobody is forgotten because the email got buried. Once you have shown them round, open the booking, untick it and save, and they drop off the list. The tick box appears wherever your form does: your own enquiry page, the form embedded on your website, and the WordPress plugin. Thanks to Binfield Memorial Hall's bookings secretary for asking, and for pointing out how often people say yes to it.

New feature 9 August 2026

Two things to make the busier screens easier to take in. Payment Settings and VAT had grown long enough that finding one box meant scrolling past everything else, so their sections now start folded - you see the headings and what each one is for, and open only the part you came for. The longer forms and record pages have a fold arrow on each section too, but nothing on those starts closed, so filling in a booking still shows you the whole thing. And every list - bookings, invoices, payments, all of them - now has a Columns button next to the search box. Tick and untick to show only what you want to look at, and the remaining columns spread out to fill the space. The first column stays put, so a list can never end up with nothing in it to identify a row by. What you choose is remembered while you are signed in.

Fix 9 August 2026

Opening an invoice and clicking Items gave an error page rather than the list of what is on it. The Payments tab beside it worked, which made it look like something to do with that one invoice rather than every invoice. It was a missing line in our own code, and it is fixed - the tab now opens and lists the description, quantity, unit price and total of each line, along with the booking it came from where it came from one.

Fix 9 August 2026

Changing the quantity or the price on a line of an invoice did nothing until you saved it - and worse, tabbing out of the box put the old figure back in front of you, so it looked as though your change had been thrown away. It had: what you typed was never reaching us. Both boxes now send what you have typed a moment after you stop, and the line total, and the invoice total underneath it, follow along. Change 1 to 6 on a sixty pound line and you will see the line become £360 and the invoice total with it, before you have saved anything.

New feature 9 August 2026

The Line items part of an invoice has always said "the total updates automatically", and then never shown a total - so the only way to find out what you had just changed an invoice to was to save it and look again. There is now a line underneath the items that says what the invoice comes to, and it moves as you change the figures above it. If your hall is registered for VAT it shows the amount before VAT, the VAT, and the total, rather than one number you would have to unpick. Recording a payment was the same problem from the other side. The form opens over the top of the invoice, so the total you were checking the cheque against was behind it. That form now carries the figures with it: the invoice number, who it is for, what it comes to, what has been paid already and what is still owing. The amount box also starts filled in with what is owed, because most payments settle an invoice in full - if they have paid part of it, type over the top. Thanks to Sarah at Binfield Memorial Hall for describing both of these clearly enough to fix properly.