Everything we have changed, and when

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.

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.