Made with care for the volunteers who keep Britain's halls running.
Product updates
Everything we have changed, and when
Most of what is on this page started as an email from a village hall. We write these in the same words we send our
halls, so you can see for yourself how often this thing actually moves.
Phone numbers written the normal way are no longer refused
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
Carry a repeating booking on into the next term
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
Choose where your enquiries go, and share them round
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
Ask one question of your own on your enquiry form
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
Half-day and full-day rates have been removed
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
Charge one fixed price for the whole hire
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
We chase your unpaid invoices - and you can now stop us
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
Tell us if you are a registered charity
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.
New feature
Click the Outstanding figure to see the invoices behind it
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
Your Outstanding figure was wrong if anyone had overpaid
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
Sign your minutes off, and have them stay signed
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
Keep track of your utility and supplier contracts
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.
Most of this came from a village hall asking
If your hall needs something this does not do yet, say so. That is how nearly everything above got built.