Everything we have changed, and when

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.

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.

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.