Everything we have changed, and when

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.

New feature 9 August 2026

A hall that has been invoicing on paper for twenty years has an invoice its hirers recognise, and being handed a different one is not an improvement. Four things were missing from ours. Your administrator now appears at the top. Most halls have one person who deals with the money, and their address is rarely the hall's - so alongside the hall's name, address and charity number on the left, the top right can now carry "Administrator: your name" with their own address and email underneath. Fill it in under Finance, Payment Settings; leave it blank and the invoice looks exactly as it does today. Your bank's name is printed. We already asked for your sort code, account number and the name on the account, but not which bank it is with - which is the first thing somebody types into their banking app. There is a box for it now, and it prints above the rest of the transfer details. A monthly invoice says which month it is for. When you invoice a hirer's bookings in one go, the invoice opens with a line above the list - "This is for the bookings for the month of November 2025:" - so nobody has to read the dates to work out what they are being billed for. It is filled in for you, and if the bookings run across two months it gives the dates instead. You can change it, or clear it, on any invoice. And your hires can be one line each. If a room of yours charges more for the first hour, an invoice shows the first hour and the later hours as two lines, so the total can be checked. Some halls would rather each session appeared once, with a single fee, the way a handwritten invoice does. There is now a switch for that under Payment Settings, off unless you turn it on, so nothing changes for anybody who is happy as they are. Thanks to Digswell Village Hall for sending us one of their own invoices to work from.

Fix 7 August 2026

The "Keep this booking private" switch was only on the edit screen, not on the form you fill in when adding a booking. So a wake, a private party or anything else you did not want named on your public calendar had to be saved in the open and then hidden afterwards. The switch is now on the first step of adding a booking, next to the hirer and the room. There was a quieter side to this worth knowing about. If you have ticked "keep this hirer's bookings private" on a hirer, we tick the switch for you when you choose them - but with no switch on the add form, that had nothing to tick, so their new bookings went onto the public calendar under their real name. That is now the opposite way round: choose that hirer and the switch turns itself on in front of you, and you can still turn it off for a one-off. Any bookings already made for those hirers are worth a quick look on your public calendar. Thanks to Binfield Memorial Hall for spotting the missing switch.

New feature 7 August 2026

If your hall is a registered charity there is now somewhere to keep track of what the Charity Commission expects, alongside your fire risk assessment and your insurance. Four new categories under Compliance: your annual return, with the ten month deadline spelt out because that is the date nobody remembers; your accounts and trustees' annual report, with the income thresholds for filing and for examination said plainly rather than left as "it depends"; your governing document - your objects and schedule - which has no renewal date but does need to be to hand; and keeping the Commission's list of your trustees up to date. Each one carries a due date, a status and reminders, exactly like everything else in there, and each says what the law actually asks of you. They only appear if you have told us your hall is a registered charity. Your register of trustees already exists, by the way - that is your Committee Members list under Governance, where you can mark who is a trustee and record when their term runs out. Thanks to Binfield Memorial Hall for the idea.

Fix 7 August 2026

Only some of your committee appeared in the list of people to add to a meeting - the ones who can sign in to Village Hall Hub. Anybody on your committee without a login was missing, which for most halls is most of the committee. That was simply the wrong list: we keep team members (who can sign in) and committee members (your trustees and officers) apart on purpose, and a committee meeting should obviously offer the committee. It now does. Everybody on your Committee Members list is there to tick, whether or not they have ever logged in, and people who have since left the committee stay tickable, so editing older minutes cannot quietly drop a name from them. Thanks to Binfield Memorial Hall for reporting it.