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.
Some halls run their own website, or their own server, and would rather the booking diary appeared there than only here. There is now a way to do that. Village Hall Hub has an API - a door in the side of the system that a website or a program can knock on and be handed your bookings, so your own pages can show what is on without anybody copying dates across by hand. To start with it can be asked three things: what is in the diary, the details of one booking, and when a particular room is free. The free-time answer is worked out exactly the way the booking form works it out, including your changeover buffer and the days you have marked the hall closed, so it will not offer somebody a slot that the form would then refuse. Access is by a key you make yourself, under Settings, API keys. Making one takes a moment: name it so you know later what it was for, tick what it is allowed to do, and choose whether it should stop working on its own after a few months. The key is shown once, when you make it, and never again - so copy it there and then, and hand it to whoever looks after your website rather than sending it round the committee. If a key is ever shared by mistake, or the person who had it moves on, one button stops it working. Only an owner or an admin can make a key, because a key is used by a machine and misuse of one is much harder to notice than misuse of a login. A key only ever opens the one hall it was made for, and can only do the things you ticked. Bookings you have marked private stay private: the time is shown, so nothing gets double-booked, but the name of the event is given out as "Private booking" and never leaves the building. Hirers' names are only included if the key was specifically given permission to see them, so a key made purely to publish a diary cannot come back with a list of who booked. Every request is written down. This is the first part of something larger, and it is deliberately read-only for now - nothing reachable through it can change your bookings, your invoices or your money. Thanks to Dorridge Hall for making the case for it, and for being blunt about why systems that keep their API to themselves are frustrating to live with.
New feature
See what each month of the diary was worth
The monthly table on the reports page could tell you what you invoiced and what you received, and neither of those is the question asked at a committee meeting: how much did we take in September. If you bill a whole term of weekly hires on one invoice, or invoice in arrears, September's hires can sit entirely in July's or December's billing, and nothing on the page told you otherwise. There is now a Booked column at the front of the monthly breakdown - the value of the confirmed bookings that took place in that month, whenever they happened to be billed. Where a booking has been invoiced it counts what you actually charged, so last spring is counted at last spring's prices rather than today's, and bookings not yet invoiced are priced from your rate card. Free bookings and cancellations are left out, and a hall registered for VAT sees the figure before VAT, the same as every other income figure on that page. It is in the Income Summary export too. Thanks to Binfield Memorial Hall for asking.
New feature
Hallie knows more about how the system itself works
Hallie was good at your hall's own information - who has how many bookings, when a group is next in - and vaguer about the system she lives in. Asked whether committee members are emailed when you set up a meeting, she said she did not know. She now has proper answers to that sort of question: what gets sent out on its own and what only goes when you press a button, the difference between team members and committee members, who receives a hirer's invoices, and where your own details live. She has also been told not to answer questions about Village Hall Hub from general knowledge about booking systems - if she does not have the answer she will say so, rather than telling you what a system like this usually does. For the record on that first question: no, nothing is sent to your committee when you add a meeting.
New feature
Change your own name, email address and password
There was nowhere to do this. If you married, or your email address changed, or you simply wanted a new password, there was no screen for it - which somebody found by asking Hallie where it was. Settings now has My Details at the top: your name, your email address and your password, all in one place. It is your own login, separate from your hall's name and address. Changing your password asks for the current one first, so somebody walking past your open laptop cannot change it for you.
New feature
Invitations last a day, and you can always send another
A hall told us their team were being turned away with "login expired" when they tried to accept an invitation. The link only lasted an hour, which is no use at all when the invitation arrives while somebody is at work and gets opened that evening. It now lasts 24 hours, and the email says so. The bigger problem was on the Team Members page: the Resend Invite button only appeared for people who had done nothing at all since being invited. Somebody whose invitation had run out, who then signed themselves up to have another go, no longer counted - so the hall was left with nothing on the page they could press for the one person who needed help. The button is now always there. For somebody who has never got in it sends a fresh invitation. For somebody who already has their own account it sends a note saying they have been added to your hall and asking them to sign in, because we will not set a password for an account that is not ours to set.
New feature
Nobody gets left without a hall to sign in to
If you belong to no hall, signing in takes you straight to the page for registering one - there is nowhere else to send you. That is fine when you really are new, and no use at all if you already belong somewhere and something has gone wrong, because the only screen you can reach is the one that makes a second, empty hall. One person spent a week in exactly that loop and ended up with three accounts. Registering a hall now either creates it with you on it or does neither, so an account cannot be left belonging nowhere, and a half-finished registration cannot leave an empty hall behind. If you are ever told to register a hall you know you already belong to, do not - email us and we will put it right in a minute.
New feature
Money now counts in the month it arrived
The reports page worked out what you had received by looking at the invoice rather than the payment, so an invoice raised in July and settled in August was counted as July money. If you were checking the page against your bank statement, the two never agreed. Received now means what actually came in during the period you are looking at, on the date it came in - so a payment in August shows in August, even when it settles an invoice from last year, which the old figures left out altogether. The Outstanding column beside each month has changed with it: it now shows what is still owed on the invoices raised that month, rather than that month billing minus another month cash. Invoices you brought in from another system as already paid still count, on the invoice date, because that is the only date those have.
New feature
Several people at the same group
A hirer used to have one name and one email address, which is fine for a one-off party and no use at all for a group. There is now a People tab on every hirer: add the secretary who books, the treasurer who pays, anybody else you deal with, each with their own email and phone. Tick who books the hall and who gets the invoices, and everything goes to the right person - booking confirmations to the one who booked, invoices and reminders to the one who pays. If you have not added anybody, nothing changes: your existing contact was brought across automatically and carries on doing both jobs. When somebody hands over, mark them as stepped down rather than deleting them. They stop getting emails straight away but stay on the list, so next year you can still see who was looking after that group and when it changed. Thanks to Binfield Memorial Hall for asking.
New feature
Plainer names on the hirer screen
The box you type the hirer into was labelled "Contact name", which is not what it is. Whatever goes in there is the name on your calendar, in your bookings list and on their invoices - so if you were putting a person in it because the label asked for one, the person was appearing on the invoice instead of the group. It now says Hirer name, and says where it turns up. The old "Organisation" box is now "Full name for invoices", because that is all it ever did: print an extra line above the address for a group whose official name is longer than what you call them. Most halls should leave it blank. "Email address" is now "Main email address", to make clear it is the fallback for anybody you have not listed on the People tab. Nothing moved and nothing needs changing - only the wording.
New feature
Your own hirer types
Hirers could only be one of four things we picked: Individual, Organisation, Charity or Commercial. Halls do not think that way. You know the difference between the parish council, the Guides, a yoga teacher running a business and somebody hiring for a wake - and most halls charge villagers less than people from outside, which there was nowhere to record at all. It all collapsed into "Organisation", so the income report said "Organisation" and told you nothing. There is now a Hirer Types screen under Bookings. You start with the same four, exactly as before, and you can rename them, reorder them or add your own - Parish Council, Village resident, Out of parish, whatever you actually say. Your list is yours: no other hall on Village Hall Hub sees it, and two halls can happily have a type of the same name. You can also add one without leaving the hirer you are editing, using the + beside the Hirer type box. A type you no longer use is retired rather than deleted, so it stops being offered on new hirers but stays on the ones that have it and still appears on last year's report. Nothing about your existing hirers changed.
New feature
Meet Hallie, your hall assistant
On the Standard and Professional plans there is now a button in the bottom corner of every screen. Ask Hallie a question in plain English - "who is in on Saturday?", "who has not paid me?", "how much did the WI pay us last year?" - and she will look it up and tell you. She can also tell you where things are: ask "where do I change my prices?" or "how do I chase an invoice?" and she will point you at the right screen and talk you through it. She can also take a booking off your hands: tell her "the Brownies want the main hall every Tuesday from September to Christmas, 6 til 7:30" and she works out every date, checks each one against your diary, shows you the price and flags anything that clashes. If the person is not one of your hirers yet, she will offer to add them at the same time, and if the name is close to one you already have she will ask whether you meant that instead. Nothing is booked until you have read it through and pressed the button, and what goes in is provisional so you can check it before confirming. One thing she cannot do is set a one-off price: the figure she shows comes from your room rate or that hirer's rate card, so if you have agreed something different on the phone, change it on the invoice when you raise it. Two things worth knowing. Hallie can only ever see your hall, and she never changes anything on her own - she has no way to send an email, raise an invoice or alter a booking, and the only thing she can create is one you have said yes to. And every figure she gives you is looked up from your own records rather than guessed, so if she does not know something she will say so instead of making it up. Standard halls get fifteen questions a month, which is enough for a small hall to run on. Professional halls get seventy five. If you ever need more than that, get in touch and we can add some.
New feature
Who else handles your data, said plainly
Our security page now has a section listing every other company involved in running the service and exactly what each one gets: where the servers are, Stripe for card payments, our email provider, and OpenAI for the AI assistant. It also says what they are not given - the assistant is never sent email addresses, phone numbers, postal addresses or payment details. Two things follow from this. If your committee would rather nothing at all left the UK, you can switch the assistant off under GDPR in your admin, and you keep everything else your plan includes. And the privacy notice you generate for your own hirers now has a "who else sees your data" section, so if you handed one out before, it is worth generating a fresh copy and using that instead.
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.