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.
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.
Fix
The hirer portal now works on any device
The PIN screen your hirers use relied on JavaScript, so on a phone or browser where that did not run - a blocked script, an over-keen extension, an older device - pressing Continue did nothing at all, with nothing on screen to explain why. The form now works either way: if the page cannot run its scripts, it falls back to an ordinary form and your hirer still gets in, still sees "Incorrect PIN" if they mistype it, and is still locked out after five wrong tries. The Upcoming, Past and All buttons on their bookings list work the same way now, and can be bookmarked or shared as links.
Fix
Your public calendar now reads properly on a phone
On a narrow screen there is no room for seven columns of times and names, so the calendar squeezed each booking down to a coloured bar and put the detail in a tooltip - and a phone has no tooltips. Somebody looking at your calendar could see that something was on and had no way of finding out what. Underneath the month you now get a plain list of everything booked that month, with the day, the times and the name, so it can simply be read. The grid above it becomes an at-a-glance view of which days are busy, and tapping a day jumps you to it in the list. The colour key has moved above the calendar on small screens, where it used to sit below and explain the colours long after you had passed them. This applies to your public calendar page, the calendar you embed on your own website, and the WordPress plugin - update the plugin from your WordPress dashboard to get it.
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.
New feature
Set your own payment terms
Invoices always gave people 30 days to pay and there was no way to change it except one invoice at a time, if you found the date box. There is now a "Payment terms" setting under Finance, Payment Settings - put in however many days you give people and every new invoice uses it. You can still change the date on a single invoice when you want to. There is one exception, and it is deliberate: a booking marked "pay in advance" is due on the day of the booking rather than a month later, so nobody is ever invited to pay after their own party. That used to work on invoices made from a single booking but not when you invoiced a whole month at once, which is the way most halls do it - so a party paid up front could fall due a fortnight after the event. Fixed. Thanks to Binfield Memorial Hall for asking.
New feature
The payments list now says who paid, and what for
Your list of payments led with the invoice number, which is no help when you are trying to remember who a payment came from without opening every row. It now starts with who paid, their organisation underneath, and what the invoice was for - the booking name where there is one, or something like "Bloom Baby and 5 more" where a month has been invoiced in one go. The invoice number is still there. Thanks to Binfield Memorial Hall for asking.
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.