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.
Print your management accounts for the committee, and clearer column headings
Two things, both asked for by a treasurer. There is a Download as PDF button on the Management Accounts page now, so the sheet you read on screen can go round the table on paper - it prints the month you are looking at, on one landscape page, with your notes printed underneath the lines they explain and the figures in brackets where they are negative, because a red number is the first thing a photocopier loses. If the month you have picked has not finished yet, the PDF says so on its own face, since on paper there is nobody to ask why every line looks under. Separately, the two columns that used to say "Year actual" and "Year budget" now say YTD actual and YTD budget. They always were the year to date - from the start of your budget year up to the month you are looking at - but "Year" sat next to a column called "Whole year" and reasonably read as the same thing. The note under the table spells out both. Thanks to Sarah Peacey at Binfield Memorial Hall for both.
New feature
Put the accounts on a meeting agenda, and see what is attached
The other half of what a treasurer asked for: alongside Download as PDF, the Management Accounts page now has "Add to a meeting". Pick one of your meetings still to come and the accounts are filed in your Document Vault under Accounts and attached to that meeting as an agenda paper, so they turn up in both places. Attach the same month twice and it replaces what was there rather than leaving the committee two papers with the same name on them. We also made the attachments easier to find. A meeting used to list its papers as small grey tags inside a picker, which does not look like a document at all - one hall attached the accounts, opened the meeting, and reasonably reported that it had not worked. Both the meeting page and the edit page now list the papers underneath as proper links you can open, with the file size next to each, and the meetings list has a Papers column so you can see at a glance which meetings have something attached.
New feature
App
The iPhone and iPad app has caught up with the Android one
If you use the app on an iPhone or an iPad, the update is out and everything the Android version has had for the last little while is now in yours too. Apologies that it took as long as it did. Both versions are built from the same work and go off at the same time, but Apple review every update before it reaches the App Store and that adds days at their end which we cannot do much about - Android tends to come through the same day. It is not that iPhone gets looked after second. Open the App Store, search for Village Hall Hub and press Update, or turn on automatic updates and it will look after itself in future. Nothing on the website was affected either way: that is always up to date the moment we release it, whatever your phone is doing.
New feature
The calendar, without leaving what you were doing
There is a Calendar button at the top right of every screen now. Press it and your month opens over whatever you had open - checking an invoice, working through a run of repeat bookings - and closes again on Escape or a click outside, putting you back exactly where you were. It is the same month you get on the Booking Calendar page, with the same room filter and the same colours, and clicking a booking opens it properly. Nothing on it is editable, which is the point: it is for the moment you need to know whether the hall is free on the 14th and do not want to lose your place. Thanks to Sarah Peacey at Binfield Memorial Hall, who had been keeping a second browser tab open for exactly this.
New feature
Putting right an invoice that has already gone out
A hirer books four and a half hours, the invoice goes out, and then they change it to four. Until now the only tool for that was a credit note - which is the right thing for money you have decided not to collect, and the wrong thing for a figure that was simply wrong, because it leaves your hirer holding an invoice that still says four and a half hours with a second document beside it explaining the difference. So where nothing has been paid, you can now correct the invoice and send the corrected one. Open it, put it right, and there is an "Email the corrected invoice" button at the top of the page: same invoice number, same document, right figure. The invoice screen says which of the two applies before you have to guess - once money has been paid against an invoice it tells you to use a credit note instead. There is also a new "Add a booking" button on the Items panel of an invoice, which brings the room, date, times, hours and rate straight across from the diary and marks the hire as invoiced, so it can never be billed twice. Thanks to Sarah Peacey at Binfield Memorial Hall.
New feature
Change a booking and its draft invoice changes with it
If a hirer got their times wrong - typing 1am instead of 1pm, say - the invoice came out for twelve hours instead of eight, and correcting the booking did nothing to the invoice. The money stayed wrong and the line still read back the old times, so the only way out was to delete the invoice and start again, and starting again meant typing out the room, the date, the times and the rate by hand. Now, while an invoice is still a draft, correcting the booking corrects it: the hours, the rate, the total and the words on the line all follow the diary. Changing the room re-prices it at the new room's rate, an agreed flat fee replaces the hourly arithmetic, adding the kitchen adds the kitchen, and a booking you make free drops off the invoice altogether. Lines you typed yourself for anything that is not a booking are left exactly where they are. This only ever happens to a draft. An invoice you have already sent is a document your hirer is holding, and nothing rewrites that behind your back. Thanks to Sarah Peacey at Binfield Memorial Hall.
New feature
A spreadsheet of everything you have not invoiced yet
Reports has a new button: Export Uninvoiced Bookings CSV. It gives you every hire in the diary that is going to be billed and has not been - what date, what time, how many hours, which hirer, which room, and what it is expected to come to at your current rates. Confirmed and provisional dates are both in there, marked as one or the other, so it works as a forecast as well as a to-do list. It deliberately ignores the date range at the top of the page, because the rows worth having are the ones from last month that nobody ever invoiced, and a date filter is exactly what would hide them - there is a column telling you which of them have already happened. Free hires and sessions covered by a monthly charge are left out, since neither will ever be invoiced. Thanks to Sarah Peacey at Binfield Memorial Hall for asking.
New feature
Record the bar takings, the raffle and the interest
Until now the system could tell you what your hirers owed you and what the hall paid out, and had nowhere at all for money that arrives without a booking behind it. There is a new Other Income page under Finance, built exactly like Spending: what it was, which heading it comes under, how much, what day, and somewhere to keep the paying-in slip. Income Headings sits beside it, with a "Start me off" button for the usual ones - bar takings, fundraising, donations, grants, bank interest. Room hire deliberately does not belong here: that money is already counted from the invoices you raised, and typing it in again would make your income read as twice what it was. Your budget can now point an income line at one of these headings, which is what lets your management accounts compare what you planned to take against what you actually took. Thanks to Duncan Brown at Whatfield Village Hall, who wrote and said he could not use the finance system without it.
New feature
Your 100 Club, kept properly
There is a new Entertainment section for halls on Professional, and the first thing in it is your 100 Club. Set the club up once - what you call it, how many numbers, what a number costs and what share the hall keeps - and the numbers are made for you rather than typed. The register shows every number and who holds it, so you can answer "which ones are free?" and "who has 42?" without going through a notebook, and there is a filter for the numbers somebody holds but has not paid for, which is the list you want in front of you before a draw. When you make a draw, only paid-up numbers go in the hat, nobody can win twice on the night, and the winners are recorded by name as well as by number so a member leaving in five years does not erase who won this year. The figures the council asks for - what came in, what went to the hall, what was paid out - are worked out and frozen onto the draw, and every draw shows the date its return is due, three months later, with a reminder on the menu until you mark it sent. One thing worth saying plainly: the draw is made by one of your committee pressing a button, and their name goes against it. We keep your records and work out your figures; we do not sell tickets, hold money or run your draw for you. Registering the lottery with your licensing authority, staying within the terms of that registration and sending your returns remain your committee's responsibility, not ours. Thanks to Linda Cawley at Rampton Village Hall, whose village lottery started this off.
New feature
Number your invoices the way your committee already does
Invoices have always been numbered INV-00001, counting up forever. A lot of halls number theirs by the year instead - 2026-001, starting again at 001 each January - and there was no way to tell us that. There is now, under Payment Settings, in a section called Invoice numbers. You can clear the letters in front, put the year in, and choose how many digits, and it shows you exactly what your next invoice number will be before you save anything. Once the year is in, it starts again at 001 each 1 January on its own. Nothing changes unless you go and change it: if you have never opened that screen your invoices carry on exactly as they were, and invoices you have already raised keep the numbers they have whatever you choose. Thanks to Linda Cawley at Rampton Village Hall for asking.
New feature
App
Compliance, volunteer hours, payments and manual invoices in the app
Four things that were already on the website but had no screen on the phone: what compliance is due or overdue and a way to mark an alert seen, a list of volunteer hours with a form to log more, the payments you have received in their own list alongside invoices, and raising an invoice by hand and sending it. Each appears only if your hall's plan and your own permissions include it, the same as everywhere else.
New feature
App
The app now shows what a booking is charged for beyond the room
A booking with the kitchen, the projector or an extra clean on it showed in the app as a bare room hire, which is exactly the screen somebody is looking at when they are asked why an invoice is more than the rate card. The extras and what each one costs are now on the booking.
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.