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.
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.
Fix
Recording a payment for a date that is not today
When you added a payment to an invoice, there was nowhere to say when the money actually arrived, and we stamped it with the day you typed it in. That meant last month's cheques showed up in this month's reports, and you could not put it right. There is now a "Date received" box, so you can enter a payment whenever suits you and still have it counted in the right month. An invoice is also marked paid on the day it was actually settled. Notes you typed against a payment were being thrown away too, and are now kept. Thanks to Binfield Memorial Hall for spotting it.
New feature
Changing a repeating booking now asks which dates you mean
Until now, editing one date of a repeating booking only ever changed that one date, with nothing on screen to say so. Moving a term of yoga to a new time meant opening every week by hand, and cancelling a term meant the same again. When you save a booking that repeats, we now ask whether you mean just that date, that date and the ones after it, or every date in the series - and each choice tells you how many other dates it would affect. Change the time and every date moves to the new time on its own day, keeping the length of the booking. If one of them cannot move because somebody else has the room at the new time, we say so plainly and leave that one where it was rather than quietly skipping it. A booking that does not repeat saves exactly as before and never sees the question. Thanks to Binfield Memorial Hall for asking.
New feature
Find every date for a class by its name
Your bookings list now has a "What is on" filter listing the names of everything you run - Bloom Baby, Fitsteps, Brownies and so on. Pick one and you get every date for it. That is a different question from filtering by hirer, and both are now there: one group can run several different classes, and a class can change hands between groups while still being the same thing to the village, so filtering by who booked it does not always give you what you want. There is also a "Group by" box above the list, so you can have the dates gathered under headings by what is on, by hirer, or by room. Thanks to Binfield Memorial Hall for asking.
New feature
See everything a group has booked, in one place
Open a hirer and there is now a Bookings tab listing every date that group has with you, past and future, with the number still to come on the tab itself. Open any one of them to change it. If a booking repeats, that booking now has an "All dates in this series" tab listing every date in the run, with the one you are looking at marked, so you can change or cancel a single week without hunting through a list of a dozen identical-looking rows. It works from any date in the series, not just the first. The main Bookings list also has a Hirer filter now, so you can narrow it to one group there too. Thanks to Binfield Memorial Hall for asking.
Fix
Bookings with a deposit were being left off monthly invoices
If you had already raised a deposit invoice for a booking, we treated that booking as invoiced, so it was quietly skipped when you invoiced the month and never got billed for the hire at all. Taking a deposit is not the same as invoicing for the hire, and it is now treated as a separate thing. If this has happened to you, those bookings will now appear the next time you invoice that month, so it is worth running it back over the last few months to check nothing was missed.
New feature
Invoicing a whole month at once is easier to find
If you invoice your regular hirers monthly in arrears, the Invoices screen has always been able to do it in one go, but the button was called "Bulk Generate" and there was no way to tell that was the thing you wanted. It is now called "Invoice a month of bookings", and it opens on last month rather than the month you are in the middle of, which is what invoicing in arrears means. Before it does anything it tells you in plain English what it is about to do - how many bookings, between which dates, and how many invoices that comes to - so you can check the dates are right without having to create anything first. You still get drafts, so nothing goes to a hirer until you send it. Thanks to Binfield Memorial Hall for asking.
New feature
Professional: our name comes off your pages
On the Professional plan, "Powered by Village Hall Hub" no longer appears anywhere your hirers see: not on your public calendar, your enquiry form, the invoice they open from their email, your invoice PDFs or your meeting minutes. Together with your own logo and colours, everything a hirer sees is your hall's and nobody else's.
Fix
The colour key on your calendar was wrong
Your calendar colours a booking by its type of hire, and falls back to the colour of the room when there is no type. The key underneath listed only your rooms, so it could tell somebody green meant the Back Room while a green booking sat in the Main Hall. It now lists exactly the colours actually on the calendar and what each one stands for, so it cannot say anything the calendar does not. Fixed on your public calendar, the one you embed, and the one in the plugin.
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.