Everything we have changed, and when

Fix 10 September 2026

When you pencil in a regular hirer's dates and ask them to confirm from their portal, they answer one date at a time - and until now every one of those answers sent you its own email. A term's worth arrived as twenty-odd separate messages, which is twenty times the inbox and none of the information. Now the answers are gathered up and you get a single email a few minutes after they have finished, listing every date confirmed and every date cancelled, with the times and the room against each one. Nothing about the diary has changed: the moment a hirer presses the button the booking is confirmed or the date is freed, exactly as before. It is only the telling that waits, and it never waits more than half an hour. Thanks to Sarah Peacey at Binfield Memorial Hall for spelling out what twenty emails in one sitting is like.

New feature 10 September 2026

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.

Fix 10 September 2026

Everything somebody types on your enquiry form has always been kept - it goes onto their hirer record - but the booking page showed their name and nothing else. So an enquiry arrived, you opened it, and there was no email address, no telephone number and no sign of what they had actually written. There is now a "Who to contact" section right under the booking details with their name, organisation, email address, telephone number, address and their message, and the answers to any questions of your own are further down as before. The email address and the phone number are both clickable - the number dials on a phone or tablet - and there is a copy button on each. There is also a "Reply by email" button at the top of the page. It opens your own email program with the address filled in and a subject line naming your hall, the booking and the date, so you reply from your own address with your own signature and the conversation carries on where your hirer expects it. Nothing is sent through us. Thanks to Sarah Peacey at Binfield Memorial Hall.

Fix 10 September 2026

This one is worth reading carefully, because it will change figures you have already seen. An income budget line that was not your room hire line had no way to find out what actually came in - so it quietly reported its own budget figure in the Actual column. A hall with £12,000 of budgeted bar income read back £12,000 as taken, having recorded not a penny of it, and there was nowhere in the system to record it either. Those lines now show £0.00 until there is real money recorded against them, which means some income lines will look worse than they did last week. They are not worse; they are honest, and they were flattering you before. To get real figures back into them, add an income heading, point the budget line at it on the Budget screen, and record what comes in on the new Other Income page. Your room hire line is unaffected - it has always been priced from your actual invoices and still is.

Fix 10 September 2026

If you recorded a payment under a heading your budget did not mention, your management accounts left it out completely - while your cashflow, which has always had an "Other spending" row, went on showing it. A hall put in three payments and saw none of them, which is a fair reason to give up on the page. The management accounts now carry the same two catch-all rows the cashflow does, "Other spending (not in the budget)" and "Other income (not in the budget)", so every figure you have entered appears somewhere and the sheet adds up. They only appear when there is something in them. If you would rather see a heading on a line of its own, give it a budget line and it moves there. Thanks to Duncan Brown at Whatfield Village Hall.

New feature 10 September 2026

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 9 September 2026

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 9 September 2026

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.

Fix 8 September 2026

We put part of this right yesterday and missed the real cause, so apologies to anybody who looked again and found it no better. If a project had a long note against it, that note was printed in full on the row - which stretched the first column until the figures, the Edit button and the Delete button were all off the right-hand edge of the screen. Nothing was broken, but there was no way to reach any of it. Notes are now cut short on the row, and hovering over a project name shows the whole note without opening anything. The project name can also be turned off in the Columns panel now, like every other column. Thanks again to Sarah Peacey at Binfield Memorial Hall, who reported it twice.

New feature App 7 September 2026

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 7 September 2026

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.

Fix App 7 September 2026

A wedding booked into the hall and the committee room was showing in the app as two separate bookings with nothing to say they belonged together - which mattered more once hirers could answer a booking themselves, because letting one go lets the whole hire go. Both now say which rooms the hire takes, and a hirer letting a date go is told plainly that it covers all of them before they do it.