Everything we have changed, and when

New feature 24 August 2026

Three things asked for by a hall going through it with its committee.

New under Compliance: Key Contacts. Somewhere for the window cleaner, the plumber and the man with the mower - the people you ring who have no contract and no renewal date, and whose numbers otherwise live in one committee member phone. Nothing is required beyond a name.

New under Bookings: Facilities. Write down what your hall has - the projector, the PA, the kitchen, the stage - and they appear as a tick list when you take a booking, so whoever opens up knows what needs to be out. You can add a note to each one for whoever sets it up, which the hirer never sees. This is not the same as Extras and never touches an invoice: wanting to know whether the kitchen is in use is not the same as charging for it.

And the bookings list can now show a Private column, so you can see at a glance which bookings are named on your public calendar and which are not. Turn it on with the columns button above the list.

Thanks to Whatfield Village Hall for all three.

New feature 23 August 2026

Repeats could be weekly, fortnightly or monthly, so a group using the hall on more than one day meant setting up a separate repeat for each day and then keeping them all in step. There is now a "Certain days each week" option: tick Monday to Friday, or Tuesday and Thursday, and one booking covers the lot at the same time on each day.

It works well with term time. Put your school holidays into Holidays and Closures, tick "Term-time only - skip holidays", and the sessions step over the holidays instead of filling your diary with dates that are not happening.

Thanks to Whatfield Village Hall, whose village school has the place every weekday in term time.

New feature 23 August 2026

The booking request form inside a hirer portal asked less than your public enquiry form: nothing about drink, no offer of a look round, and not your own question either. So a hall got answers from strangers but not from its regulars, with nothing to say which was which.

Both forms now ask the same things. A hirer signing in still does not have to type their name and address, because you already have those, but everything you need to know before saying yes is asked either way.

On the public form, "I would like a look round the hall" has moved above the Additional Information section. It is an offer rather than a detail of the booking, and it reads better standing on its own.

Thanks to Whatfield Village Hall for both.

New feature 23 August 2026

Your enquiry form let you add one question of your own, and it had to be answerable with Yes or No. That suited halls charging two prices and nobody else.

You can now add up to three, and choose how each one should be answered: Yes or no, a short answer on one line, or a longer answer in a box. You can also say whether each one has to be answered or is merely nice to know.

That means you can ask things a tick cannot answer. One hall needs to know who will be responsible on the day, which is often not the person doing the booking, and had been asking for a name, an email and a telephone number inside a Yes or No question with the answer left in the message box.

The answers appear on the booking and in the email that reaches you, each one with the question beside it. They are kept that way on purpose: if you reword a question next spring, what somebody told you last autumn still reads correctly against the question they were actually asked.

Anything you have already set up carries over on its own, and is asked exactly as it was. You will find it under Settings, Booking Settings, in a section called Questions of Your Own.

Thanks to Whatfield Village Hall for the push.

New feature 21 August 2026

If you have "Send the key safe code before each booking" switched on, the code now also appears in the portal, on the hirer dashboard and against the booking it is for. Nothing changes about the email - it still goes out exactly as before.

It follows the same rule the email does, so there is nothing new to set up. The code shows only on a confirmed booking, only within the number of days before the hire that you chose, and it stops showing once the hire is over. Somebody has to enter their PIN to see it, and they only ever see their own hall.

There is one thing the portal does that an email cannot. If you change the code, every hirer with a booking coming up sees the new one straight away - nothing to resend, and no old code sitting in an inbox waiting to be tried. Your code is stored encrypted either way.

Thanks to a hirer at Binfield Memorial Hall for the idea.

New feature 21 August 2026

If you keep a list of events on your website, you have been typing everything twice - once into your diary here and once into your website. Not any more.

There is a new tick box on a booking called "Advertise this on our website". Tick it, write a line or two about the event and add a poster or a photograph if you have one, and it appears on your own What is on page. Each event shows its name, the date, the time, how long it runs and which room, with your description and picture beside it. Visitors can search it and jump to a particular month.

There are two ways to show it. A list, which answers what is coming up, and a month calendar, which answers whether anything is on a particular weekend. The calendar puts the name of each event on the day itself rather than a dot, so somebody can see what is on without clicking anything, and picking a day shows just that day underneath. Visitors switch between the two themselves.

Nothing else in your diary goes anywhere near that page. Only the bookings you tick appear, private bookings can never be advertised at all, and anything cancelled or already past drops off on its own, so there is no tidying up to do.

For a repeating booking, write the description once on the first one and every date says the same thing - though you can still say something different on a single date if you want to.

Photographs taken on a phone are fine. They are usually far too big to upload, so we shrink them for you before they are sent - you do not have to resize anything, and the page still loads quickly for somebody looking at it on their phone.

There is also a short version for your home page: the next few events as a row of cards that slides sideways, with a button through to the full list. It is meant to sit alongside everything else a home page says rather than take a page of its own.

You will find the address and the code to paste into your website under Settings, Embed on Your Website, alongside the calendar and enquiry form snippets. That page also folds up now, so you can open the one you want instead of scrolling past the others. It comes with the Standard plan, the same as those. Thanks to Hambridge and Westport Village Hall for asking.

New feature 20 August 2026

Not something you will see, but worth writing down.

Our platform dashboard led with the number of halls signed up and the number of accounts created. Both only ever go up, so neither could tell us anything was wrong - and a hall whose trial had quietly run out looked the same as one that had never started.

It now leads with what is actually coming in, what is about to stop, how many trials turn into halls that stay, and how many halls have not opened it in a month. That last one matters most to you rather than to us: a hall that has stopped using it is usually one we have failed to help, and now we can see it rather than waiting for it to go quiet.

New feature 19 August 2026

The part of the day you were missing. Alongside month by month and day by day, there is now a table showing mornings, afternoons and evenings, so you can see whether it is your weekday mornings going begging rather than the whole of Tuesday.

The three parts follow whatever opening hours you set, rather than a notional day. If you count the hall as open nine to five, you are not shown an empty evening you never had to sell - and the three always add up to your day.

We have also corrected the share of use column in the who is using the hall table. Where two groups were meeting at the same time in different rooms, the shares could add up to more than 100%. Each hirer keeps the hours they actually booked, because a group that took two rooms did use both, and the column now says plainly that it is a share of the hours hired.

New feature 19 August 2026

The communication log on each hirer was a book you wrote in yourself. Nothing the system sent was recorded there, so a hall that had invited half a dozen hirers to the portal had no way of telling whether any of it had gone out.

Every email we send a hirer now writes its own line: portal invitations, invoices, payment reminders, booking confirmations and door codes. Each says what it was and which address it went to.

That includes the ones nobody presses a button for. The door code goes out two days before a booking and the payment chaser at nine in the morning, both on a schedule with nobody logged in - and those are precisely the ones worth having a record of.

You can still add your own entries as before. A phone call or a conversation at the door is not something we can log for you.

New feature 19 August 2026

A hirer wrote to her hall to say the portal was easy to use, but that she could not tell whether a date was free without asking. The hall had been sending her the link to the public calendar by hand.

There is now a **What is on** tab in the hirer portal. It shows everything already booked, month by month, with a filter by room if you have more than one, and a button that takes them straight through to asking for a date. So seeing a free Tuesday and requesting it is one step rather than an email to you.

It shows exactly what your public calendar shows and nothing more. Anything you have marked private appears only as busy, the same as it does to anybody else.

Our thanks to Claire at Binfield Memorial Hall, who asked for it.

New feature 18 August 2026

Three things we have built recently now have proper explanations behind them, for anybody weighing us up or wanting to understand what they are looking at.

The features page explains how to see **how much your hall is actually used** - hours hired against hours available, cut by month, by day, by room and by hirer - and why funders ask for it. It also covers what happens **when an email to a hirer never arrives**, and how we offer to send it again once you have corrected the address.

Our compliance guide now has a **Charity Commission** section: the annual return, the accounts and trustees' annual report, the governing document, the trustee register and serious incident reporting, with the income thresholds that decide which apply to you. Most village halls are registered charities and the page had been silent on it.

There are also four new guides queued for the blog, on measuring utilisation, writing a fair booking policy, Charity Commission duties, and why invoices go unpaid when it is not the hirer's fault.

New feature 18 August 2026

Your Committee list and your Team Members list are two different things, and nothing on either screen said so. Committee is the record of who holds which post - trustees, terms of office, who represents which organisation. Team Members is who can actually sign in. Adding somebody to your committee never gave them a login, so halls quite reasonably reported it as a fault when a new trustee did not appear.

Your committee list now has a **Can log in** column, so you can see at a glance who has access and who is on the committee only.

Where somebody has no login and you have their email address, there is a **Give them a login** button on their row. Choose what they should be able to do - the same six roles you get when adding a team member - and they are sent an invitation to set a password. They then appear under Team Members like anybody else, and the two records are joined up from then on.

It will not offer to invite somebody who can already sign in, including where they were added to both lists separately in the past.

Our thanks to Binfield Memorial Hall, who kept asking why their trustee was not showing up.