Hall Manager support

Getting started

Hall Manager shares the same sign-in as Camp Planner, Quartermaster and Leader Compliance — if your group already uses any of them, signing in here gets you straight to the same group with no separate account needed. If you're new to all four, sign up and create your group, then add your first hall (most groups have just one or two bookable spaces).

If you have more than one group

Most groups only ever set one up, so if you belong to a single group you go straight into it when you sign in — no list to pick from. If you belong to two or more, you get the list and choose.

To add another group (a second section that keeps its own records, or a District you also help with), click ← All groups at the top of any of the group's pages. That takes you to the full list, where a New group button sits in the top right. The list also appears on its own once you belong to more than one, so you only need that link the first time.

Being invited to someone else's group counts too — accept the invitation and you'll start seeing the list, with both groups on it.

Free plan & pricing

Hall Manager is free for one hall, with unlimited one-off and recurring bookings for your leader team — no time limit and no card details needed, since most groups only need to manage a single space privately. A paid subscription (£20/yr) unlocks the public booked/free calendar, compliance reminders, the keyholder directory, and a second hall onwards — or £50/yr for the bundle with Camp Planner, Quartermaster and Leader Compliance together. Only your group's owner can subscribe or cancel, from a Billing section on your group's page, paid by Direct Debit via GoCardless. See full pricing for details.

Halls & bookings

Add each bookable space your group has, then book it for a section meeting, a one-off event, or anyone else hiring it. A week or month view shows what's on at a glance, and you can filter down to one hall if you have more than one.

Hiring out more than the hall

A booking doesn't have to be for a room. Alongside your halls you can list anything else the group hires out — the minibus, a trailer, a marquee — and take bookings against it the same way. Each asset carries its own hourly or daily rate, so a weekend minibus hire prices itself.

If you also use Quartermaster, group equipment can be made hireable without re-entering it: mark an item as available to hire and it shows up here. Anything already promised to a camp in Camp Planner is accounted for, so the same six tents can't go out twice.

Kit that isn't safe to hire won't be offered. An item whose condition is recorded as damaged, or whose PAT test has expired, is held back automatically rather than quietly appearing on the list. Handing kit over and taking it back are recorded, with the safety check repeated on the day it actually goes out.

Public hire portal

A single link you can put on your group's website or Facebook page, showing everything you hire out and what's free — the hall, the minibus, the trailer, the kit. Hirers pick what they want and ask for it there.

They never see who booked what: the portal shows availability only, not names or purposes. Requests arrive for you to accept or decline, the same as public booking requests for the hall.

Booking rules

On the Protect Duty page, alongside its capacity field, you can optionally set a minimum and maximum booking length and a changeover buffer for each hall — a gap enforced automatically between two bookings so there's always time for cleaning or setup in between. These are checked whenever a booking is created or edited, and are entirely optional — leave any of them blank to not enforce that limit.

Recurring bookings

A weekly section meeting can repeat on one or more days each week (or every few weeks), and a monthly booking can repeat either on the same date each month or on a fixed weekday — "the second Tuesday" or "the last Friday", for committee or AGM-style bookings. Need to change something without affecting the rest of the series? Edit just a single occurrence, edit that date and every date after it (a new time or keyholder starting from a certain point, say), or edit the whole series for a change that should apply from the start.

Public booked/free calendar

Turn on a public link for a hall and share it with anyone who needs to check availability — it shows only busy/free blocks, never who booked it or what for. You can also subscribe to it as a live calendar feed in any calendar app.

Public booking requests

Separately from the read-only calendar link, a hall can also accept booking requests directly — turn on Accept public booking requests for a hall (on the Halls page) to get its own request link. An external hirer fills in their name, contact details, date and time, purpose of booking, expected attendees and layout preference, and — if you've set one — must tick to accept your hire agreement before submitting. Nothing is added to the calendar yet: it lands as a pending request on your group's Requests page, where an owner, leader or helper can approve it (checked automatically for capacity, duration and clashes before it's added, so an approval can never double-book the hall) or decline it with an optional reason. The hirer gets an email either way, plus an automatic reminder the day before a one-off booking they made this way (recurring bookings don't get this yet). The same purpose and layout preference fields are also available on bookings you create yourself.

Compliance reminders

Track anything with a recurring due date for each hall — gas safety, electrical, fire alarm and intruder alarm servicing, insurance renewal, fire risk assessments, emergency-lighting tests, or a keyholder's DBS certificate (optionally tied to that specific person rather than just the hall). Your group's owners, leaders and helpers get a daily nudge email once something's due or overdue, so nothing gets missed.

Keyholders

Keep a directory of who holds keys or opens up for each hall (name, phone, email and notes) — they don't need a Hall Manager account of their own. Assign a keyholder to a booking so who's opening up is an assigned fact rather than an assumption, right down to a single date in a recurring series if someone's covering just that one.

Charging for hall usage

On the Fees page, set an hourly rate per booking section for each hall — leave a section blank to keep it free (a common setup: your own uniformed sections free, a charged rate for Public/Other hirers). A booking is charged for every occurrence it happens, so a recurring weekly hire is charged every week, not once for the whole series. Mark each one paid as it comes in, or send the hirer a payment link (see below) and let it happen automatically. Visible to owners and leaders only.

Getting paid online

Connect your own GoCardless account from your organisation's page (the "Collect payments" card) — payments land straight in your group's own bank account, not ours. Once connected, click Get payment link next to any unpaid booking on the Fees page and send the link to the hirer; the booking is marked paid automatically once GoCardless confirms it. Our platform fee of 1%is deducted from each payment, and GoCardless charge their own transaction fee separately. The manual "mark as paid" checkbox still works too, for hirers who pay by cash or bank transfer — and ticking it no longer overwrites the record of a payment made online.

The hirer chooses how to pay. Pay now from your bank is approved in their banking app and clears straight away, and sets up a Direct Debit at the same time — so a regular hirer booking again next week doesn't have to authorise anything a second time. Set up a Direct Debit is authorised once and collected over about three working days.

A hirer who already has a Direct Debit with your group is offered pay with the one they already have: the page names the account and takes the payment on one click, with no bank details and no trip to GoCardless. It needs their email on the booking to recognise them — bookings that came through your hall request form already have it, and there's a hirer's email field on the booking form for ones you add yourself. It's optional; without it they simply get the ordinary options.

It isn't offered on a recurring booking, because that already collects each session automatically against its own Direct Debit — offering it as well would take the same session's money twice.

Because Direct Debit takes days to clear, the Fees page shows what each payment is actually doing rather than just paid or unpaid: Payment processing (on its way, nothing to chase), Payment failed — being retried automatically (GoCardless is trying again on the day most likely to work, so there's nobody to chase), Payment failed (didn't go through — the hirer can try again from the same link), or Payment charged back (their bank reversed it after the event, so the charge returns to unpaid by itself).

Regular hirers: one Direct Debit for the whole booking

A hirer with a repeating booking used to authorise a Direct Debit every single time they were charged. Now, from any session's payment link, they can choose Set up a Direct Debit for this booking once — and every session after that is collected automatically.

Each session is charged separately, for its own exact amount, after it has taken place. That matters more than it sounds:

• A term-time hirer isn't charged through the school holidays — no session, no payment.
• Change a booking's times or your hourly rate and the next collection simply uses the new amount.
• Cancel a session and nothing needs undoing, because nothing was taken in advance.
• Sessions from before they set the Direct Debit up are never charged, so setting one up on a booking that's been running for months doesn't bill all of it at once.

Collection happens automatically each morning. A Ready to collect panel also appears on the Fees page listing what's owed, with the number of sessions and the total, so you can take it straight away rather than waiting — you're shown the figure before anything is charged.

The option only appears on bookings that repeat on a single day — weekly, fortnightly, or the same date each month. A booking on several days a week, or on "the third Thursday", can't be followed by one Direct Debit schedule, so those hirers keep using payment links per session.

Refunds

Any charge paid online can be refunded from the Fees page — a cancelled booking, or a hirer who paid twice. Open Refund next to the occurrence, check the amount (it defaults to everything still refundable, but you can refund part of it), add a reason if it helps, and confirm. Where a hirer has made more than one payment against the same booking you choose which to refund. Owners and leaders only, the same as marking a charge paid.

Two limits come from GoCardless rather than from us. A payment can't be refunded for seven days after it was collected — the app tells you the date it becomes possible. And a refund can only come out of money GoCardless still holds for your group, so once a payment has been paid out to your bank account it can't be refunded this way and you'd need to return it yourself. The app shows your available refund balance if that happens.

Invoices & accounting exports

Every charge — however it's paid — gets a real, sequentially numbered invoice. Click View invoice next to any charge on the Fees page for a printable invoice document (use your browser's print dialog to save it as a PDF). On the Reports page, download your recorded charges ready for Xero, QuickBooks or Sage, so bringing hall income into your group's bookkeeping is a straight import rather than manual re-entry (Sage import requires the hirer to already exist as a contact in Sage).

Protect Duty (Martyn's Law)

New UK legislation requires publicly-accessible venues with a capacity over 100 to have a preparedness plan and a staff-training record, ahead of an April 2027 deadline. A Protect Duty page per hall lets you record its capacity, mark a preparedness plan as in place with a review date, and keep a log of who's completed training and when — a badge shows whether the hall is likely over the threshold, though it's advisory only and doesn't stop you keeping records either way.