Rooms
A room is any space a hirer can book on its own. Most halls have two or three: the main hall, a committee room, sometimes a kitchen or a bar that can go with either.
Set a room up once and everything else hangs off it — what it costs, when it is free, and whether two bookings clash. HallPro will never let the same room be booked twice at the same time, which is the single job the paper diary kept getting wrong.
The hourly, daily and evening rates here are the hall’s standard prices. If a particular kind of hirer pays something different — a charity, a regular, a parish council — that belongs in Rate Rules rather than here.
Setting up and clearing away: minutes kept free before and after every booking of the room. With 15 before and 15 after, two bookings must be at least half an hour apart, and a hirer asking for a time too close to another booking is told why. Hirers are not charged for this time.
For example: Ashcombe Village Hall has two rooms. The Main Hall at £12 an hour, and the Committee Room at £6. The kitchen is not a room: it comes with the Main Hall and is listed under equipment, because nobody hires it by itself.
Questions people ask
We only have one room. Do we still need this?
Yes, one room. Everything is booked against a room, so the hall itself needs to exist as one. Call it whatever your hirers call it.
Can the whole hall be booked as well as its parts?
Not automatically. If somebody books the Main Hall, the Committee Room is still shown as free. For an event taking the whole building, book each room — the clash check then protects both.
The Brownies finish at 7 and a party wants to start at 7.
Set the room’s clearing-away and setting-up time, say 15 minutes each. The party can then start at 7:30 at the earliest, on the website, in both apps and on the Bookings screen. The committee can still override it for a one-off.
What if a room is taken out of use for a while?
Add a closure under Opening Hours for that room and those dates. Existing bookings are left alone; it stops new ones.