The hall is booked, and somebody has to set it out

Who sees what

Somebody in the congregation sees a card by the door. They scan it, say what they noticed and where, add a photo, and send it. No account, nothing to install, and the link they get back shows that it was read and what happened next. A parishioner who mentions the guttering every Sunday can say it once and watch it get fixed.

Whoever holds the keys sees a list: what is overdue, what is due this week, and what nobody has picked up. Opening a job shows the building, the photo, and the history of that thing, so the boiler that has been looked at four times is a boiler with four jobs behind it rather than a rumour.

The treasurer, or whoever answers to the parochial church council, sees what was spent from the stores and which checks were done on time. It comes out as a file, one per table, whenever they want it.

The first afternoon

Four lines is a setup: church, hall, vestry, tower. Type them in, or paste the list you already keep. Print the poster and put it by the door people actually use. Invite the one other person who does the work, and the two of you are the free plan.

Then set the first schedule. The heating service before winter, the gutters after the leaves, the lightning conductor test, the boiler: each one gets an interval and a checklist, and from then on the job raises itself on the right morning. The quinquennial inspection’s list of things to keep an eye on becomes a set of schedules rather than a document in a drawer.

If the parish has a spreadsheet from before, six files bring it across: places, people, parts, equipment, the inspection calendar and the job history. The import is free and you run it yourself.

A year later

The compliance report says which checks happened on time and which slipped, from the jobs themselves. The cost summary adds up what was taken from the stores, priced when it was taken. The audit log says who changed what, which matters when the churchwardens change and the new one wants to know what the last one did.

A benefice with more than one church gives each volunteer the buildings they actually look after and nothing else, and the person answering for all of them still sees all of them.

Nobody has to keep checking. A report arriving, a job being handed over, a check falling due: each one is a notification in the app for the people who asked to be told, and each person chooses which of them they want.

When the archdeacon asks, the answer is a file.

What it will not do

There is no mobile app and nothing works offline. Everything runs in a phone’s browser, which is fine in the porch and no use in a crypt with no signal. It does not log time: a job records what was done and what it cost in parts, never the hours a volunteer gave. It raises no purchase orders, holds no accounts and does not talk to the treasurer’s software.

And on the free plan it will not book the hall. That is the one thing a church reaches for first, so it is named at the top of this page rather than discovered at the moment somebody tries it.