Developer Diary #15

01/09/26

It has been a quieter few weeks on the diary front while people were away over the summer, but not on the workbench. This release closes seven requests from the Feature Board, and a good chunk of it is for Treasurers, which as a Treasurer myself I will admit I have enjoyed.

There is also a lot here for Secretaries tidying up their Members and Contacts, and a fair amount of work to make The Working Tools feel less "Craft first" for Chapters, Preceptories and the other Orders.

As always, please do log in and have a look around. There is quite a bit to find this time.

What's new in this release?

Prepaid Credits for members who pay monthly

More and more Lodges accept dues by monthly or quarterly standing order. The difficulty is that dues are technically payable on the due date, so a Treasurer collecting instalments through the year is usually holding that money against next year's dues, not this year's. Until now there was no clean way to record that in The Working Tools without either raising next year's invoice early or fudging this year's.

There is now a Credits page in the year header of the Treasurer section. Record the instalment there, against the member, and it goes into the bank as income today while the unused amount is held as a credit on the member. This year's invoice is untouched. When you Batch Create next year's invoices, the option to apply available prepaid credits is ticked by default, so a member who has paid £25 a quarter towards £100 of dues receives an invoice showing £100, less £100 already received, and nothing now due. Credits can also be applied by hand on any individual invoice, and the member's Membership page shows what they have in hand.

One thing worth being clear about: the Treasurer section is a cash book, so prepaid money shows as income in the year it arrived, and next year's invoice can then show as paid without a matching income line in that year. That is expected, and the Close Year page lists everyone with a credit carrying forward so nothing is lost in the handover. This was a Feature Board request and I am glad to have it in.

Send Reminder on outstanding invoices

Another Feature Board request, and an overdue one. On Outstanding Invoices you can now tick the invoices you want to chase and click Send Reminder. It works on invoices that have already been marked Sent, which is the case Send Selected never covered, so you no longer need to work around it.

The default wording explains that the invoice remains outstanding and asks anyone who has paid in the meantime to ignore the notice; you can edit it before sending. Each member's invoice PDF is attached, members without an email address (or with one that has bounced) are skipped, and a copy comes to you. Reminder batches are filed in Tools → Sent as Invoice Reminder so you have a record of who was chased and when. If you email a single invoice from its own screen and it has already been sent and is still unpaid, the message box now pre-fills with the reminder wording too.

Transfers between bank accounts

If your Lodge takes card payments, the money usually lands in a clearing account and is paid out to the real bank account in lumps. Recording that lump as income again inflated your Profit and Loss, and the workaround of a matched pair of transfer-in and transfer-out account codes was messy. Several Treasurers told us so.

Open Treasurer → Bank Accounts, click the account the money is leaving, and use the new Transfer button. Both accounts are updated together, the two sides stay linked for editing and deleting, and transfers appear in their own section on the reports rather than in income or expenditure. You need at least two bank accounts set up for the button to be useful.

Event Response Notifications

This one came from a support ticket, and the Secretary who raised it had a great point. When a member replied to an event invite, the response was recorded on the event's Attendance tab, but nobody told the Secretary. You had to remember to go and look.

There is now an Event Response Notifications card on Settings & Defaults. The default is a single daily summary each morning listing the new responses since yesterday, which I would recommend; a Lodge of fifty members answering an invite should not produce fifty emails. If you would rather hear about each reply as it arrives you can choose that instead, or turn it off entirely, and you can send the notifications to a different address from the account holder's, which is useful where a Delegate handles the dining numbers. Every response is still recorded on the Attendance tab whichever option you pick.

While in there we fixed a small but annoying thing: replying to the "Response Recorded" confirmation email used to land in an unattended mailbox. It now reaches the Secretary.

Bulk Edit grows up: Contacts, Candidates, Tags and Bulk Delete

The spreadsheet-style Bulk Edit grid that arrived for Members in the last diary has been extended in three directions.

• Contacts and Candidates now have their own grids, with a switcher at the top to move between the three.
• A Tags column can be turned on from the Columns button (once your Lodge has at least one tag). Each row shows that person's tags as badges, and clicking the cell opens a tick-list. Above the grid a Bulk tag bar lets you add or remove one tag across every record your current filters match, not just the visible page, so filtering to a committee, a search result or a fresh import and tagging the lot is a single action. It tells you how many records will be affected and asks you to confirm.
• A red Bulk Delete button at the foot of each grid opens a page where you tick people off a searchable list (your ticks are remembered while you search and page), review the full list by name and email, and then type the exact number of records before the delete button unlocks. That is a deliberate speed bump. Everything deleted this way goes to the same Deleted list as a single delete and can be restored. It needs the Delete Members permission, so Delegates without it will not see the button.

The Contact Importer has also caught up with the Member Importer: after a successful import a green Next step card opens the Contacts grid filtered to just the records you imported, so you can tidy them before they mix in with the rest of the address book.

Dining at Quick Attendance, and Contacts on the Table Plan

Quick Attendance (in the Post Meeting card on an event's Attendance page) now has a Dining tick beside Confirmed, so you can mark who is staying for the Festive Board for the whole Lodge in one pass rather than opening each member's attendance popup. Tick all and Untick all respect the name filter, and the ticks feed straight into the dining lists and the Table Planner.

On the Table Planner, dining Contacts now appear properly in Unallocated Attendees, colour-coded by attendance status, and seat as their own person type rather than being muddled with Other Attendees. Deleted Contacts and Members no longer linger in the list, and a Contact saved as "WBro John Smith" on the dining list now prints the same way on his place card instead of as plain "John Smith".

Chapters, Preceptories and the other Orders

A recurring and entirely fair piece of feedback from Companions and Knights: the word "Lodge" was everywhere, and a Royal Arch Chapter's Exaltation date did not show as a Masonic Birthday on the calendar because the system was quietly looking for "Initiated".

Across settings, members, contacts, treasurer, reports, confirmation messages and Delegate emails, the app now uses your unit's own name: Chapter, Preceptory, Conclave and so on, taken from the Lodge Type set under Jurisdiction. Ritual wording on summons and minutes is deliberately unchanged. Each Lodge Type now also carries its own presets: which career event counts as the Masonic Birthday, any extra anniversaries to show on the calendar and the 90-day diary, prefix suggestions, and which offices are the chair and the secretary. These can be overridden for your own unit on Settings & Defaults, with a reset back to the Order's default. Craft Lodges that leave everything alone will notice no change.

Printed and emailed invoices follow suit: the remittance note now names your unit correctly, and if you have entered Custom Text on Invoices in Treasurer settings it replaces that default line rather than being tacked on underneath. Two more Feature Board requests closed with this, and I am grateful to the Chapter that kept nudging.

Lodge logo: crop, preview, and no more giant crests in Outlook

We had reports of Lodge logos appearing enormous in emails, particularly in Outlook. Uploads are now resized automatically and emails carry proper image dimensions, which fixes it.

While we were there, choosing a logo under The Lodge → Basic Info now opens a crop window (Square is recommended; Free and Fit whole logo are there for banners and odd shapes), and the same page then shows you how the crest will look in an email, in the top bar and on a PDF, so you can check it without sending yourself a test message. The maximum file size is 3mb.

Personalised Forms

The placeholders that arrived in the Emailer last time, such as [[ first_name ]], now work in Forms too: in the send and schedule emails, in the form description, and in the reminder chasers. Each recipient is greeted by name instead of "Dear Member". This was requested on the Feature Board only a fortnight ago, which is a nice turnaround.

Smaller things you may notice

• The Masonic Career Activity report now has a text search (by event title, details or member name, so "Provincial Promotion" finds everyone) and a CSV export of whatever you have filtered.
• The Date of Birth calendar on Member, Contact and Candidate records now opens eighteen years before today rather than at today's date, so you are no longer scrolling back through decades to enter a typical Brother's birthday. A Feature Board request, and a very reasonable one.
• On a phone, the menu bar now has a person icon that opens the same account panel as the desktop dropdown: Lodge Settings, Documentation, Support Tickets, Highlights and the Lodge switcher. Previously these were awkward to reach on a small screen.
• The UGLE Hermes import under Tools → Importer has lost its work-in-progress warning. It has been running quietly for a while now and I am happy for Lodges to use it.

Bug fixes & other tidy-ups

• Some Lodges found the Roles page listing nothing, with Quick Add appearing to do nothing and a "duplicate" error when adding Worshipful Master. The offices were there all along and are now shown; Quick Add only offers the ones you are missing.
• External Links on the Dashboard were being flagged as broken when they were not, because some sites (shop pages in particular) refused our checker. The checker now behaves like a browser, only treats a genuinely missing page as broken, and restores healthy links on its next run.
• The Attendance Report now shows meeting columns in date order rather than the order they were entered, which matters if you have been back-filling history. It now matches the CSV export.
• The Event Performances page no longer errors when a planned performer has since been deleted from the Lodge; it shows their name, or "Unknown member" if the record is gone.
• Printed dining and attendance reports no longer stack the "Other Attendees" heading one letter per line when that section is empty.
• Re-importing a spreadsheet containing the email of a previously deleted Member or Contact no longer fails; the deleted record is restored and updated.
• The event invite editors gained the same link button as the Emailer, so you can insert a URL without hand-typing HTML.
• A few Secretaries were receiving bounce notifications for emails they had not sent (an old send with a similar address matching a newer bounce). Fixed.
• The sidebar's white background now runs the full length of long pages such as Settings & Defaults instead of stopping at the bottom of the window.

Documentation

The help centre has been updated alongside all of the above. The Treasurer guide now covers Prepaid Credits, Transfers and Sending Reminders in full, including the cash-book point above. The Members & Contacts guide covers the Contacts and Candidates grids and Bulk Delete, the Tags page covers bulk tagging, the Events guide has new sections on Quick Attendance and Dining lists, and the Tools guide now documents Forms personalisation, the Importer next step and, at long last, the Role Swapper. As ever, if you are unsure how something works, the documentation is the place to start.

What's coming next?

The big one on the workbench is a completely new Summons Editor. Rather than a form that fills in a fixed layout, it is a page you build from blocks, with live content pulled straight from the event: the agenda from the Event Planner, your officers, past masters, the dining notice, forthcoming meetings, and the traditional wording with the names and dates filled in. It publishes a digital PDF and a print pack for a folded A5 booklet, straight into the event's Documents. It is usable now, and I have run a real meeting on it, but it is not finished and I would rather find the rough edges with a few patient Lodges than with everyone at once.

So this is an invitation. If your Lodge produces a summons every meeting, you would like to help shape this, and you can live with the odd thing not quite working while I fix it, I would love to hear from you. Raise a Support Ticket from inside The Working Tools, or reply to this email if you are reading it in your inbox, and I will switch it on for your Lodge. Your existing Summons Creator carries on exactly as it is in the meantime, and any summons you have already made stays where it is.

The provincial view I have mentioned in the last two diaries is still coming. It has been leapfrogged twice now by things with more votes behind them, which is the Feature Board doing its job, but it has not been forgotten.

As always, thank you for supporting The Working Tools. The system continues to grow because of your feedback and real-world use. If you know a Secretary in any Order who might benefit from what we're building, please do point them our way for a free trial.

More soon.

S&F,
Karl