The New Summons Creator

28/09/26

This release has one headline, and it's one that has been a long time coming: the new Summons Creator is out of beta and available to every Lodge.

Alongside it there's a new report I'd really like every Almoner and Secretary to run this week, a better way for Brethren to keep their own details up to date, and a good handful of fixes. As always, please do log in and have a play around.

The New Summons Creator

If you've been with us a while, you'll know the summons has always been a bit of a compromise. The old Creator filled a fixed layout, and plenty of Secretaries (quite reasonably) carried on building theirs in Word.

The new Summons Creator is a different animal. You build the summons page by page from blocks (text, images, your crest, columns, odes) on a true-scale page, so what you see is what prints. The clever part is the Dynamic Content blocks, which fill themselves in from your records:

• The Agenda, straight from the Event Planner items you've marked For the Summons, numbered in order
• Your Officers and Past Masters, in whichever name format you prefer
• Forthcoming meetings, where you can untick committee meetings and rehearsals so only the right events appear
• The Dining notice, Contact details and the traditional Summons wording, with live names and dates dropped in for you

Design it once, save it as your Lodge template and set it as your default, and every future summons starts almost finished. Change the Planner or a member record, click Refresh Dynamic Data, and the summons catches up. Nothing you do on the summons ever changes the records underneath it.

Somewhere to start

You don't have to start from a blank page. The gallery now includes templates you can adapt; four-page A5 booklets for Craft and Royal Arch, and the earlier classic designs. Each layout card has a Preview button, so you can turn through every page (in book view for a booklet) with your own logo and next meeting on it before you commit.

There's also a Lodge house style in Settings & Defaults: your logo, font colour and heading and body sizes, set once and picked up by new summons automatically. And dates can now read as "6th October 2026 at 6pm", or in the Masonic year (A.L.) if that's your Lodge's custom.

Publishing and sending

When you're happy, click Publish. For an A5 booklet you get a print pack (A4, double-sided, fold and nest) with an optional how-to-print page, plus a digital PDF and an optional book-view copy. They're all filed on the event's Documents, and the digital copy is pre-selected when you invite from the event's Attendance page.

Before it publishes, the Creator checks the summons is actually ready. If a placeholder can't be filled in (for example nobody currently holds the chair), or a page runs past the bottom of the paper, it will tell you exactly where to look rather than letting it go out wrong. For long agendas and officer lists, Continue on next page carries them over when you ask it to. That last part is deliberate: I'd rather the summons never rearranged itself behind your back.

Contacts you've marked as needing a summons (your Visiting Officer, the Provincial office, the hall) are labelled Summons contact and come pre-ticked when you invite contacts from the event. That one came straight from the Feature Board, so thank you to those who asked for it.

What about my existing summons?

Nothing is lost. Summons made with the previous Creator are still there to read, and each one has a one-click Convert that rebuilds it in the new editor while leaving the original untouched. If you'd rather keep using Word, that's absolutely fine too: upload the finished file to the event as you always have, and it gets the same treatment when you send your invitations.

And if you'd like your current summons turned into a Working Tools template for you, just get in touch by email or WhatsApp and we'll help.

A very big thank you to the Lodges who used the beta and reported back. Many of the changes in this release exist because users took the time to give their feedback. With a feature of this size, I fully expect a few rough edges still to turn up. Please do raise a Support Ticket if you find one and I'll get on it.

You'll find it on any event, under the Summons tab. The full guide is at /help/summons-creator.

What's new in this release?

Members without an Emergency Contact

This one came from a Secretary who got in touch after a Brother was taken seriously ill during a meeting, and it turned out nobody could quickly lay hands on a next of kin.

Emergency contacts already exist in The Working Tools. They arrived with the Welfare update: on a Member's Welfare tab, under Family & Emergency Contacts, you can record next of kin and flag one or more of them as an Emergency Contact. But that request made it clear that plenty of us either don't know it's there, or haven't got round to filling it in.

So there's now a Members without an Emergency Contact report on the Reports page, next to the Welfare Report. It lists every current Member who doesn't yet have anyone flagged, and clicking a row takes you straight to that Member's Welfare tab to add one. Like the rest of the welfare data, it's only visible to users with the Almoner / Welfare permission.

If you do one thing after reading this, please make it this: run the report, and chase the gaps. It's a five-minute job, and on the one night it matters it could matter enormously. The Member Details Update form (below) is a good way to gather the details from the Brethren themselves.

Pre-filled Member Details forms

Sending out the Member Details Update form has always had one drawback: every Brother got a blank form, and had to type everything in again just to tell you nothing had changed.

You can now turn on Show members the details we already hold on a form. Each Member confirms their date of birth first, then sees what the Lodge already has on file, so they only change what's out of date. When you review the response, only the things that actually changed are ticked.

Because this shows personal details, it's been built with care: three wrong date-of-birth attempts lock that personal link and email you so you can send a fresh one, and pre-filled links expire after 30 days (a reminder extends them). Members with no date of birth on file still receive a blank form, so it's worth filling those in via Bulk Edit first. You'll find it under Tools → Forms.

Retracting an invite

We've all done it: invited the wrong person, or the right person to the wrong meeting. You can now use Retract on their row in the event's Attendance.

You add a short explanation, they're emailed that message, and their RSVP link shows your explanation instead of the response form. They drop off the dining list and the Table Planner, and reappear as Not Invited so you can invite them again later if needed. The original email can't be unsent from their inbox, of course, but this is the next best thing.

Repeating Reminders

Reminders can now repeat every month, every 3 months, every 6 months or every year, with an optional Repeat until date. Mark one as Done and the next date is set automatically. Handy for the quarterly call to an elderly Brother, the annual insurance renewal, or anything else that comes round like clockwork.

Anniversary reminders for Welfare Events

Almoners will know that some dates matter long after the event itself, the anniversary of a bereavement being the obvious one. When adding a Welfare Event you can now tick Remind me of the anniversary on the 90-day planner, and that date will appear each year on the Dashboard planner and the printable Upcoming Planner. These reminders are only shown to users with the Almoner / Welfare permission, and they carry on after the event is marked Resolved.

Copy a Member's address in one click

A small one, but it saves a lot of fiddling. There's now a copy icon next to Home Address on a Member's record. One click copies the whole address, line by line and skipping any blank fields, ready to paste into a letter, an envelope label or a map.

Minutes: wider margins and pasting from Word

Printed and published Minutes now have wider left and right margins, so nothing gets clipped when the page is signed, scanned or hole-punched for the Minute book.

We've also fixed a frustrating problem where pasting a long or illustrated document from Word into the Minutes editor would fail to save. Long pastes now save properly, and if something is genuinely too large you'll see a clear message, with your draft left safely in the editor.

Smaller improvements

• The printable Member PDF Report has an Include all attendance records option, for when you need the full history rather than the latest 12
• The Lodge Rank Profile report now shows current members only by default, with an Include members who have left option for a historic view

Bug fixes & ongoing work

• Printing a Floor Plan could produce blank pages in Safari and Chrome. It now waits until the plan has drawn, and fits on a single landscape A4 page
• Place cards now print with the Lodge crest on every card, and cards no longer split across page breaks
• Sent Items was showing your login email as the Reply-To rather than the address set in Settings & Defaults. It now shows the correct address, and your "copy of the email you sent" goes there too
• Expected Income on previous financial years was counting every current member, including those who joined later or had already left. It now only counts members who belonged during that year, and the Dues Breakdown CSV no longer counts resigned, suspended, excluded or deceased members
• The Configure External Links window on the Dashboard could appear empty if you have access to more than one unit, a double-click on Add Link created two copies, and the default Masonic Charitable Foundation bookmark couldn't be removed. All now fixed
• Monthly Form schedules could only be saved for the 1st of the month. Any day from 1 to 31 now works
• Changing the number of signatures on an Event Planner Signature Block (for example from 2 to 1) crashed the page. Now fixed
• The public Documentation pages now behave properly on mobile, including the menu and tutorial videos

Documentation

The documentation has been updated alongside every change in this release, and the Summons Creator guide in particular has been rewritten from top to bottom. As ever, it should be your first port of call, and there's a search box if you're hunting for something specific.

What's coming next?

With the Summons Creator now in everyone's hands, I expect the next few weeks to be about listening: smoothing whatever rough edges you find, and helping Lodges get their first templates set up.

Beyond that, I'll be working back through the Feature Board. Visitors and guests on invitation responses are sitting right at the top of the votes, so that's very much on my mind. If there's something you'd like to see, please do add it or vote for it. It genuinely shapes what gets built.

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