How to Track Hall Utilisation and Running Costs

Most community halls set their hire rate by looking at what the hall down the road charges, and
then adjust it when someone complains. That is not a pricing method, and it is why a great many
halls are quietly subsidised by whoever owns them without anyone having decided to subsidise
them.

You do not need sophisticated accounting to fix this. You need two numbers.

The two numbers

Annual cost to run the hall. Everything: utilities, insurance, cleaning, maintenance and
repairs, consumables, any paid staff or management time, a share of anything else the building consumes.

Bookings per year, and the hours they represent.

Divide the first by the second and you have cost per booking and cost per hour. Almost every
hall that does this for the first time finds the number higher than they expected — usually
because maintenance and cleaning were being thought of as occasional rather than continuous.

Count what is easy to forget

The cost side is where the errors are. The items most often left out:

• Cleaning, when it is done by a volunteer. Unpaid is not without a cost; if that person stopped, you
  would pay someone.
• Maintenance, averaged over several years rather than taken from a quiet one.
• Replacement of furniture, equipment and flooring, spread across its life.
• Empty-hours costs — heating, lighting and security that continue whether or not anyone
  booked.

Leaving these out does not make the hall cheaper. It moves the cost somewhere less visible,
where it eventually appears as a crisis.

Measure utilisation honestly

Utilisation is booked hours as a share of hours you could realistically let. Not of all hours in
the week — nobody is hiring a hall at four in the morning.

Decide what your lettable window actually is, then measure against it. A hall at thirty per cent
of a realistic window is in a very different position from one at seventy, and the two need
opposite responses: one has a demand problem, the other has a capacity or pricing one.

Look at the two together

This is where the value is. Cost per hour on its own invites the wrong response.

• Low utilisation, high cost per booking — the cost is spread over too few bookings. Raising
  the rate usually makes this worse. The work is on demand.
• High utilisation, high cost per booking — the rate is too low, or the cost base has grown
  without anyone noticing. This one is a pricing conversation.
• High utilisation, low cost per booking — you have room to invest in the building, and
  probably should before something forces you to.

The same cost figure means three different things depending on utilisation, which is why halls
that track only one of the two keep drawing the wrong conclusion.

Break it down by booking type

Not all bookings are equal. A regular weekly group at a modest rate may be more valuable than an
occasional event at a high one, once you account for turnaround effort, damage risk and the
certainty of the income.

Tag each booking by type and compare. Two patterns commonly appear: a category that generates
most of the damage and cleaning effort while paying a standard rate, and a category that is
almost pure margin because it needs no setup.

Review annually, decide deliberately

Once a year, put the numbers in front of whoever sets the rate. Not to raise it automatically —
to make the decision knowingly.

A committee that decides to subsidise community use, with the figure in front of them, is
governing. A committee that has never worked the figure out is subsidising by accident and will
discover it when the boiler fails.

Keep the underlying records simple

All of this comes out of two lists you probably keep already: a bookings list with dates, hours
and fees, and a spending record. The analysis is arithmetic.

The one habit that makes it possible is recording maintenance spending as it happens rather than
reconstructing it annually — reconstructions systematically miss the small repairs, which are
usually most of the total.