26th Aug 26

✨ New

• Keep a gun's paperwork with the gun — you can now attach documents to any of your guns, such as a Police notification (Form 11), a variation letter, proof marks or a receipt. Open a gun, select Edit and upload up to 5 files (up to 2MB each, as PDF, JPEG, PNG or HEIC). The gun's page lists each file with its name, size and upload date, with buttons to download or remove it. Your documents stay private to you and your club's admins, the download links can't be shared or guessed, and a gun's files are removed if the gun is.

• Record an ER5 explosives certificate — black-powder shooters can now record a police-issued ER5 explosives certificate alongside an FAC or SGC. Pick ER5 as the certificate type wherever you add firearms certificates (during sign-up, on your profile, or when an admin manages your record), then enter the certificate number, issuing police force and expiry date as usual. It's stored and expiry-tracked just like your other certificates.

• Add calibres for your whole club — you can now add club-wide calibres that every member can pick, on top of Range Mate's built-in list and members' own personal ones. Handy for things like air rifle pellet types and weights (for example ".177 8.4gr pellet"). Add and manage them under Club settings → Club calibres. Your club calibres are only ever shown to your own members, never to another club, and adding or removing one is recorded in your club's audit history.

• Approval-gated event bookings. You can now make an event need approval before a member's place is confirmed. On the event form under Advanced options, add a role rule and choose Requires approval. Members with that role see Request to book instead of Book now, and their request waits as pending without using up a place: availability, the "places left" badge, the calendar feed and the fully booked marker only count confirmed bookings. Requesting to book uses the same booking page as everyone else, so the price shows as normal and optional extras, booking for juniors, and gun logging (where your club requires records) all work exactly as they do today. The whole party in one request is approved or declined together. You can also set exactly which roles approve requests on an event by adding a Can approve rule (for example everyone on a practical night needs approval, but only your ROs can approve). Club admins, and anyone with a bookings manager role, can always approve. If you don't add a Can approve rule, only those admins and bookings managers can approve on that event: the roles that need approval can't approve their own kind, and nobody can approve a request they're booked into themselves. Approvers review waiting requests in the Booking requests queue and approve or decline each one with an optional reason. Club admins reach it through Action Items; other approvers (bookings managers and anyone named by a Can approve rule) get a Booking requests link with a count of what's waiting, in the main menu and in the account menu on phones. The queue shows who's coming (including juniors), any extras, the total, and how it will be paid. Members are emailed the outcome, and approvers get a daily reminder while requests are waiting. The old "Restrict to" and "Restrict from" role options move into the same place as flexible rules you can combine on one event.

• Approval works for paid events too, with no card taken up front. When an approval-gated event is paid in advance, requesting to book takes the member through checkout to save a card. No money is taken at that point, and if they close checkout without saving a card the request is cleared and never reaches you. If you approve their request, the saved card is charged the full booking total (including any extras and everyone in the party) automatically, and their place is confirmed. If you decline, nothing is ever charged and the saved card is removed. On the rare occasion a saved card needs the member to re-authorise it (for example an extra bank security step), we email them a payment link to finish. Their place isn't held until they pay, and if they don't finish within the usual short window it's released so others can book.

• Approval also works for pay-on-arrival events. A member can request a place on an event they'll pay for in cash on the day and still go through approval first. Nothing touches checkout: once you approve, their place is held and they pay on arrival as usual. Free events work the same way and never touch checkout.

• Approve requests straight from the event's Attendees tab. When you open an event that needs approval, the Attendees tab shows the requests waiting for that specific date, each with who's coming (including juniors), any extras, the total and how it'll be paid, and Approve or Decline buttons right there. The tab carries a small count so you can see at a glance there's something waiting. You only see this on events you can approve for. Approving or declining happens on the tab without the page reloading or jumping you back to Overview: the request drops off the waiting list, an approved place appears in the confirmed bookings below straight away, and the counts update as you go. If a place can't be confirmed (the event filled up while the request was waiting, or a saved card needs the member to re-authorise), the request stays put and tells you why instead of disappearing.

• Booking requests sit alongside your other things to action. Requests waiting for approval show up in your Action Items area (and its weekly summary email) next to outstanding declarations, shoots to sign off and the rest, with a count and a link through to review them. Everyone who can approve still gets a daily email reminder while requests are waiting (so single-admin clubs never wait days to hear about one).

• The booking request emails can be reworded. The four emails the approval flow sends (the request notice to your approvers, and the approved, declined and payment-needed emails to the member) are now in Club Settings → Email templates under Bookings, so you can put them in your club's own words like the other booking emails.

🔨 Improvements

• Check people in before the session starts. Range Officers can now tick people off on the Range Log at any point on the day, so a register taken at the safety brief works as expected. On kiosks, members can check themselves in from 30 minutes before the session starts rather than waiting for the exact start time. See Attendance & Range Logs.

• Club settings, reorganised — the settings tabs are gone. Opening Club settings from the admin menu now turns the sidebar into a settings menu, grouped by job: Club (profile, directory listing, plan and billing), Membership (joining and renewals, warnings and suspensions, payments, custom fields), Range and records (shooting records, declarations, kiosks) and Communications (email, email templates, police notifications, NRA Safe Shooter cards). A Back link at the top returns you to the main menu. Everything that lived on the old General and Integrations tabs has a clearly named home: the record keeping controls are together under Shooting records, and police notifications and NRA card requests each have their own page. Old bookmarks redirect to the right new page, and the Activity Log now lives under People in the admin menu.

• Kiosks are out of beta — kiosks are now generally available to every club. Set up a shared device at the range, like a wall-mounted tablet, and members can sign in on it without a password. Find them under Club settings → Kiosks.

• Connect your existing Stripe account — if your club already takes payments through Stripe, you no longer have to create a brand-new account. On your payment settings you now choose between Connect an existing Stripe account and Create a new Stripe account. Connecting an existing one sends you to Stripe to sign in and authorise Range Mate, then links that account so your events and membership payments all run through it. Need to switch later? You can connect a different account, and we'll ask you to confirm before replacing the one you're using.

• Add notes to a gun — each firearm now has an optional Notes field on the add and edit forms, for keeping load or setup details with the gun (ball size, wad, powder and the like). Your notes show on the gun's own page and are visible to you and your club's admins. It's free text, so it's for details about the gun itself, not other people's personal information.

• More gun categories to choose from — when you add or edit a gun, the category list now includes Unlicenced Pistol, Unlicenced Rifle, Suppressor/Moderator, Antique and Deactivated, alongside the existing Section categories. This lets you record air-category guns, moderators and antique or deactivated items that didn't fit before. It's a record label only and doesn't change who's allowed to hold what. Your existing guns and any category filters are unaffected.

• Whitelist your club calibres at a location — when a location has permitted-calibre limits switched on, its whitelist now offers your own club calibres alongside the built-in list, so you can allow them there too. As with everywhere else, you only ever see your own club's calibres, never another club's.

• Tidier workflow requirements table on a member's profile — on a member's admin profile, the Workflow progression requirements table no longer squashes its action buttons. Labels like Sign off and Mark met stay on one line instead of wrapping mid-word, so the table stays readable even for members with a lot of requirements. Cosmetic only, the buttons and what they do are unchanged.

🐛🔨 Bug Fixes

• Editing a firearm no longer resets its calibre. When an admin edited a member's gun, the calibre picker sometimes didn't show the gun's saved calibre, and saving quietly changed it to another calibre (often a 7.62). This happened when the gun used a calibre the member had added themselves. The picker now always shows and keeps the gun's current calibre, so editing other details leaves the calibre untouched.

• Membership prices are now kept to whole pounds and pence. Entering a price with more than two decimal places (for example 12.999) is rejected with a clear message, rather than being silently rounded to £13.00, so the price you type is always the price your members are charged.

• Adding a location now checks the basics. The new-location form used to save with no name at all, and would accept impossible figures in the muzzle energy, muzzle velocity and minimum age fields. A location now needs a name, and those three fields are kept within sensible limits, so a stray extra digit can't quietly break the calibre and age checks that use them. Leaving a field blank is still fine where it always was.

• Announcements now need a title and some content. It used to be possible to post an announcement with both the title and the message left blank, which published an empty announcement and, if you'd ticked the email option, could have sent a blank email to every member. Creating or saving an announcement now asks you to fill in a title and content first.

• Announcement wording fixed. The announcements pages had "Announcement" misspelled in a few places, including the heading on an announcement, and the New, Edit and Edit announcement buttons. Those now read correctly.

• Pay-on-arrival cancellations are now recorded and listed. When a member cancelled a booking on a pay-on-arrival event, the booking used to be removed completely, so nothing ever appeared on that event's cancelled bookings list. These cancellations are now kept and shown like any other, so you can see who dropped out. Cancellations of unpaid bookings from before this change weren't recorded, so they can't be shown retrospectively.

• Uploaded files can now be deleted from the Documents library. Clicking a file downloads it rather than opening it, so files never reached the Delete button that folders and pages have, and there was no way to remove an out-of-date PDF or form. Every row in a folder listing now has its own bin icon (shown only to people who can edit that item), so you can delete a file, page or folder without opening it. The Delete button in the top bar is now labelled too, rather than an icon on its own. See Documents.