Improved: Donor notification for churches that don’t accept credit cards

New: Build lists faster, easier with AI using plain English

New: Parent and guardian household roles

New: Show event rooms on Church Center

New: Zebra support for Check-Ins mobile in beta

New: Add a memo line to your donation form

Improved: Simpler signup creation

New: Preschool Grades in Planning Center

New: School year options for Australia, Canada, and the UK

Improved: Easier to add organization admins and billing managers

New: Organize events with multiple calendars

New: File uploads and section headers on Church Center profiles

New: More column display options on the groups list

Improved: Clearer, more predictable notification badges on iOS

New: Attended/absent names in multi-group attendance export

Update: Terms of Service acceptance

New: ACH Payments for Registrations in beta

New: Daily repeating events

New: Split donations across multiple funds in Church Center app

Improved: New donation form now available everywhere

New: Message reply counts in the chat email digest

New: Tasks mobile app

New: CSV export of the groups list

New: Reply directly to messages in Chat

Changed: New groups default to leader-started chats

Jon Aleixo

2025 was a year of service, connection, and generosity—and you and your community made it all happen.

Last year, Planning Center churches created millions of service plans, scheduled volunteers in many roles (over 102 million!), rehearsed worship sets, and welcomed countless people through your doors. Week after week, you showed up to make the life of your church run smoothly and give people a place to belong.

You stayed connected, sending emails (more than 600 million) to keep your community informed, managing workflows to keep people from falling through the cracks, completing tasks that kept projects moving forward, and organizing events that brought people together.

For all the time and effort you put in, your community responded. So many people used the Church Center app to stay engaged with your church, gave generously to support your mission, filled out forms to help you organize information, and registered for over 6 million events that deepened the relationships within your community.

Want to see your personal impact? Log in to your Planning Center account to see your 2025 roundup!* There might be an extra surprise in there, too. 

wink

Your dedication to serving your community inspires us and drives everything we make. Thanks for trusting us and letting us be on the journey with you. Here’s to a wonderful 2026! 

raised_hands

*Reach out to your church’s Planning Center admin to enable your 2025 roundup if you can’t see it.

2025 was a year of service, connection, and generosity—here are some highlights.

2025 Recap | Planning Center

Your 2025 in Planning Center

Emily Jiles

Tax season is here, and that means it’s time to prepare donation statements for your church! While this annual task might feel routine, it can be a meaningful touchpoint with the generous people who make your ministry possible. A well-organized statement process shows your donors you value their support 

 helps them navigate their own tax preparation.

We know this season can feel overwhelming, so here are eight essential tips to make the process smoother and help you finish strong.

Sometimes donors accidentally create multiple profiles. Take a quick moment to review and 

. This ensures each donor receives a complete and accurate statement of their giving history.

2. Watch out for uncommitted cash and check batches

Uncommitted batches can hide donations from showing up on statements. Do a quick sweep to make sure everything’s been properly processed!

All monetary donations through credit/debit card, ACH bank transfer, or cash and check will automatically be included on the statement. You can also choose whether to include qualified charitable donations (QCDs) and donor-advised funds (DAFs). 

Your statements will include the donations within your specified date range and can’t be filtered by specific funds, payment sources, payment methods, or membership types.

4. Pay close attention to the received dates

Donation dates matter more than you might think. For a donation to be included in this year’s statement, it 

 be received on or before December 31, 2025 for churches in the US and Canada. 

 You can manually set the received date for batched donations to fall on or before December 31. ACH and card donations, though, are automatically dated when initiated and can't be back-dated.

Donors can receive joint statements if their profiles are 

. Just keep in mind that only two profiles can be joined, so it might not capture every household member.

6. Point donors to Church Center when statement download links expire

It might be a good idea to let your donors know that links to download their statements are only active for 14 days. After that time, donors can still access their statements but the original download link they were sent will redirect them to log into their Church Center profile to get their statement.

7. Edit or delete statements with mistakes

You may want to edit or delete a statement you realize has mistakes on it, like if you accidentally included a pledge progress or chose the wrong date range.

The good news is that you can! It just takes a few clicks. With the 

 button you can change the statement date range, or delete the statement completely. Nothing is set in stone until the statement is sent out. 

If only the printed portion of a statement has been generated, you can edit that statement and then regenerate it. You’ll just want to click the 

button on the print page, and then click 

Sometimes there can be errors on statements—it happens! Rest assured that when you fix something, the correct statements are easily accessible to your donors. Here’s how, based on the country.

We want you to feel supported with everything you need this statement season. Our support team is just a quick email away at 

 in the toolbar. They’re ready to help you navigate any challenges that pop up. 

We wish you a merry Christmas, a happy New Year, and a smooth statement season!

Send year-end donation statements quickly and easily with these 8 essential tips!

2025 Year-end Statement Tips | Planning Center Giving

Year-end donation statements: 8 essential tips for a smooth tax season

You're blitzing through the church lobby when a volunteer mentions the kids' check-in tablets are acting up again. 

Then you're grabbing things from the supply closet and remember you need to follow up with the new small group leader. 

By the time you're at your desk, you've accumulated five things you don't want to forget—but you've already forgotten two of them.

We built a mobile app for tasks. Now you can note tasks the moment they come to you, get notified when something needs your attention, and check things off your list without returning to your desk and opening your laptop.

Stay connected with notifications, not chained to your computer

Notifications come to your phone now, too. When someone assigns you a task, you'll know. When a deadline is approaching, you'll get reminded. You don't have to stay logged with your eyes peeled to your computer to stay informed.

The big change? You can finally write down tasks as they happen, no matter where you are or what you’re doing. Walking to your car? Create a task. Sitting in the waiting room at your kid's orthodontist appointment? Assign a task to your worship coordinator. Lying in bed and remember something important? Add it to your list before you forget for the next day.

You might be wondering: Why use Planning Center Tasks instead of another task management app, including the native one on your phone? 

Because your church work doesn't live in isolation.

With the Planning Center Tasks app, your to-do list lives where your church data lives. 

When you open a task, you can see who assigned it—if it’s related to a person in your database, a specific event you’re planning, a person you’re discipling, or a volunteer you’re scheduling—what event or service plan it's connected to, and so on.

Your personal task app doesn't know that "confirm sound check" is tied to 

 Sunday's Service plan. Planning Center does.

This app is straightforward: Create tasks, complete tasks, get notified, keep going.

We didn't build a complex project management system for your phone, and we’re not going to try to cram every Planning Center feature into a mobile interface. We built this app to do one thing really well: keep you on top of your tasks from wherever you are.

The simplicity is also intentional because it lays the foundation for what’s to come: more productivity tools across the entire Planning Center ecosystem, right to mobile, all in one app.

What you can expect from Planning Center Tasks

The tasks mobile app works exactly as you’d hope:

Planning Center Tasks is available now on 

. Download it now to stay on top of things wherever you go!

Note tasks the moment they come to you, get notified when something needs your attention, and check things off your list on the go.

The Planning Center Tasks App | Planning Center Home

The Planning Center Tasks app: Take your to-do list with you

It's December. Which means you're not just coordinating this year's candlelight Christmas Eve services—you're already sketching plans for early 2026. Youth lock-ins. Easter services. Summer camps. VBS. All-staff retreats. The list goes on.

You’ve probably been doing this work with one big calendar and a lot of tags. It works…sort of. But finding your team's events means filtering through everyone else's. And when you need to see how your events fit into the bigger church rhythm? You're toggling tags on and off, trying to remember which combination shows what you need.

What if each team just had their own calendar?

A Christmas miracle: Multiple calendars are here

 now supports multiple calendars, giving every team a clear home for the events they own!

 Create dedicated calendars for ministries, campuses, or facilities. Color-code them for fast scanning, and switch views without losing the big picture.

Your Google, Apple, or Outlook calendar has worked this way for a while, and we thought your Planning Center calendar should work this way too. There's just something different about having multiple calendars in your 

 where all of your ministry planning is happening. Because this isn't just your personal schedule, it's your church's entire rhythm. And now every team can see their part in it more clearly.

Calendars vs. tags: What’s the difference?

First, let's clarify how calendars and tags work together, because they serve different purposes.

 give ministry teams a single, central, and shared view of events their ministry is responsible for. Those ministry-specific events belong to their corresponding ministry. You might create calendars like:

 let you organize events by their common characteristics. An event can have as many tags as you need, and you can even use multiple tags from the same group. Tag groups can be marked as required. You can use tags for things like:

Here’s an example of what that could look like practically: Your youth ministry summer camp would belong to the Youth Ministry calendar, and might be tagged as an 

. The calendar marks ownership, while the tags mark attributes.

Give each ministry team their own calendar and watch what happens. Youth leaders can pull up their calendar and see only their events without having to sift through stuff that doesn’t apply to them. They can plan their quarter, spot gaps in programming, and know at a glance what's coming.

And when someone asks, "Who's in charge of that event?" the calendar answers the question. Ownership becomes clear.

Create a calendar for each location and have your multi-site coordination get much simpler. Need to see what's happening at your downtown campus next month? Just switch to that calendar view. Curious if any campuses are scheduling conflicting events? Toggle between campus calendars to compare them. 

It’s kind of the planning dream, right?

Make a central calendar for facilities-specific events, like building maintenance, arranging the sanctuary, or landscaping needs. You can visualize space utilization and allocate resources more strategically.

When you open Calendar, you'll see that we've already created a new calendar using your organization name. All of your existing events live there, and you can reassign them to new calendars whenever you're ready.

And if you've spent months (or years) building a thoughtful tagging system, don’t worry! That work isn’t lost. You can bulk-transfer events from specific tags into new calendars. Your Children's Ministry tag can become a Children's Ministry calendar in just a few clicks.

Your events will still appear in the same products they did before, and your room reservations and permissions still work too. The only difference now is how you 

It’s still one system—just easier to navigate. 

Multiple calendars are available now in… 

. So log in now and give every team their own home!

Create multiple individual calendars, and give every team a clear home for the events they own! 

Multiple Calendars | Planning Center Calendar

Give every team their own calendar

Savannah Frye

Picture this: It's promotion season, and you're responsible for getting every kid into the right classroom. With Planning Center, promoting grades K–12 is easy. But preschool? Not so simple, with only one Pre-K grade to group all kids under 5.

Today, we're releasing the ability to add more preschool options to your grade list: 

Infant, Preschool 1, Preschool 2, Preschool 3, and Pre-K. 

 (region-specific grade naming for Australia, the UK, and Canada) and 

Replacing workarounds with settings that 

Santa's gotten over 800 letters asking for more preschool grade options (800 feature requests from churches like you). So before our team started building, we reviewed the requests to determine how to build a solution that would solve the most problems for most churches.

We chatted with dozens of churches to find grade names that would be clear and make the most sense as you organize your kid’s ministry.

Add more preschool options to your grades lists across Planning Center

Until today, the only grade option before Kindergarten was Pre-K, making it a catch-all for ages 0-5. Now, you can choose to add 4 additional grades to group younger children: Infant, Preschool 1, Preschool 2, and Preschool 3. For churches in California, we’ve also included a Transitional Kindergarten (TK) grade option.

This means you can now have 5 different grades for those years before students enter Kindergarten! 

Note: Nothing will change in your account until your Organization Admin updates your localized account settings.

One of the most delightful parts of this new release is that we were able to add the ability to update the grade naming conventions to match local regions in Australia, the United Kingdom, and Canada.

No more “12th grade” when it should be Year 12. Somewhere in Australia, a kid’s pastor is having a very 

Here’s where it shows up throughout the system

Once you update your grades settings, you’ll see this change applied everywhere your grade’s list lives. Here’s a few examples.

will now hold the correct information on each child, which makes it easier for you to pull reports and communicate with parents. 

You can include preschool ages on your event signups and then auto-assign children based on their grades in 

Plus, parents and guardians can feel confident they are signing up for an event or filling out a form on 

We’re so excited to get this into your hands. If you don't have access to these settings, reach out to one of your 

You can also walk through this demo to see how easy it is to update this setting across your account.

We're releasing the ability to add more preschool options to your grade list: Infant, Preschool 1, Preschool 2, Preschool 3, and Pre-K. Plus, a special Christmas gift for our international churches (region-specific grade naming for Australia, the UK, and Canada) and churches in California (Transitional Kindergarten).



Preschool grade options for more accurate grouping

New preschool grade options for more accurate grouping

Starting today, you can switch your entire Planning Center experience to dark mode! 

All your tools are in the same place, and everything works as it did before—now just a little easier on the eyes. 

for the people who live in order of service every Sunday. 

Now, as you run the slides, sound board, or camera controls, hopping over to Services won’t feel like staring into the face of an exploding Death Star. No more squinting or fumbling with brightness settings.

The Force is strong with our new design 

Dark mode is the first system-wide update under our new, 

 Before now, creating a consistent dark mode across all Planning Center products was 

. Each product had its own approach to color, navigation, and styling—beautiful in their own way, but not built to work together.

By standardizing certain components and creating consistent styling across the system, our design and engineering teams could build dark mode and implement it everywhere in one swoop. 

And dark mode is just one example of the types of projects we can do now that we have a shared design foundation across our entire system.

Choose your path, and do or do not (either way there are cookies) 

Dark mode is available right now as a beta feature while we’re still testing things out and finding bugs. It’s a personal setting just for your account, so you can use dark mode while the rest of your team uses light mode—or vice versa.

You can enable it from your profile settings and switch between light mode, dark mode, or "follow system setting" (which automatically matches your appearance settings on your phone or computer).

 mode. Try it out and tell us what you think! 

black_heart

Starting today, you can switch your entire Planning Center experience to dark mode! All your tools are in the same place, and everything works as it did before—now just a little easier on the eyes. 

Introducing dark mode in Planning Center

Planning Center is about helping churches help people. Beyond making software tools, one of the best ways we can do that is by connecting you all to each other in a central place!

, a dedicated space where church leaders and administrators can connect, share ideas, and learn from each other's experiences.

We love our churches, and we've seen how you all support each other—whether troubleshooting a tricky workflow, sharing creative ideas, or just encouraging one another through the ups and downs of ministry.

This collaboration has always happened in various places—Facebook or Slack or Reddit—but we wanted to create a centralized home where these conversations can take place and everyone can benefit from them. A place where the collective wisdom of so many churches using Planning Center could be easily accessible, searchable, and organized.

 is our answer to that need—a space built specifically for you to connect, learn, and grow together.

What you’ll find inside the Planning Center Community

Let's get practical. Here's what the Planning Center Community actually looks like and how you can use it:

The Community is organized into dedicated spaces for each Planning Center product. This means you can jump straight into conversations about Services, Check-Ins, Groups, or whichever tool you're working with at the moment. 

No more sifting through unrelated posts—just relevant discussions, product announcements, and tips tailored to what you need.

In the Resources section, you can see how other churches are actually using Planning Center! Browse real examples of service plans from different churches. Explore various Church Center home pages to see what might resonate with your congregation. Get quick access to bite-sized Planning Center University clips to keep learning how to use features.

When you connect with other people who are navigating the same challenges you are, something powerful happens. You get fresh ideas, encouragement, and help from people who have been (and are!) in your shoes. What could be better?!

The Planning Center Community is designed to make connections with other people easy and meaningful.

Whether you're wondering how to organize your volunteer scheduling, looking for inspiration on how to set up custom signups, or needing tips on setting up your check-in stations, there's someone in the community who can help. 

This is just the beginning. As more of you join and contribute to the Community, it will grow into an even richer resource. We're excited to see the conversations that emerge, the solutions you find together, and the ways you help push each other forward.

A dedicated space where church leaders and administrators can connect, share ideas, and learn from each other's experiences! 

The Planning Center Community | Planning Center

Welcome to the new Planning Center Community!

You may have noticed that half the internet was down yesterday—social media apps, email providers, and thousands of websites were all unavailable during 

the largest internet disruption in over a year

 All Planning Center products and systems are fully operational, and any tasks or automations that were delayed by the outage are caught up—including recurring donations.

To all the churches who cheered us on and made a tough day better… thank you.

If you’re still getting up to speed, here’s an overview of what happened and what measures we’ve taken to get our tools back up and running for your ministry.

You can also skip to frequently asked questions below.

You can see the full breakdown of what was happening in our products on our 

, but here are the highlights from yesterday, October 20,2025: 

 Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage begins, impacting Planning Center products and causing scheduled tasks to fail. 

Our system was fully offline and inaccessible to churches. After 5:07 a.m., systems begin gradually recovering.

 and all delayed tasks ran successfully—including recurring donations.

If you keep seeing unexpected behavior in your account from the outage, please clear your browser’s cache and cookies: 

During this outage, Planning Center organizations may have experienced one or more of the following disruptions:

All accounts are fully operational, and automated tasks are completed

Your account is now fully operational, and all scheduled actions that were impacted during the AWS incident are now complete. This includes: 

No automated action in your account will be lost; all recurring donations have been processed, and all scheduled background tasks have been completed as expected. 

As these systems have come back online, you may see a backlog of emails now being delivered to your staff and/or congregation. We understand this can be confusing, and we apologize for any additional confusion this may have caused.

These have been the most commonly asked questions during this outage, and what we’ve heard from our customers so far.

 The world’s largest cloud server platform.

AWS is the most trusted provider of cloud storage and computer serving in the world. While yesterday’s outage was 

, AWS is a trusted resource. They have 99% historical reliability and incidents like this are very rare. 

AWS still provides us with the best and fastest solution to provide overall reliable software week-to-week.

Planning Center is committed to keeping our system operational.

All Planning Center products and systems are fully operational, and any tasks or automations that were delayed by the outage are caught up—including recurring donations.

What’s new

Your 2025 in Planning Center

Changelog

Improved Donor notification for churches that don’t accept credit cards

New Build lists faster, easier with AI using plain English

New Parent and guardian household roles

New Show event rooms on Church Center

New Zebra support for Check-Ins mobile in beta

New Add a memo line to your donation form

Improved Simpler signup creation

New Preschool Grades in Planning Center

New School year options for Australia, Canada, and the UK

Improved Easier to add organization admins and billing managers

New Organize events with multiple calendars

New File uploads and section headers on Church Center profiles

New More column display options on the groups list

Improved Clearer, more predictable notification badges on iOS

New Attended/absent names in multi-group attendance export

Update Terms of Service acceptance

New ACH Payments for Registrations in beta

New Daily repeating events

New Split donations across multiple funds in Church Center app

Improved New donation form now available everywhere

New Message reply counts in the chat email digest

New Tasks mobile app

New CSV export of the groups list

New Reply directly to messages in Chat

Changed New groups default to leader-started chats