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

Improved: Timestamp for confirmed check-ins

New: Search for pages and sermon content

Changed: Account settings navigation 

New: Require two-step verification (2SV) for org admins and billing managers

Improved: Refreshed “My Giving” experience in Church Center

Jon Aleixo

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 

wink

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

Emily Jiles

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.

During a server outage, our goal is to keep as many of our products and operations as functional as possible. 

We did everything we could to keep as many of our products online and operational (even if at a slower pace) throughout the outage and get everything back online as soon as we could.

Possibly yes, since most Planning Center features and systems were affected.

The AWS outage impacted the Church Center mobile app and web, Services mobile app, Check-Ins mobile app, and others. 

Your congregation may not have been able to donate, see songs and plans in Services, sign up for events, or use Check-ins during the outage. However, all of these operations are now fully online. 

Yes, all products and mobile apps are fully online.

By 10:15 p.m. PT on October 20, 2025, all Planning Center systems were fully operational, and all paused automations were run and refreshed.

This means all of our products and mobile apps are fully online and available, and your automated operations scheduled during the outage are complete, including:

You may need to clear your browser cache to see the changes.

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

. If you are still having issues after taking these steps, reach out to our support team at 

Where can I learn about future irregularities? 

 whenever something impacts our system. It’s the most accurate reflection of what’s going on in our products at any given time. You can also 

 to see if any other customers are experiencing what you are!

Additionally, you can always contact our Support team by clicking the question mark in the top right-hand corner of any product or emailing us at 

Reliability is a top priority for us, and we apologize for the disruption that this caused for your church and staff

blue_heart

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.

AWS Outage Response | Planning Center

We’re back: Planning Center is online after AWS outage

You’ve probably been there. It's Saturday night, and you're finally sitting down to relax when the thought creeps in: 

 You grab your phone, open the Services app, and scroll through the volunteer schedule. Sure enough, there’s a gap.

With new gap alerts, you can be notified when you’re missing volunteers and proactively fill those slots.

Your children’s ministry director has to close the 4-year-old classroom because there aren’t enough volunteers.

Your worship leader is trying to find a drummer at 8:45 p.m.; otherwise, they have to go full-on acoustic.

Tech Tim is running the livestream, operating the camera, 

 advancing the lyrics, which has everyone singing “You call me out upon the waters” for…a while.

You can help prevent scenarios like these, which is why we built gap alerts.

Every week in ministry is different and jam-packed. With everything you’ve already got going on, you shouldn't have to manually check your volunteer schedule every single day to make sure everything's covered.

Gap alerts becomes your proactive partner so you can fill all of your volunteer needs without the extra effort.

All you have to do is turn on scheduling gap alerts, send out your volunteer requests, and then give people a few days to respond. 

Then, instead of having to remember to follow up with people, we’ll send you a reminder, calling out which specific volunteer roles still need to be filled. From there, you can send out reminder emails to anyone who hasn’t confirmed and give them a little nudge. 

No more triple-checking the schedule, and no more scrambling. From here on out, just an intentional reminder so you can have the volunteers you need.

 is the place for volunteer teams to be managed and resourced. And now with gap alerts, you can take your volunteer management a step further.

So no matter what kind of team you’re leading, this feature was made for you. Because when every volunteer position is confirmed, everything runs smoother: classrooms stay open, newcomers are greeted with kindness, and services have fewer hiccups. 

Turn on gap alerts now and wave goodbye to the volunteer scramble. We have a feeling you won’t miss it one bit.

Gap Alerts | Planning Center Services

Get every volunteer role filled with gap alerts in Services

Today we released an early upgrade to lists in People for a small group of churches to try. The lists feature allows churches to search data from across the Planning Center system to find groups of people—from a list of first-time visitors, to lists based on donors who gave just in the last month, and so much more.

But now you can build complex reports just by typing out who you are looking for!

This is only available to a small group so we can improve performance based on feedback and monitor the reliability of the feature.

 to be notified as soon as we're ready to open up the beta!

An easier way to find people in your database

Using data from your People account, lists are 

 for identifying how people engage with your church.

Lists also come with a little bit of a learning curve, and we know a lot of church staff and volunteers have shied away from using it.

With this upgrade, you can enter in exactly who you want to find, such as:

Then we'll automatically create a set of suggested rules and conditions to help you build the right list!

This first iteration of the upgrade is focused on finding ways to make list-building even more accessible for other staff and volunteers soon.

Join the beta so we can tell you when it’s ready for you!

How we got here: Finding solutions through experimentation

When we first started looking into how AI could help make Planning Center easier to use, we opened the door to all kinds of technical possibilities, and we were excited about the potential!

At some point, though, some of the interactions with the natural language model we were playing with (simply defined as an AI system) started falling apart. Instead of providing accurate results, it hallucinated, provided answers to questions with made-up data, and extracted meaning we didn’t ask for or want.

This kind of inaccuracy and inconsistency is a known issue with many AI systems, and is exactly why people have a hard time trusting the solutions put out by tech companies.

As our CPO and co-founder Aaron said, “All‑purpose answers can’t promise truth, and that erodes trust.

But, because we’ve been watching the AI landscape carefully and we took the time to play around in the space, we better understood the technology and were ready to ask ourselves:  

What high-impact feature could AI make easier for our churches?

Once we found a specific way that the technology could make an administrative ministry workflow easier, we were cooking.

Innovation for churches— not tech for tech's sake

We are privately owned, and the churches who use our software are the only stakeholders we want to satisfy.

We’re committed to continuing our exploration of this new technology safely, ethically, and with you–your church–at the center.

Technology is never the point. AI is just another tool in service of our purpose—helping churches help people—and we promise to never hand you an AI tool we don’t trust and believe can meaningfully help.

A note on privacy: We are not training any AI models with church data

The large language model we use to help build lists never reads actual member profiles. Neither does it know which people are included in the conditions it creates. It only helps build the query itself.

Find groups of people in your church database more easily. Type who you need and our AI suggests conditions. Join the waitlist today. 

What’s new

Give every team their own calendar

Changelog

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

Improved Timestamp for confirmed check-ins

New Search for pages and sermon content

Changed Account settings navigation

New Require two-step verification (2SV) for org admins and billing managers

Improved Refreshed “My Giving” experience in Church Center