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Planning Center Check-Ins

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Blog

Mar 12, 2019

Direct Printing for Check-Ins

Printing plays a significant role in the overall speed of your check-in time—if one of your printers backs up or shuts down, you have a problem! Check-Ins strives to offer a consistently smooth printing process so your check-in time can be fast! We have found over the last few years, a few Check-Ins customers have experienced slow printing as a result of problems with external software outside our team’s control. When a browser, operating system, or printer’s software is updated, it can delay t

Scott Myers

Product Manager

2 min read

Aug 01, 2018

Fresh Stations Page Design

You should spend as little time as possible using Planning Center Check-Ins and as much time as possible doing ministry, which is why we are excited to share the new layout for the Stations page! We added more details about the information you need, and decreased the noise from the things you don’t. We thought it was time to give more screen space to the things you came to the Stations tab to use! On this page you will see all of the important details about your stations, including the St

Scott Myers

Product Manager

2 min read

Jul 19, 2018

More Settings for Your Check-Ins Locations

No matter how big your church or how many classrooms you have, one of the most chaotic aspects of Sunday morning is getting everyone to the right place after they check in. Today, we are giving you the power to decide how you want Check-Ins to suggest people to locations. In each of your event folders you will see a new Distribution section. The Waterfall and Balanced distribution options are designed to suggest locations for new people, or those who haven’t attended in a while. Wat

Scott Myers

Product Manager

2 min read

Jun 04, 2018

Emergency Contact Field in Registrations

Carson ate the craft project at VBS—a solid half pound of slime, toothpicks, and flannel. Who do you call? In the rare case an emergency occurs on your watch, we want to make sure you have the right contact information at your fingertips. Introducing the brand new Emergency Contact field in Registrations! The Emergency Contact field is an Attendance Types setting, which means you can set the field as required, optional, or hidden. When a person goes through the registration process, they c

Scott Myers

Product Manager

2 min read

May 23, 2018

Manned and Self Stations for Registration Events

Last year we released an integration between two of our applications, Check-Ins and Registrations. This integration allows you to check people into an event you created in Registrations using a Roster Station in Check-Ins. Today, the Check-Ins and Registrations teams announce a stronger integration with all station types in Check-Ins, which means you now have options. If you use a Roster Station in Check-Ins, you can call out roll “clipboard style” from a list of all your attendees, which

Scott Myers

Product Manager

3 min read

Mar 21, 2018

Edit Stations with Station Keys

Maybe you have had the experience of arriving to church before check-in time to make sure everything is ready to go...only to discover that none of the Stations are set properly. Little hassles like this with your Stations can turn into big problems! You need a fast, easy, and secure way to change those Station settings on the fly. Introducing Station Keys: a new way to edit station settings! As of today all Check-In Stations have an icon at the bottom right of the screen, whic

Scott Myers

Product Manager

2 min read

Nov 08, 2017

Handling Special Cases & Event Notes

Within the last week we released two highly requested features to Check-Ins: an option to ignore age and grade filters and the ability to create notes on each of your events. Handling Special Cases Every child is unique and has his or her own way of learning—not all children can fit inside the box of their age or grade. To help you ensure the children at your church are in the best classrooms for them we added an option to Ignore age and grade filters. If you have a child who needs to

Scott Myers

Product Manager

3 min read

Oct 09, 2017

Check-Ins for Mac and Windows

We’re excited to announce a new way to use Check-Ins on your laptop or desktop: an installable app made for each platform! Whether you use a Mac, Windows, iOS, or Android device, you can now download and install Check-Ins, built specifically for that device. No. More. Browsers. One of the greatest pain points over the last few years has been when a browser, such as Google Chrome, has updated itself over the weekend. This sometimes has broken the needed ties between your pr

Scott Myers

Product Manager

2 min read

Jun 15, 2017

It's Grade Promotion Time!

Summer is officially here, and with school ending, VBS in full-swing and preparation for the fall beginning, your church might be ready to promote grades! Just in case you’ve never promoted grades with Planning Center before, or you can’t remember how, here is detailed breakdown of how to do it in the People App. You might want to grab a piece of paper and a pen, this is a complex, multi-step process... Just kidding! It will take you less than one minute to promote every grade and check th

Jeff Berg

2 min read

Jun 06, 2017

Introducing: Registrations and Check-Ins Integration

We are excited to introduce our most highly requested integration -- with Planning Center Registrations and Check-Ins. Assignments All filters you create in your Registrations Assignments will automatically be carried over to Locations inside of Check-Ins. This is great for things like camps or Vacation Bible School where you want to assign certain people to groups or cabins, and have Check-Ins automatically direct them to the right location when they arrive. In Check-Ins, you

Scott Myers

Product Manager

3 min read

May 24, 2017

Introducing Headcounts for Android and iOS

Our Headcounts feature in Planning Center Check-Ins has been used by thousands of churches to record any type of attendance without tracking specific individuals. Until now, you’ve only been able to add and edit Headcounts from the Admin side of Check-Ins on the web. Today, we’re excited to announce a Headcounts app for Android and iOS with a few experiences built specifically for your church. We’ve built Headcounts with the people who take general attendance in mind, whether it

Scott Myers

Product Manager

3 min read

Mar 29, 2017

Introducing Trusted People

Sometimes there are situations where you’d like your neighbor, or grandmother, or a close friend to pick up your children from church. However, as a church, you need to clearly record who can check children in, and be notified of who should not check them out. That’s why we’ve created the concept of Trusted People and people who are Not Authorized for Pickup. Let me show you what that looks like. More Household Flexibility Trusted People are the type of close friends and family to your ho

Scott Myers

Product Manager

2 min read

Nov 15, 2016

Custom Labels, Roster Updates, and Suggested Locations

Check-Ins has been updated with quite a few useful features. We have some of the most highly requested custom label options available to all printers. We’ve updated Roster stations with some new sorting options and live-updates. And we’ve added suggested locations to manned stations. Custom Labels for all printers! You can now add a new custom label that will work on all printer types. We’ve collected the most popular requests for custom label printing, and added them to Check-Ins. Yo

Scott Myers

Product Manager

2 min read

Sep 30, 2016

Rosters are Now More Powerful

Our newest Station mode, Roster, just became a lot more powerful. Now you’re able to pull a list of people not only from a location, but also from a folder or an event. You can even switch between any location or folder that your Station has access to. In the above example, I’m pulling a Roster list from the “Youth Group” folder. Within that folder, there are a few other folders, for Jr. High and High School. I can freely move around throughout any folder or location within the Youth Group fo

Scott Myers

Product Manager

1 min read

Aug 11, 2016

New Check-Ins Profile Pages

We’re excited to have released a brand new way to view a profile on the admin side of Check-Ins. We’re one step closer to all of our apps having the same look and feel for a person's profile. The biggest reason for this change is to give you better tools to help troubleshoot or look up the most pertinent information about each person. The activity tab is where all this comes together. It’s best to think of this page as separated by the past (on the left) and the future (on the right). Lef

Scott Myers

Product Manager

2 min read

Jun 28, 2016

Expanding Check-Ins with our API

Last year at Orange, a children’s ministry conference, we met Brian Jones, a youth pastor that dabbles a bit in development. He shared with us how he uses our Check-Ins API to help with his ministry. We loved his ideas and implementation so much that we wanted to share two of them with you! (If you’re not a tech person, an API is an “Application Program Interface,” a tool to make one piece of software “talk to” another piece of software, especially when they’re built by different software develo

Scott Myers

Product Manager

2 min read

Jun 07, 2016

Introducing the Roster Station

We’re excited to announce a new type of station, a Roster Station. A Roster Station assembles a list of anyone who has checked in to this location within the last three sessions. The initial idea is to replace the clipboard you might have used when taking roll. But with Check-Ins, it can do a lot more. If labels are attached, they will print immediately. If there’s an issue that needs to be resolved, you’ll see an error message so you can fix the problem before finishing the check-in. You can

Scott Myers

Product Manager

2 min read

May 18, 2016

Check-Ins now supports Zebra printers!

The Check-Ins team is proud to announce a new member to our family: a Zebra! No, it’s not a new cross-species developer that requires a lot of hay; it’s support for a new printer… which instead requires a lot of labels. Zebra printers are arguably one of the leading printers for their durability and their quick printing speeds. Although they may be pricier than our other supported printers, if you’re needing to print out mass quantities quickly, you’ll want this printer. At 5 - 6 inches of la

Scott Myers

Product Manager

2 min read

Mar 31, 2016

Easter 2016 Brings a Basket of New Features

Last weekend was Easter, and it was a tremendous success! With over 280,000 check-ins during the week, it was a joy to see and hear about churches that had a safe and secure week, especially on one of the busiest weeks of the year. We have a rule at Planning Center that we won't add any new features a few weeks ahead of Easter, just to make sure that our churches' Holy Week events go super smoothly. What that means is that YOUR Easter basket is now filled with a lot of new features that have

Scott Myers

Product Manager

3 min read

Feb 23, 2016

Headcount Reports and Dymo-Mite Browser Support

Headcount Report After the release of Headcounts, we took some time to figure out exactly what type of reports were needed. Check out our newest report option! This update includes quite a few background changes that lay the groundwork for the future of reports. Now that you can choose a “type” of report, we hope to expand on that idea a bit more. Stay tuned for some new types of reports! Check-Ins now supports all browsers! If you were with us back in September 2015, you might

Scott Myers

Product Manager

1 min read