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Blog

Jan 10, 2017

New in Accounts: Administrators

This new screen answers the question: who has access to our Planning Center? Organization Administrators now have a single, birds-eye view of the people who can access the church's Planning Center apps. You can sort the list by application or search for an administrator by name. For many churches, staff and volunteers have changed throughout the years which means the number of application admins has likely grown. Seeing them all in one place, we think, is becoming more important as th

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

1 min read

Jan 09, 2017

Emails, Workflow Improvements, and More!

Happy New Year! 2017 has arrived, bringing with it much excitement for what’s to come. We have so many ideas that we'll get to work on, several new team members to collaborate with, and even more churches to serve. Today, I want to highlight a few small changes we've made while we put the final touches on some major updates coming soon. Send Basic Emails Easier We've added a new way to contact a member of your church. Now you can click on the email icon at the top of their profile

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

2 min read

Dec 23, 2016

Very Merry Media Updates

You asked for a winter coat for Christmas, but you didn't want to miss out on prime coat-wearing season, so you opened it a month ago. That's kind of what happened with our new Media pages and player. Now that Christmas is basically here, it's time to officially introduce them, even though you've probably already seen them. But don't worry, we've put an extra special gift in your stocking that we've saved as a surprise until now! I guess you will just have to keep reading to find out what it is

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

6 min read

Dec 20, 2016

Faster, Flexible Batches

We love your feedback. We need it. We crave it. It's our compass. After 18 months and 6,373 help-desk tickets (as of this moment) it's easy to see which parts of Planning Center Giving are working well and which areas need improvement. Our project queue is still a mile long but as we round out 2016, we wanted to improve an existing feature: batches. Batches are how cash and check donations are added to the system. It's a core concept in Giving. In practice, working with batches felt a bit ted

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

1 min read

Dec 09, 2016

Planning Center Groups, Reporting for Duty!

When you log in to the administrative side of Planning Center Groups today, you'll find a new tab: Reports! High level reports are available on both the group type view and on the individual group view. Let's dive in! As an example, I'll take a look at the Small Groups group type and then a single small group. Reports for group types. At the top, we have some basic statistics about the current state of small groups at my church. 1. Health Stats - In addition to the number of gr

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

4 min read

Nov 30, 2016

Viewing, Exporting, and Contacting Donors

We've added new donor list functionality within Planning Center Giving! Now you can quickly get to your list of donors, download it as a CSV, or email the entire list right from Giving. Let's take a look at the new "View Existing Donors" section: 1. Date range & filters - Narrow the list down to only those donors who gave during a certain date range. Additionally, you can add a filter to include only donors who gave to a specific fund or gave a donation with a specific label. 2. "Only n

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

3 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

Nov 15, 2016

Scheduling Options United at Last

There have always been many ways to schedule people to your plans. Today we've made some changes that bring most of these options into one place, making it much easier to access and understand your scheduling options. We're also putting a bigger emphasis on importing templates, both in the plan, and now in the Matrix, since that's usually the best way to start scheduling. Teams First, we've renamed the entire people section from "Scheduled People" to "Teams." We did keep (Scheduled People

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

4 min read

Nov 14, 2016

Resources' New Features and New Look

The Resources team is excited to show off some things we’ve been working on for quite a while. Introducing, with quite a few brand new features, the new Rooms and Resources pages. The Look Since the Resources team was so jealous of how awesome Services is starting to look, we’ve borrowed a few concepts and design ideas from it. Editing details is now a joy to use with the new in-line editing. Need to edit the Resource name? Just click and start typing; it’ll save automatically for you

Scott Myers

Product Manager

3 min read

Oct 17, 2016

Touch ID Support is Here

Churches that use Planning Center have access to a ton of incredibly powerful data about the people in their church. When you understand a person's history of serving, attendance, and even giving, you’ve got another tool in your belt to help you serve that person better. All this information is powerful, valuable, and sensitive. The people in your church have entrusted you with their personal information and it’s up to you to keep it somewhere safe. We’ve always considered the security of you

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

2 min read

Oct 13, 2016

Text-to-Give is Now Free

Here's how it went down: Jeff (our CEO): Hey, I was thinking about Text-to-Give yesterday. Me (Giving product manager): Yeah? What's up? Jeff: What if we made it free? Me: Well, it takes money to run that service. Like, the short code and the SMS messages themselves. And we'll have those costs when we release in Canada too. Jeff: Yeah. Me: You're saying, we'll just eat that? Let me crunch some num– Jeff: I've never liked that it was an add-on. Have you? Me: No. We could roll it into th

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

3 min read

Oct 10, 2016

Announcing Duplicate Detection

We’ve just launched a long awaited and much requested feature that will save huge amounts of time and tidy up your data... automated duplicate detection! Duplicates slip in from all over. You might have a Tom Anderson in your database, but if he drops a check in the offering plate that says "Thomas Anderson" on it, there's a good chance you'll end up with two profiles for the same person. Similar situations can happen from online registrations, or old data that was imported from another ChMS.

Daniel Murphy

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

Sep 29, 2016

Registrations Now Supports Apple Pay!

With the release of iOS 10 and macOS Sierra comes Apple Pay for Web, the fastest way to pay for online purchases using Touch ID! As soon as Apple announced this feature, we knew we'd want to support it in all of our applications. The Good News Registrations now supports Apple Pay for Web! When someone registers for one of your events using an iPhone or iPad on iOS 10, or a Mac running macOS Sierra, they'll find the option to pay using their Apple Pay linked credit or debit card. There’s n

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

1 min read

Aug 22, 2016

Just Launched—Mobile Profile Editing

The wait is over! With the latest version of Planning Center People’s mobile app, you can create and edit profiles right on your iOS or Android device. Hurrah! Imagine a visitor to your church stops by your information booth. Instead of filling out a piece of paper that you'll have to deal with later (or maybe not...), you can enter it all in on your phone or tablet right then and there. In addition to recording basic contact and demographic information, you’ll be able to fill out your custom

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

1 min read

Aug 21, 2016

Introducing Eventful Groups

Today, we have some tasty new updates to Planning Center Groups. This week it's all about events! Repeating events Repeating events are here! Now you can schedule events to repeat every week, every-other-week*, every month, or every year. When editing a repeating event, you can delete or make changes to a single occurrence without affecting the rest in the series. Repeating events are available to anyone editing events: that means administrators on the admin side of Groups or group le

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

3 min read

Aug 15, 2016

The New Song Pages

For 10 years, Planning Center has been helping worship leaders plan and organize songs. As we move into the next decade, it's time to modernize the Song pages and make them more powerful for existing users while simplifying the layout to be cleaner and easier for new users. New Unified Layout We've combined what used to be two (or more) pages into one main page with song details always visible in the header, and all your arrangements visible as tabs on the side. To keep

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

8 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

Jul 20, 2016

Announcing New Profile Pages!

PCO Registrations just got even easier to use with its brand new profile pages! Registrations has always allowed users to make multiple payments on their registrations by following a link in their confirmation email. But for some people it can be difficult to find those old emails. Do you know anyone whose phone looks like this? Instead of having to find those emails, we want to make it easier for your attendees to come back to their existing registrations to make those payments. Fi

Daniel Murphy

Product Manager

1 min read

Jun 29, 2016

Launching Planning Center Groups

Today we're launching Planning Center Groups - the newest member of the Planning Center family. Groups is an application for streamlining the way you organize, manage, and support all the groups within your church. Last month we showed a sneak peek but today the wrapping comes off. Built for small groups. And big groups. Or any group. When we first started dreaming of this application, we had small groups in mind. Most churches, large or small, have some sort of small group ministr

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

3 min read