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Oct 30, 2014

A couple wild months for Resources

Whew! It's been a crazy couple months for the Resources team. Here's what's been happening: Reservation Block Mini-Redesign There are a few places where people spend a lot of time in Resources. One of those is the "Reservation Block" page. As an event planner, it's where much of the work is done. It's the page where you add rooms, configure your requests, move resources around, and answer room/resource questions. As a facilities director, it's where you go to find out which requests are s

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

6 min read

Jul 31, 2014

iCal Feeds & Reports: More to Explore!

More is better. Well, usually it is. You wouldn't want more wisdom teeth. Or insect infestations. Or chins. But in this particular blog post… more is better! More options for ical feeds 1. Select what types of events you want to include in ical feeds. 2. Optionally include information about rooms and resources in the event notes. 3. By using event schedules you can now hide certain event times from ical feeds, just like you could with kiosks and the embeddable calendar widget. This

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

2 min read

Jul 29, 2014

Drag & Drop Uploads

Drop everything and rejoice, because the drag of having to use Flash for uploading files has been vanquished! We've just given our file uploader a big update that no longer requires you to have the Adobe Flash plugin to upload files, and adds some nifty improvements in the process. Uploading from the Attachments Box When you click 'add an attachment', the top Upload tab has a new design that makes it clear how to upload your files. You can click the button to choose a file from you

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

3 min read

Jun 25, 2014

Planning Center Check-Ins Released!

Bye Bye Beta After a month and a half of refining the application and listening to our wonderful testers, we are happy to take Check-Ins out of beta! We'll officially start charging for PCO Check-Ins in July. If you're not sure when your exact billing date is or you need to cancel your Check-Ins subscription, head to the account center. Also, as with all of our products, if you're in the middle of your first 30 day trial you won't see a charge until your next billing cycle. Okay, now onto

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

3 min read

Jun 24, 2014

Okay, Who's Hogging the Chairs?

When setting up an event in Resources, you may find that some rooms or resources are unavailable during your event's timespan. Hey, in a busy church it happens! Now you can quickly see which event has that room or resource booked. To jump over to that event, just click the name. Sometimes, a quick comment in the event discussion is all it takes to sort out resource conflicts: Your pals, The PCO Resources Crew. Dan, Jeremy, & Jake!

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

1 min read

Jun 12, 2014

Better Reports in Resources

Facilities managers love their reports. Today we've released some improvements to the reporting system in Resources. New Report Descriptions & Variables The new "Report Description" field will help you distinguish between reports. When you create a new report, you can describe what it does using this new field. We've also added some new variables about the reports themselves including {{report.title}}, {{report.scope}}, {{report.start_date}}, and {{report.end_date}}. Hurray! One List

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

2 min read

May 30, 2014

Split Teams

A couple weeks ago we published a blog post describing lots of smaller new features we've released recently. We alluded to a big new feature that was coming soon, and I'm thrilled to announce its arrival! Split Teams is a new way to configure your teams to schedule different people at each service time. For example, if you have a 9am and 11am service, but you schedule different Greeters for each time, you can split your First Impressions team to easily see which Greeters are scheduled for each

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

5 min read

May 09, 2014

New Feature Roundup

If you've used PCO Services for a while, you know we like to continually improve it by adding new features. You might have also noticed that we haven't added any big features recently. We do have a big feature that is really close to completion, but we've also been hard at work on some other things, too. For one, we've just finished a major upgrade to our west coast servers that sets us up for future features and keep things snappy for our ever-increasing number of users (especially now that we'

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

5 min read

Apr 08, 2014

Announcing Planning Center Check-Ins

UPDATE: This is an old article announcing Check-Ins! You can find up to date info here. Current subscribers can find up-to-date documentation and help articles here. Eight years ago we created Planning Center Services- the best worship-planning software on the market. Last year we launched Planning Center Resources- the best way to manage your church facilities. Today we are very excited to release our new child and volunteer check-in system, Planning Center Check-Ins! Simple Design

Jeff Berg

Owner / Developer

3 min read

Apr 07, 2014

Email Deliverability

We've recently had some reports of emails sent from PCO Services that weren't getting to users, even though the app was successfully sending them. After some investigation, we realized that because of the way we were sending emails (which we've done for years), Yahoo had recently decided that all email sent from PCO was bad and just wouldn't deliver it. The good news is that we have resolved this issue and all new emails should be deliverable now. For some more background information, read on.

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

3 min read

Mar 31, 2014

Event Archiving in Resources

If you've used Resources for a while, you probably have a growing number of old events. You're also probably tired of manually deleting them. Today, we've rolled out a new feature: event archiving. What it looks like: LEFT: Three of our events occurred in the past and they aren't scheduled to occur again. RIGHT: These three events are pulled from the main list and archived. How it works: Every night, Resources will take a look at your events. If all the reservation blocks occur

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

1 min read

Mar 07, 2014

Enhancements to Room and Resource Questions

We love seeing customers set up their Resources accounts in ways that make sense for their organization. One of the more heavily used features in Planning Center Resources are custom questions. Freeform room and resource questions help facilities managers gather the information they and their setup crews need. Here's what is new: Sortable Questions Now you can rearrange your questions after you've added them. Just give them the old drag-'n-drop to reorder the questions. Question Group

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

1 min read

Feb 12, 2014

Family Scheduling

When we first launched Planning Center Online in 2006, I don't think that even we knew all of the things that it would grow to be used for; we just wanted something that would help us to get away from spreadsheets and difficult scheduling scenarios for our worship teams. But once other ministries saw its capabilities, PCO Services grew to be a scheduling tool that could be used for lots of different scheduling needs, not just for the worship team. In 2011 we added the ability for people to sp

Reagan Helms

Community Support Lead

4 min read

Feb 10, 2014

Music Stand Version 3

Planning Center Music Stand is an add-on to PCO Services that connects to your account, downloads your music onto your tablet, and makes it easy to plan, practice or perform. Turn pages with a wireless foot pedal, take notes that are saved for the future, and listen to attached audio. Both the iPad and Android versions have been updated to version 3 with a new modern design customized for each operating system. We've also added tons of new features, so we decided to compile the best stuff in on

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

5 min read

Feb 03, 2014

File License Tracking

Staying legal with copyrights and licenses has always been a challenge. Luckily, with blanket licenses like the Rehearsal License by CCLI, and the Performance License by Christian Copyright Solutions, you pay one fee and get licenses for tons of songs. Those licenses cover pretty specific usage though. Just because you have a license to give rehearsal audio to your team doesn't mean you have a license to distribute purchased chord charts to them. If you use chord charts by SongSelect, they're

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

5 min read

Jan 23, 2014

A Few Fun Features

I can't be the first, so let me be the last person to wish you a happy new year! To ring in 2014, I thought it would be nice to let you know some of the smaller features we've released recently. We've got some big new features coming soon, but sometimes it's the little things that make the biggest difference. Chord Chart Auto-Save Don't you love it when you've spent the last hour meticulously crafting the most perfect of chord charts, you get distracted by Facebook in another tab, and bef

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

3 min read

Jan 14, 2014

Resources iOS App

Give the people what they want Okay! We hear you loud and clear. You like Resources on the web but you'd really like a true iOS application. Something you can download. Something with an icon. The Planning Center Resources iOS App for iPhone and iPad is now available in the App Store. Yep, it's free! An Enhanced iOS Experience There are a few advantages to using the Resources iOS application over the standard mobile website view: Full-screen kiosks for iPad The kiosk views in t

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

2 min read

Nov 25, 2013

Power to the Thumbs!

If you use Planning Center Resources primarily on your iPhone or Android phone, this update is for you. We've released tons of new functionality for small screens. New features for mobile: * Reports: For events, rooms, resources, & folders. * Room setups: Manage & add diagrams. * Approval groups: Administer on the fly. * Month-view calendar: New to mobile. * Calendar subscriptions: Use your native calendar app. Managers and setup crews rejoice! With this update, setup and ma

Jeremy Ricketts

Product Manager

1 min read

Nov 19, 2013

Mobile Mania, Polished Properties, and a Fleet of Features

Is it even possible to adequately document the epic nature of all the new stuff in Planning Center Services over the last couple of months? You've no doubt noticed some new things recently, but if you're like me and want to get every last bit of power out of your software, read on to be in the know of the new. Services for Android 2.0! Last week we were extremely proud to announce the monumental upgrade of Services for Android to a fully-native app! Though we did already have an app, it w

Aaron Stewart

Co-Founder / Product Manager

6 min read