Planning Center Change Log

New: CarPlay and Android Auto support for Services mobile

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:44:05 GMT

Many team members use the Services Media Player to rehearse throughout the week. But until now, that required interacting with the phone screen, making it difficult (and unsafe) to use while driving.

Not anymore!

With Apple CarPlay and Android Auto support, the rehearsal experience is now:

Integrated with your vehicle interface
Designed for quick access to your service playlist
Hands-free and driver-friendly

Now you can practice your set while commuting, running errands, or heading to rehearsal, without needing to interact with your phone.

How it works

When your phone connects to your vehicle with an Apple CarPlay or Android Auto compatible display, the Services mobile app will appear as an available app in your vehicle interface.

You’ll see a familiar Now Playing experience with:

Song title and artwork
Song metadata (key, meter, and BPM)
Playback controls (play, pause, next, previous, skip forward 15 sec, skip backwards 15 sec)
Repeat option
A progress bar showing where you are in the song

Rehearse your current plan playlist

You can also open your Current Plan playlist and play through all the songs in your upcoming service.

From the vehicle interface you can:

Browse songs in your plan
Tap a track to start playback
Move through the setlist using next/previous controls

This makes it easy to rehearse the full order of songs during your commute.

Access upcoming service playlists

If you’re scheduled for multiple services, you can also view playlists for upcoming plans you’re scheduled to serve in.

From there you can:

Select a future service
Browse the songs in that plan
Start rehearsing right away

Why this matters

Accessing the most important ministry resources is now easier than ever. This update makes the things you need for rehearsing more readily available, especially when you're on the road, so you have what matters most wherever you are.

Try it out

To use Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with Services Mobile, update your app to the latest version (6.8.0) on your iOS or Android device.

New: The Planning Center mobile app

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:33:24 GMT

The Planning Center app is here, and it's designed to be your home base for everything happening across Planning Center! For a deeper dive with a video and demo, check out this blog post.

Download it now in the Apple App Store or on Google Play.

What's inside

Push notifications from every product — Get notified about schedule requests, workflow updates, calendar approvals, and more! No more wondering which app to check.
Browse any product — Open Services, Groups, Giving, People, or any other product right from the app. No more getting mixed in with your browser tabs.
Your dashboard, on the go — Your Home dashboard is the landing page. If it’s your first time ever setting up your dashboard, we'll automatically put action-oriented widgets towards the top so you can quickly find what needs attention without digging around.
Get things done — Complete tasks and collaborate on task lists to stay on top of everything you and your team need to do.

A note for Tasks app users

If you've been using the Tasks app, you're already in the right place! The Planning Center app is built on the same foundation — all of your tasks are still here, right where you left them. We've just expanded the app to serve the full Planning Center ecosystem.

We're just getting started — there's always more coming to the Planning Center app, and we can't wait to share it with you!

The Planning Center Mobile Team

New: Block out rooms and resources for maintenance

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:16:07 GMT

You can now block out rooms and resources for specific periods of time, giving your team a clear picture of what's actually available for booking.

Blockout dates work like events, but with a key difference: when a room or resource is blocked out, no one can request it during that time. Any conflicting bookings that overlap with a new blockout are automatically rejected, and the affected event owners are notified by email. You can create blockouts from a room or resource's page, or from a folder to block out everything in it at once.

Why this matters

Holiday closures made simple. Block out your entire building for Christmas week from one folder, and every room inside it is covered. No more creating workaround events and hoping people don't book over them.
Maintenance without surprises. When the Fellowship Hall floor is being refinished, block it out so event planners know immediately that it's unavailable — no back-and-forth with the facilities team.
Clear availability for everyone. Blocked-out rooms and resources show as unavailable throughout Calendar, so staff see the real picture when they're planning events.
No approval bottleneck. Blockouts are created by room and resource editors and bypass the normal approval process, so your facilities team can act quickly when something comes up.

Blockout dates appear in the events index alongside your regular events, and you can filter to show or hide them. We hope that this makes it simpler for you and your teams to stay on the same page!

Team Calendar

New: Attendance by group report

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 15:05:52 GMT

We’ve added a new Attendance by group report that helps you quickly spot which groups might need support without a ton of individual clicks.

Here’s what’s included:

A new Attendance tab has been added to the Reports section, and the Event attendance trend chart has been moved there. All attendance-related information is now easier to find in one place.
Sorted for action: sorted from lowest to highest attendance % by default—so the groups that may need attention rise to the top.
Helpful context at a glance: Average attendance %, Typical attendance count and number of events
Drill down when needed: Click a group to see attendance details at the member level

Attendance insights help you support your groups where they need it most — so you can spot struggling groups sooner and follow up with leaders faster.

We’d love to hear what you think and what you’d like to see next.

Team Groups

New: Export your product user table

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 19:15:16 GMT

If you've ever needed to audit who has access to what across your Planning Center products, you know the drill: open a profile, check their permissions, copy it to a spreadsheet, repeat. For larger organizations, that process can eat up a lot of time.

Now you can skip all of that. From your product users table in Accounts, you'll find a new export option that downloads a CSV of every person listed—along with their permissions across your Planning Center products.

A couple of things to know:

If your table has fewer than 500 people, the file downloads immediately.
If it's 500 or more, we'll send a download link to your primary email address so it's ready when the export finishes.
The export respects any product filters you have applied, so you can export a focused list rather than your full table every time.

Whether you're doing a routine permission review, cleaning up access before an onboarding cycle, or just want a clear picture of who has permission to what—this gives you that at a glance.

🩷The Accounts Team

Improved: Bulk update default assignees for workflow steps

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 17:34:39 GMT

When changing a default assignee on a workflow step, you can now apply that change to other steps at the same time.

Previously, we added alerts when a workflow step is missing a default assignee, which helps you spot gaps before people fall through the cracks. But if someone on your team transitions out of their role and they were the default assignee on several steps across a workflow, you would have to go into each step to fix that.

Now, when you change the default assignee in the "Edit step" modal, you'll see a new "Apply to" option that lets you decide how broadly to apply the change:

This step — updates only the step you're editing
This step and any without a default assignee — fills in the gaps across the workflow without overwriting steps that already have someone assigned
All steps — sets every step in the workflow to the new assignee

This should make staff transitions a lot smoother — especially for workflows with many steps. If there are other ways we can make managing workflows easier for your team, we'd love to hear about it!

The People Team,
Zane, Usborn, Shawn, Shane, Kody, Julia, Gabi, Fred, Dave, and Benson

New: Add internal notes to any registration

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 23:22:49 GMT

Admins and managers can now add internal notes directly on a registration. These notes are only visible to your team. Attendees will not see them.

Sometimes the most important context comes up during a follow-up call, a conversation at check-in, or while managing special accommodations. Now there is one place to keep track of it all.

Notes support rich text formatting, so you can use bold, italics, lists, and emoji.

We hope this gives your team one less thing to track outside of Planning Center and helps you stay organized.

The Registrations Team

New: Additional scheduling preference options for volunteers: "Once a quarter" and "Unavailable"

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 23:06:58 GMT

Two meaningful updates to scheduling preferences landed today, both aimed at giving volunteers and leaders more flexibility in how they manage availability.

New Scheduling Preference Options:

Once a Quarter
Unavailable

Not every volunteer wants to serve every few weeks, and not every break needs to mean leaving a team entirely. Volunteers who want to serve a handful of times a year can now set 'Once a quarter' as their frequency, and this preference will be handled both with auto-scheduling and manual scheduling automatically, at least 12 weeks between schedules. And when someone needs a breather from one specific team, they can set their preference to 'Unavailable' without it affecting any of the other teams they're a part of.

How It Works

If you're a Team Leader, navigate to the Members tab on the Team page or open a team member's profile, and within the frequency options in the scheduling preferences column, select "Once a quarter".

As a Volunteer, go to your profile, find the team, and set your own frequency preference the same way.

Unavailable

One of the common requests we've heard is the ability to block out dates for a specific team without affecting others. The tricky part is that blockout dates are designed around time ranges, not teams. What volunteers were really trying to communicate was simpler: "I don't want to serve on this team right now."

That's exactly what the new "Unavailable" preference does. Whether it's a busy season, or just a small break from a particular role, a volunteer can now be marked as "Unavailable" for a specific team without being removed from it entirely. The best part, they're still available to be scheduled on any other teams they serve on. When they're ready to return, the preference can be reset at any time by the volunteer or a leader.

Team Leader Steps

Navigate to your Team page
Open the team member's drawer
Set their scheduling preference to "Unavailable"

Go to your profile
Navigate to the preferences section
Find the team
Update your scheduling preference

A note on manual scheduling: Leaders can still force-schedule someone marked unavailable if needed, but they'll see a conflict warning, consistent with how other conflicts work today.

Why This Matters

Supporting the health of your volunteers is key. Aligning scheduling preferences with the needs of both team leaders and volunteers creates a clearer, better scheduling experience. This process allows for natural breaks in service based on current scheduling practices and offers more ways for your volunteers to continue contributing to your church.

Try it out

Open any team, find a volunteer, and take a look at the scheduling preference picker. Both options are available now.

Team Services

New: Inline images in emails

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 20:35:18 GMT

If you've ever wished you could drop an image right into an email in People—a photo from last Sunday's baptism, a graphic for an upcoming event, or a map to your new campus—you weren’t the only one. This has been one of your most-requested features for years, and today, it's here!

You can now insert images directly into the body of your People emails. Add them using the image icon in the toolbar, or drag and drop an image file right into the editor.

Where it works

Inline images are available everywhere you compose emails in People:

Emailing from a profile
Emailing from a list
Emailing from a workflow card or workflow step
Email templates

Images you send also appear in your communication history, so you'll always have a record of what was sent.

A few details

Supported formats: JPG, PNG, and GIF
Max file size: 10 MB per image
Images wider than the email content area are automatically resized to fit

We're excited to finally get this into your hands. If you have feedback on how inline images are working for your team's communications, we'd love to hear it!

The People Team,
Zane, Usborn, Shawn, Shane, Kody, Julia, Gabi, Fred, Dave, and Benson

Improved: Developer documentation site

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 20:08:46 GMT

The Planning Center API documentation has a new home at api.planningcenteronline.com/docs and has been rebuilt from the ground up to work better with the tools developers actually use.

Built to work with modern developer tools

The new site is fully readable by LLMs and renders without JavaScript, meaning tools like Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, or any AI-assisted coding workflow can now parse and reference our documentation directly, faster and with no extra setup required.

Easier to find what you need

Search has been improved, dark mode is supported, and a handful of small design refinements make it easier to scan and navigate across the API reference sections.

The API Team