Planning Center Change Log

New: Connect your AI tools to Check-Ins

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 18:33:45 GMT

You can now connect your AI tools to ask questions about your Check-Ins data. Look up who checked in, review headcounts, see which locations are set up for an event, and track attendance across services — all through natural language questions.

Check-Ins is the latest addition to the Planning Center MCP, joining People, Groups, Services, and Registrations — all of which are already available today. More products are on the way!

If you're already connected, you'll need to reconnect to get access to Check-Ins. Remove your existing connection and add it again, then approve Check-Ins during setup.

Ask about attendance, guests, and headcounts

Here are a few examples to get started:

"Which volunteers checked in on Sunday?"
"Show me all check-ins for VBS this week."
"What are the headcount totals for last week's services?"

What's included

Check-Ins adds five new tools to the MCP:

Events — list and search your Check-Ins events
Event times — see which time slots are configured for each event
Locations — view rooms, age groups, and folder structure for an event
Check-ins — look up individual check-in records with filters for regular attendees, guests, volunteers, one-time visitors, and checked-out status
Headcounts — retrieve manually-recorded attendance tallies by service time

Cross-product questions

Check-Ins works alongside the other connected products. Try questions that span multiple products:

"Is everyone scheduled to serve on Sunday also checked in?"
"Which small group leaders checked into Wednesday night?"
"Show me VBS registrants who also checked in to Summer Camp"

Your data is secure

Check-Ins follows the same security model as the other products. Only people with a Planning Center login can connect, and they'll only see data their permissions allow. Sensitive fields like security codes, medical notes, and emergency contacts are never included in AI responses.

Keeping your private data private

By default, some AI providers may use your conversations to train and improve their models — which means personal information from Planning Center could be included. Most providers offer a setting to opt out of this, and we recommend turning it off before connecting.

For setup instructions and troubleshooting, check out our help article on connecting AI tools to Planning Center.

What’s next

We're actively working on expanding support to even more Planning Center products. Join this group in our community to share feedback and tell us what you'd like to see next. We can't wait to hear how you're using it!

The API Team

New: Resources bulk delete

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 16:54:08 GMT

Bulk delete is now available for resources, making it faster to clean up outdated or unnecessary files from large resource lists. This complements the recent Resource pinning feature by reducing what admins and leaders need to curate.

In Groups, you can navigate to the resources page for a single group or the shared resources page. From there, select multiple resources with the checkboxes on the left, click Delete, and confirm the action. Groups will process the delete in the background and let you know when it’s done.

To help prevent accidental deletes, you’ll see a confirmation step before anything is removed. If your selection includes shared resources, Groups will clearly call that out so you know which resources need to be managed from the shared resources page instead.

Bulk delete is available for group-specific resources based on your role and permissions. Shared resources include an extra warning so they aren’t accidentally removed from places where other groups still rely on them.

Why this helps

Groups resources can pile up over time, especially after seasons, events, or curriculum cycles. Now, admins and leaders can clean up faster with bulk delete. Resource cleanup just got a lot less resource-intensive.

Team Groups

Improved: Easier to find resource actions

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 18:49:24 GMT

The resource download, open link, and edit action buttons have been moved from the far right in each row to now appear directly under the resource name, which makes resource actions easier to find especially in narrower browser windows.

Team Groups

New: Attachments in Registrations emails

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 18:22:40 GMT

For a lot of you, email is how you actually reach the people signed up for your event — but until now, those emails couldn't carry the very thing you were trying to send. If you wanted to send a PDF, a camp map, or a packing list, your options were to link out to a file somewhere, build a List in People, or export a CSV and copy-pasting addresses into your own email. More often than not, that meant extra steps for a message that should have been simple.

This has been a frequent request from Registrations admins, and it's available today! We've brought over the same email composer we use in People—so attachments work right where you write your Registrations emails.

Send the actual thing, not a link to it

Attach files directly to a Registrations email — a waiver, a packing list, a receipt, directions, or whatever your attendees need to open, save, or print.

Attendees get the file in their inbox, no extra clicks required.

A few more upgrades that came along for the ride

Because Registrations emails now use the People composer, you get some extras we think you'll like:

Choose your sender. Send from an email on your own profile or from the organization email.
Auto-saved drafts. Step away and come back — your message is waiting.
Name placeholders. Drop in the sender's or recipient's first and last name to personalize a message you're sending to everyone on a sign-up. (This is only available for general messages to registrants & emails you send straight from someone’s profile.)

A couple of practical limits, in line with our other email tools: images can be up to 10 MB each (JPG, PNG, or GIF), up to 20 per email, and up to 5 attachments, 10 MB each, 10 MB total.

This is part of a broader effort to make the email experience more consistent across Planning Center, so wherever you write a message, it works the way you'd expect. If there's something else you'd love to see in Registrations emails, we'd love to hear about it!

The Registrations & People Teams

New: Blockout, birthday, and anniversary reports for your teams

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 17:44:28 GMT

The master calendar has been one of the main places to see birthdays, anniversaries, and block-out dates in Services. But if you lead a team, the master calendar gives you too much (people not on your teams) and sometimes too little (volunteers who haven't been scheduled yet).

Today we're rolling out three new people reports built for how team leaders actually work: Blockout Reports, Birthday Reports, and Anniversary Reports, each available in both list view and calendar view.

How it works

Head to the people tab in Services, apply your preferred filters, and from the print report modal select the report option dropdown. You'll see the new options at the top, each with a list view for a straightforward roster and a calendar view for a month-at-a-glance layout.

Blockout Reports

Blockout reports show which of your team members are unavailable in the current and upcoming months. Whether you need to print out a physical copy or if you use it side-by-side while scheduling from the matrix, you can see the gaps before you schedule.

Birthday Reports

Birthday reports show upcoming birthdays for the people currently in your filter, so you can send a card or a shout-out to the volunteers on your team during your team huddles.

Anniversary Reports

Anniversary reports operate the same as birthday reports. If the team members in your filtered view have an anniversary on their profile they will show up in your report.

Because everything pulls from your people-tab filters, the reports reflect exactly the group you care about, whether that's a single team, multiple teams, or a custom filter.

Why this matters

Ministry is about people, and your team is what makes services happen week after week. Caring for them well means noticing the small things: the birthday to celebrate, the anniversary to acknowledge, the weekend they've already told you they can't cover. Those moments matter, and they're easy to miss when you're working from a report that may not have included the things you needed.

Using these new reports scoped to your filters means the birthday you see is a birthday you can act on, and the blockout you see belongs to someone actually on your schedule. Less noise, fewer misses, and a much clearer path to caring for your team.

Try it out

Open the people tab, apply your usual team filters, and click the reports menu. Look for the new birthday, anniversary, and blockout options, and try them out.

Team Services

New: Announcements block for custom pages

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 16:44:58 GMT

With announcements, you can create a centralized “what’s happening” list for your congregation. Now you can include your announcements on any custom page with the announcements block!

In the block editor, you’ll see a new product block for announcements:

Similar to other product blocks, you can include a headline, filter by campus or category, limit to featured announcements only, or limit the number shown. You can also choose whether you want to include images or keep it simple with a text-only list.

Announcements are automatically shown or hidden in the block the same way they are on the announcements page. No need to manually update multiple pages every time something changes — create your announcement once and know that it will show up in all the right places on the date you choose.

To see the announcements block in Church Center app, make sure you update to v2026.7.22 or later. (Users on older versions of the app can still access custom pages that include announcements, but the announcements block won’t be shown.)

Whether you’re creating a digital bulletin, including announcements on a ministry-specific page, building a volunteer opportunities hub, or something else, we can’t wait to see how you use the announcements block on your custom pages!

🩶 The Publishing Team

Improved: Date navigation on mobile

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 20:05:10 GMT

The mobile toolbar has been redesigned with dedicated date controls, so you can hop to any month on your calendar in just a couple of taps.

We've added Month, Year and Today buttons for quick navigation to a specific point in time. Simply tap on month or year, make your selection, and you’ll navigate straight there. Tap Today to snap right back. Actions and view settings are also now in dedicated menus so they’re just a tap away as well.

Why this matters

Plan further out without the scroll. Sketching out fall programming in June? Jump straight to September instead of swiping through July and August.
Navigate to past dates. Need to look up details about a past event? You can now navigate back in time to view past events on the go. Just choose the month and year of the event and you'll be there in no time.

For the best way to experience Calendar on your phone make sure that you check out the Planning Center app. It's our admin-centered app that brings together Tasks, Dashboards, Calendar and more — so whatever role you play at your church, your tools are a tap away. You can grab it from the App Store or Google Play.

Team Calendar

Improved: Longer summaries for announcements

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 15:39:40 GMT

You can now write longer summaries for your announcements — up to 500 characters, increased from the previous limit of 300 characters.

For featured announcements on desktop, the Church Center layout has been updated to accommodate longer text while still looking polished when your summary is short.

When an announcement needs a paragraph of information instead of just a sentence or two, we still recommend linking your announcement to a custom page — but hopefully this higher limit will give you more flexibility when just a little more context is required.

🩶 The Publishing Team

New: “Ask AI” for Instant Answers

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 14:08:24 GMT

Ask AI is Planning Center’s brand new AI-powered chat bot that is focused on answering all of your Planning Center questions without ever having to leave the work you’re doing. Use the question mark icon in the top right corner of any page to open the help center and the Ask AI button will be right there!

To get the juices flowing, you could ask about…

How to do something in a Planning Center product
What a product does or how plans and pricing work
Troubleshooting an issue you're running into
Building with our API and developer tools

Tailored to You

Add details about your role and the kind of work you do in settings so answers fit how you use Planning Center. Also, every conversation is saved so you can pick up where you left off or revisit an answer later.

Use the ... icon at the top of the chat window to access both of these pages.

Talk to a Human

Ask AI is going to equip you for success more often than not, but sometimes you just want to talk to a real person. We never want a chat bot to present a gate that you have to bust through to do that. Not only can you still send an email to reach out to our wonderful support team just like you always could, Ask AI will sometimes suggest you do just that!

Help us improve

As we’re all probably familiar with at this point, AI can make mistakes. That’s why we encourage you to use the / evaluation buttons at the bottom of each response to let us know how we’re doing.

While many other companies have chased AI to keep up with the trends, we’ve been quietly focusing on quality; cautiously testing internally, in beta groups, and also paid security tests. Our goal is to help you get the answers you need as quickly as possible so you can get back to doing the work only you can do. If our chat bot ever gets in the way of that by being wrong or off-topic, please let us know so we can fix it.

The Future

As we’re planning for how AI can be helpful inside Planning Center we would love to hear what you think. Check out our community spaces to chat with other users and our staff about what you’d like to see happen!

The Planning Center AI Team

New: Resource pinning

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 19:20:50 GMT

Keep the most important group resources easy to find by pinning them to the top of the list. Admins and group leaders can pin resources from Planning Center or Church Center, and members will see pinned resources first so forms, curriculum, links, or anything else people need regularly don’t get buried.

Pinning works for group-specific, shared, and leader only resources. Group-specific resources can be pinned for that group, while shared resources can be pinned across the groups they’re shared with or pinned just for an individual group when a leader wants to highlight something locally.

Pinned resources stay at the top while still respecting your selected sort order, and leaders can pin resources when adding or editing them.

(This change is in Groups on Planning Center, Church Center Web, and the Church Center iOS/Android apps v2026.7.8 or later)

Getting people to the right resource quickly can be tough when a group has a long list of files and links, so we wanted to make the important stuff easier to spot without adding more structure to manage.

We hope this helps you pin down what matters most.

Team Groups