New For You in Planning Center This Fall

Mia Belmont — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 16:36:52 GMT

There’s something magical about October: The air is crisper, and it’s finally cool enough to bundle up in my favorite chunky sweater and sip on a pumpkin spice latte. 🍂

Since sweater weather is officially upon us, there’s no better time to cozy up and highlight the new Planning Center features and improvements that make managing your church easier than whipping up a homemade apple pie. 🥧

Connect AI tools directly to Planning Center

Using AI tools to manage your admin work used to mean digging for data and spelling out context, with the fleeting hope that you’d found enough for a helpful answer.

With the Planning Center MCP, your AI tools get secure and direct access to the data that matters, so you can spend less time digging and more time with your people. Now, a question like “How many volunteers did we need for VBS last year?” yields an instant answer, all while keeping your people’s privacy protected.

Learn more

Swap WhatsApp for Church Center direct messaging

Communicating with groups and teams at your church often means managing multiple GroupMe, WhatsApp, or text threads chaotically.

The new DM chat feature saves you from going back and forth between messaging apps and Church Center: Your people can now message any fellow group or team member directly from Church Center. And because safety always takes a front seat, every chat with a minor automatically includes two adults.

Switch to Giving and import your past donation history

If you’ve been curious about using Giving as your donation platform but loathe the idea of maintaining two systems and splitting end-of-year statements for donors, the import donation tool might change your mind.

Integrating the donation history from your old platform into Giving now only takes a few simple steps, so you're not juggling a second donation platform while running the rest of your church's operations in Planning Center. Giving also links all donation history to your current donors, making it one less thing to worry about as the year comes to a close.

Learn how it works in Giving

View your weekly calendar on the go

If you manage groups or volunteers, you’ve almost certainly shuffled through a jam-packed monthly calendar just to find one event’s details.

The new week view in Calendar provides a simple breakdown of all your events and meetings. Whether you want to quickly confirm there aren’t any scheduling conflicts or just want a simplified view of everything on the agenda, you can now see your week at a glance on mobile or desktop.

See it in Calendar

Create a digital bulletin for church announcements

Meet announcements in Church Center: your digital bulletin board where your people can get a full view of events, volunteer opportunities, and announcements all in one place.

Announcements provide a one-stop shop for your church’s most important updates, so your people can have a clear view of how and where to get involved. You can even add links to each announcement, making engaging with events and opportunities easier than ever before.

See how it works

Set action automations for your People workflows

From adding a new small group member to welcoming first-time guests, workflows automate the follow-up process so nothing slips through the cracks. You can create workflow steps that perform actions automatically—such as sending a welcome email to new church members or creating a follow-up task for volunteer onboarding—further speeding up your follow-up processes.

Whether you’re configuring your workflows to snooze overnight or skip actions for certain people, creating automatic action steps is a must-have tool in your admin toolkit.

See how it works in People

Improved iOS compatibility for Services

Services just got a facelift that’s not only aesthetic, but efficient. By adopting iOS 26’s Liquid Glass design, we’re making sure Services mobile works like a charm with new capabilities. Next time you quickly check which songs you’re playing on Sunday, enjoy Services’ improved design that runs smoother on iOS 26.

Send emails with attachments and in-line images

If you rely on email to connect with your people, you know how difficult it used to be to build emails the way you wanted. Emails became walls of text without images, and accessing relevant attachments like PDFs left members digging through resources just to sign a waiver.

Now, you can share attachments and add in-line images to your emails so your people can access everything they need to get involved the moment they read your email.

See it in People, Groups, Giving, Calendar, Services, and Registrations

View Registrations and Giving payout reports in one place

Reviewing payment data used to mean jumping between three different dashboards just to compile payout reports. Now, the unified payout report provides a single view of your church’s payout data, all without having to leave Planning Center. You can find your payment data in Accounts under the Payments tab, shaving time off of the payout reconciliation process.

More Church Center, Giving, and Planning Center updates to watch

The improvements don’t stop there. Here’s a rapid-fire overview of a few more features that automate your ministry work even more seamlessly:

Preview appearance changes and customize header colors for Church Center: Access and edit your church’s branding and design in Church Center.
Ask AI: Get instant answers about how our products work, with our Support team still here and happy to help when you need a person to talk to.
Campus option on the donation form: Automate campus-specific donations by allowing donors to choose which campus their gift supports.

Preparing for the holiday season is hectic enough without communication and admin work adding fuel to the fire. These updates take a little off your plate, so that you can focus on what really matters: eating mashed potatoes with the ones you love. 😉

Workflows are now smarter (and less manual)

Savannah Frye — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 14:43:49 GMT

One of the best parts of my job is talking to customers. I was just at a conference chatting with a lot of different churches about what was working in their Planning Center setup, and one feature kept coming up: workflows!I was surprised, but also not surprised. Workflows are one of the most powerful and free tools inside Planning Center People (our free database) that I want more of our customers need to know about. Did I mention it’s free?

If you’re not familiar, workflows let you track people's progress through a process. Think membership, volunteer onboarding, baptism interest, any time someone needs to move through a series of steps before something is considered done. You build that follow-up process once, tracking where each person is, Without having to hold the whole thing in your head.

What I love about workflows is that churches use them to make sure their people get the care they need. But until this year, every step in a workflow still needed a person to take action, including the ones that took zero thought. You still had to send templated emails, mark people who had already registered as complete, or manually move completed cards to the next step. We knew we could do better, so our team got to work.

Automatic workflow steps

Now, when you edit a workflow step you can click "Perform an action automatically." Choose from actions like sending an email, setting a custom field, or creating a follow-up task, and more.

The moment a card arrives at that step, the action runs, it gets logged in the card history, and the card moves on. No one gets a notification asking them to do something a computer can do.

If something goes wrong, like the email template it's supposed to use got deleted, the card stays put and gets assigned to the backup assignee you chose in the step settings.

Three more automations for powerful workflows

Every ministry runs differently, so we built three more automations that work together for the needs of your church!

Skip conditions let you define which step applies to whom. Check "Skip this step in some conditions" and define your logic with the same conditions you use in People Lists. Someone who already registered for VBS bypasses the "Email registration details" step.

Overnight snooze lets you set your own unsnooze time and add after-hours rules like: "if a card comes in after 7 pm, snooze it until 8a m." Automatic actions are wonderful until your welcome email goes out at 11:40 pm because someone filled out a form from bed. 😴

Automations that complete a step push cards forward from the outside. If a step is just waiting on someone to register or submit a form, add an automation to that registration or form. When they do it, the card advances on its own or is removed from the workflow.

And all the admins overseeing volunteer onboarding workflow say amen.

What a membership workflow might look like

Here's a simple and smart membership example workflow using these automations.

Step 1: Send membership class info. Set this step to run automatically. The moment someone fills out your membership interest form, they’re added to the workflow, and step one emails them details and a link to register for your membership class. Auto snooze can hold it overnight so it sends at a good time.

Step 2: Wait for class registration. When they register, an automation from Registrations completes this step and moves the card forward.

Step 3: Wait for class completion. Once they check in to the event, they’re moved forward automatically.

Step 4: Mark them as a member. An automatic action can update custom fields your church has for membership.

Four steps. Minimal steps. No one falls through the cracks.

Check out this help article for more examples of common workflows.

Also new in workflows this year

Our People team has been busy this year making workflows better for our churches. Here’s a quick look at everything that’s shipped:

Assign and pin cards from automations, bulk actions, and form fields, so an "interested in baptism" response lands with your baptism coordinator automatically
The Assignees tab, showing everyone's overdue, snoozed, and ready counts across all workflows in one sortable view
Bulk update the default assignees across steps when someone changes roles
An “All Assignees” filter on the steps view, with your own cards highlighted
CSV export for any workflow, including days in step and days overdue
Bulk actions and redesigned tables for lists, workflows, and forms, plus a "Needs attention" filter
Attachments on workflow email replies, so a signed form comes back right onto the card

The goal of all of this: let workflows handle automatic actions, so your team can stay focused on the people on the other side of the cards.

Something else you wish you could automate? Tell us through the (?) icon in the top right corner of Planning Center. We want to keep making this better!

Church Center announcements: A new way to answer “What’s happening?”

Emily Jiles — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 17:57:44 GMT

There are probably a lot of ways people can find out about what’s going on at your church. Emails, flyers, texts, newsletters, a website—maybe all of the above.

Church Center brings all the ways people can engage with your church into one place.

Church Center is also the perfect place to communicate those updates.

The free announcements page in Church Center is the best way to loop everyone in on what’s most important for them to know.

Announcements can act as your new digital bulletin—a what’s happening page and a quick way for people to see what’s most important.

New Calendar event? Announcement page.

New event signup from Registrations? Announcement page.

Group signups just kicking off? Announcement page.

Starting a new building pledge campaign? Announcement page.

That random but important thing everyone needs to know? Announcement page!

How to make a Church Center announcements page

The announcements page is free to create and is live in every Publishing account!

From the Announcements tab under Content, you can make your announcement items.

Each item has a:

Title
Image (optional)
Summary (optional)
Link to a Church Center page or external URL (optional)

You can also choose when to show or hide an announcement in the announcements list and assign it to campuses and categories.

Click through this demo to see how easy it is!

As one of our customers said, when people ask where to find out what’s going on, “Church Center is always the answer, everything’s all in one place.”

Go set up your announcements!

New to Church Center and want to know what you can do next?

We know it can be a little overwhelming! There are a few resources you can check out depending on where you are in your journey.

Watch this webinar on how to set it up in under one hour.
Join the Church Center and Publishing channels in our customer community to see how other churches are doing things!
Still deciding between church apps? Use this compare page to help make your decision.

Why Church Center is the best place for your group and team chats

Jon Aleixo — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 17:29:11 GMT

New: Direct messages are now available in Church Center. Members of your groups and teams can now connect directly—one-on-one or in small groups. Learn how to get started.

Have you ever been in a group chat that started as a small fun thread and slowly became...everything? Prayer requests, memes, event planning, Netflix chatter, someone’s random musings about life.

The chaos wasn't the people; it was the tool. Using a general-purpose messaging app for your church has always been a bit of a compromise—not just for your community, but for safety too.

For a lot of churches, GroupMe or WhatsApp has become the default for communication. They're familiar and pretty easy to spin up. But there's a real downside: your church conversations live outside your church tools.

Church Center changes that.

Everything in one place

When your small groups and teams communicate through Church Center, your conversations are connected to the people and structures you've already built in Planning Center.

New group members get added to the right chats automatically, and when someone leaves, they're removed just as seamlessly. No more awkward "can someone remove Amy since she moved" moments. No more starting another text thread because your new guitar player has an Android (we love you Android users).

Conversations also live right next to everything else your people are already using. Group members can chat and browse group resources in the same place they sign up for events. Worship team members can chat and pull up chord charts without switching apps. It's all there, together.

And with DMs now available, your members can connect one-on-one without bouncing to another app.

Built with safety in mind

Church Center is genuinely different from GroupMe and WhatsApp. And we’re proud of that.

Neither of those apps knows anything about your congregation. They don't know who's a minor, who's a group leader, or who just showed up for the first time. They can't. They're general apps built for general audiences.

Church Center is built for churches.

That means safety isn't an add-on or “nice to have” for us. It's built into how communication works from the start. Here's what that looks like in practice:

Two adults, always. Any conversation that includes a teenager requires at least two adults to be in the chat. (That's by default, too. 💪)
Teens can't initiate DMs. If a teenager wants to reach out to their group leader, an adult has to start that conversation. This keeps conversations between adults and minors visible.
Age verification built in. Users without a birthdate on file have to verify their age before accessing chat. Anyone under 13 is completely blocked from chatting.
Admins are in control. As an admin, you decide whether DMs are enabled. You can turn it on completely, or keep it off entirely.
Members can opt out. Anyone who doesn't want to receive DMs can turn them off for themselves.

GroupMe and WhatsApp don’t do this because they're not designed for the relationships and rhythms that come with church communities. Church Center is.

Conversations stay in context

GroupMe and WhatsApp can easily turn into the Wild West. In Church Center, people can only message other people they share a group or team with. That's an intentional—and additional—layer of safety. It keeps conversations grounded in real, existing relationships, without giving access to the whole community or opening people up to conversations they might not welcome.

Your people are already in Church Center. Their giving, event signups, and volunteer schedules are all there. Why not have conversations there too?

💙 Planning Center

How 46 seniors found community and connection through Church Center

Emily Jiles — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 21:09:14 GMT

On any given week in San Antonio, a 87-year old walks into Grace Community Church and starts stretching.

She is one of 46 seniors—including five others in their 80s—who show up to the church every week for a strength class.

Terri, the church’s admin, has watched the whole class come together. And that was two years ago.

“We have a thriving community of seniors,” she said, “and Planning Center has really helped us to connect them better.”

A city rooted in military community

San Antonio, Texas is a hub of active military and retired veterans. Grace Community Church provides a place of worship and community for both. Terri is part of that story, too. Stationed in San Antonio 26 years ago, Terri discovered Grace—and never left.

While many of Grace’s ministries grew over the years—family, recovery, grief, PTSD, outreach, and others—their only senior-focused event, a monthly mid-week lunch potluck, dwindled in size.

That was until one church member, Jim, had an idea.

A 3-month mobility class experiment is now a weekly community

Jim, a retired physical therapist and member of Grace Community Church, noticed an increase in the number of members who’d taken a fall and were struggling physically. So he suggested a weekly strength class aimed at helping seniors find their footing, increase their stability, and strengthen their core.

Terri made an event signup in Planning Center Registrations to gauge interest. “The group really exploded!” she said.

Suddenly, they had a packed class: People brought friends and neighbors, and even former members started showing up as well.

After the 3-month experiment finished, everyone wanted to keep going!

The class had been a success, and its members wanted even more: a way to reach out and check in on each other in-between classes.

So Terri set up a group in Church Center!

A helping hand: the Church Center app

Grace Community Church has a strong community culture. Over 50% of attending adults are signed up for a regular small group, so many of the class members had already used Church Center for a group signup or online giving.

For those who hadn’t, Jim and his wife stayed before and after class to help people download the app and get set up.

Now all 46 group members use Church Center to share prayer requests, ask for rides, coordinate lawn maintenance, and help with other chores.

When someone misses class, they “razz” each other in the chat.

Today, class members coordinate lunches, Bible breakfasts, and share prayer requests in Church Center

Before this class, the only thing Grace Community Church had for their seniors was the slimly-attended monthly potluck—now it’s packed with people staying after the exercise class.

In the two years since the group started, new groups have sprung up—like a small band of 6-7 older gentlemen who now meet up for breakfast and support one another throughout the week.

And, “If anybody needs a ride,” Terri said, “they just put a little note out there in the Church Center chat, and somebody will go pick them up.”

You can learn more about Church Center and all the ways it can connect your community at planningcenter.com/church-center.

We found out about Grace Community Church’s story through the Planning Center community. The community is a great place to share ministry successes, ask questions, and get ideas on how to use Planning Center in ministry. We’d love to have you join us.

Announcing the Planning Center MCP: Connect ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI tools

Emily Jiles — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 17:11:30 GMT

You can now connect ChatGPT, Claude, or whatever AI tool you use to read/view data in your Planning Center account!

Ask quick questions about people, events, donations—anything in Planning Center
Build custom dashboards and reports with data from across Planning Center
Automate tasks in other software tools based on what’s in Planning Center
Audit settings in your account

The Planning Center MCP (Model Context Protocol) is available for Services, Giving, People, Registrations, Calendar, Groups, Publishing, and Check-Ins. The only edit or “write” abilities are in People: the AI tool can make notes and fill out forms on your behalf.

Even the most capable AI tools require a lot of context before they can do anything helpful. That empty chatbot window can feel a lot like that empty page of your college essay! Where to even start?

But your Planning Center account already has tons of ministry context: attendance, zip codes, schedules, demographics, engagement history. That’s a big headstart on context you can’t get anywhere else.

Connecting Planning Center to Claude or ChatGPT means you can access your work more easily, without manually feeding the model everything it needs to know.

A lot of churches are using AI tools to help automate tasks, summarize content, and create efficient processes. Our goal is to equip you with the access you need to use these tools alongside Planning Center, however you want to.

A few reasons to use the Planning Center MCP

You don’t have to use AI tools in your ministry to be productive or to find value in Planning Center. And no matter what’s going on with AI, we’re committed to improving our products to do the work you need.

But the MCP is a great way to expand what you can do on your own through Planning Center!

Here a few ideas!

Ask questions and create reports across multiple products.

There are a few powerful ways to pull information from across Planning Center (like lists in People). But sometimes you need a customized report, or just a quick answer to a question without going through a whole process.

With the Planning Center MCP connected, you could use your AI of choice to put together an attendance dashboard that combines data from Services, Check-Ins, and Registrations.

You could also put together a giving report that takes attendance into account, or just ask who’s donated for a second time this year or in the last month.

Bring data context into your ministry projects quickly and easily.

Let’s say you’re planning a children’s ministry event, pulling from past curriculum, looking through meeting notes, and making your plan. Now you can use AI to inform your work by quickly pulling data from Planning Center!

How many volunteers did we need for VBS last year? How many kids signed up versus actually checked in? How did attendance numbers change each day of the week? Did we have a giving fund for VBS?

The Planning Center MCP can read/view data in all products

When you connect the Planning Center MCP, you can choose which products you will give the AI read (or view) access to.

Then when you ask a question, make a request, or start a project, the model can reference information from Planning Center to help with the response.

Additionally, if you give it access to People, you can allow write access, so it can actually make changes in your People account.

Right now, that means you can create notes and add them to people's profiles, and fill out forms.

How to use the Planning Center MCP

Open possibilities can be overwhelming. The Planning Center community is a great place to take your questions and ideas, and see how other churches are using technology in their ministries!

Our customers are doing all kinds of things, like:

Reviewing lists in People to see if the logic/conditions need to change to get accurate results
Creating an engagement dashboard of all of the ways people are engaging with the church for an at-a-glance view
Auditing settings in Groups: making sure the right type is set and the group description is published
Adding a prayer request note in someone’s profile
Using it with the Gmail MCP to summarize the email threads and add them to their profile

Join the community to share your projects and find inspiration.

Security settings: protecting people's privacy

It’s very important that you are in total control of how AI interacts with your Planning Center data.

By default, both OpenAI (ChatGPT) and Anthropic (Claude) can use your conversations to train their models, which can include personal information from Planning Center. But both Claude and ChatGPT offer a setting to turn this off. We strongly recommend doing this before you get started, and requiring all admins to do the same.

You also have total control over who has access to the MCP from your Planning Center account. A few settings will help you stay informed and keep your information safe.

All org admins will be notified when someone first connects to the Planning Center MCP.
You control who has access to the MCP. Org admins control who connects to the MCP. You can specify who and who isn’t allowed access, and you can revoke it any time.
People can only access data they have permission for in Planning Center. This does not expand your admin's access to what is in your Planning Center account.

Planning Center does not use your church data to train any AI models. We handle member data only as you instruct. Our tools are contractually prohibited from using any of your data for training, and we process all data securely under the same privacy standards as the rest of Planning Center. Read more about our commitments in our privacy policy.

How to connect the Planning Center MCP to ChatGPT or Claude

This doc outlines how to get things set up, so follow the step-by-step process here. We highly recommend you go through the entire checklist to make sure you’re aware of all the security nuances!

We’re planning to continue expanding what you can do with these AI tools through the connection to Planning Center. We hope this tool can help you do the work you are already doing to help and serve the people in your community.

Please let us know if you have any questions or ideas on what you’d like to see next. We’re looking forward to hearing how you use it!

💙 Planning Center

3 focus areas for a successful groups ministry launch

Savannah Frye — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 13:43:44 GMT

I’ve always loved August. As a kid, it was my favorite time of year because it was always marked by getting a new planner and new pens. That fresh-start-feeling is unbeatable.

Now, August not only marks the near end of the unbearable Nashville heat for me, it also means the ministry year is starting back! As a community group leader at my church, I see this time of year bring new people to the city, and I have the unique opportunity to help welcome them into my church community.

As someone with both a front-row seat to groups ministry and Planning Center products, here are 3 focus areas I'd make sure every group leader focuses on as groups ramp back up.

Setting up your groups and events

Before the fall, it’s important to set up your groups in Church Center so they’re easily discoverable.

Duplicating groups: If your groups look similar from year to year, or you need to create a new group that uses a lot of the same setup as an existing group, you can duplicate an existing group instead of building from scratch.

Unarchiving previously used groups: Instead of rebuilding groups, you can unarchive a group that starts back again in the fall, and its members, resources, chat conversations, and events will be restored.

Resource pinning: Once your groups are built and in Church Center, you can organize them with resource pinning. Pin links and files right inside your group in Church Center, so things like discussion guides, childcare details, and location information are easy to find.

RSVP to events: Members can RSVP to events right from the app. They can also add extra guests, so your leaders get an accurate headcount before anyone shows up. Perfect for the beginning of the year when people are inviting friends to try new groups.

Custom event images and promoting events to groups: Add custom images to make group events stand out in Church Center, or promote church-wide events to small groups so members can see what’s coming up.

Communicating with your groups

Finding a group in Church Center is just step one. Once members are in, it's where they stay connected with chat.

We have a senior exercise class that meets weekly. The members of this group routinely let each other know when they won't be there, share prayer requests, and solicit and offer help for rides, lawn maintenance, car trouble, etc. The chat feature has really connected the seniors in a way that has brought many more back to church after sitting things out for a long while!
Terri Donahoe, Grace Community Church

Enable group chat from Church Center: Group leaders can enable chat directly in Church Center, so group members have a powerful, efficient, and fun way to connect

Gender-specific chat: Leaders can create gender-specific conversations right inside Planning Center chat, and as new members join the group, they're automatically added to the right conversation.

Email digest: For members who aren't opening the chat every day, the email digest delivers a daily roundup of recent messages straight to their inbox so nobody misses a prayer request, reminder, or funny GIF.

Email images and attachments: Attach files directly to a Groups email or embed images inline. Your flyer or invitation shows up right in the message instead of hiding behind a "click here."

See how it’s going

Once your groups are in full swing, reporting is one of the best ways to keep tabs on the ministry's health. Here are a few of my favorite reporting tools.

Multi-group overview reporting: This report can help identify which groups across your ministry have low engagement, so you know where to follow up with a leader.

CSV export of the groups list: Use this when you need a portable snapshot of your groups directory to share with your pastor, elder board, or anyone who doesn't live in Planning Center.

CSV export for multi-group event attendance: This export helps when you need attendance data outside of Planning Center, for things like presentations, custom reports, or to combine it with other church data.

If your fall is anything like mine, it'll be full of good conversations, new friends, and a chili night or two. These tools will help your group season start smoothly so that you can spend less time on setup and more time on things that really matter, like perfecting your cornbeard recipe.

Online giving at Planning Center: Your biggest questions, answered

Jon Aleixo — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 15:42:23 GMT

If you’re considering Planning Center Giving as your online church giving platform, you’re in the right place. We know that switching donation platforms, or setting one up for the first time, can come with a lot of questions. So we put together answers to the ones we hear the most. By the time you're done reading, you'll have a clearer picture of what Giving can do for your church.

How much is Giving?

Pricing for Giving is based on the number of donations tracked through the platform each month. That includes donations processed through your online giving form and donations entered or imported into batches.

When you’re choosing your subscription, it’s helpful to think about the total volume across all your donation types:

Online credit/debit card or bank transfer/ACH donations initiated through Church Center, our church giving app
Cash and check donations manually entered into batches
Donations imported from third-party integrations
In-kind donations (including QCDs and DAFs) tracked in Giving

To get an idea of what your Giving subscription might be, visit our Pricing page.

How do processing fees work?

Online donations in the US are processed at 2.15% + $0.30 per transaction for credit/debit card and 0% + $0.30 per transaction for ACH bank transfer. Offline donations (cash, check, etc.) don’t incur any fees. We offer the lowest processing fees available so churches can save more money for their ministry needs. To see how much you can save, check out our pricing calculator!

Can we migrate or import our giving history from our current system?

Yes! You don't have to start from scratch when you migrate to Planning Center Giving. We offer a donation history import tool that makes it straightforward to bring your existing giving records over.

This import donation history guide walks you through preparing your import file and getting your account ready.

How do year-end giving statements work, especially if we're in the middle of a transition?

With Giving, you can generate and share donor statements easily, even if you're in the middle of transitioning from another platform. Our guide on creating and sharing donor statements covers everything you need to know to get those out to your donors at the end of the year.

Can we keep our current payment processor during the transition?

You definitely have flexibility here, especially if you’re concerned about recurring donors who haven’t gotten set up with Planning Center yet.

A couple of ways churches have handled this:

Approach 1: Track-only. You can use Giving purely to track donations without processing payments through it. You can complete the full Giving onboarding without setting up online payments, so you can get your records in order before making any changes to how donations are processed.

Approach 2: Dual-system transition. You can continue processing through your current platform while also processing new donations through Giving. This is a great option if you want to give donors a set window of time to migrate their recurring giving over to Giving.

We know how important it is to be able to track donations without losing people during transition, so you don’t have to make a hard switch overnight.

Can I record donations from outside of Giving, like cash, checks, or Venmo?

Absolutely. Whether your donors give by check, drop cash in the offering plate, or use a payment app like Venmo or Zelle, you can record all of those in Giving using batches. Batches let you manually enter, organize, and track donations that don't come through your online giving form. Giving also supports mobile church giving so donors can give from anywhere, any time. Additionally, you can use the donation import tool to import these donations in bulk. The import tool will create a batch for you to review, making it easy to record donations in Giving.

Is there a QuickBooks integration?

There’s not a direct integration with QuickBooks or other ledger software. Giving offers robust CSV export options that make it easy to get your data into whatever accounting software you use. You can filter exports by date range, payment method, and even by deposit.

One tip: Instead of importing itemized donation records into your bookkeeping software, consider using journal entries instead. It saves time and keeps your records accurate. You can learn more in this guide for bookkeepers.

Can we export Giving reports?

Yes! Giving has a variety of reports you can pull and export. See our article Giving reports to learn what's available and how to use them.

How do we keep Giving and bookkeeping in sync?

The same CSV export tools that help with QuickBooks work well for keeping your books in sync. You can filter your exports by time period or donation type, and use journal entries in your ledger software to record the totals. Again, the guide for bookkeepers is your best friend here.

Switching giving platforms is a big decision, and it's okay to take your time getting there. We built Giving to make the whole process—from your first donation to your year-end statements—feel less like a challenge and more like one less thing to worry about.

Still have questions? We'd love to help! Reach out to our support team or start a free trial to experience Giving for yourself.

Switching to Planning Center Giving? Import your donation history

Jon Aleixo — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 17:04:07 GMT

Making the switch to a new donation platform is a big decision. One of the biggest hesitations we hear from churches considering a switch is that, when they migrate, they can’t bring their donation history with them, leaving them managing two different platforms and donors receiving split year-end statements.

Those are totally real—and fair—concerns.

That’s why we’re introducing our new import donation history tool! With all of your donation history in Planning Center Giving, this means:

Donation records aren’t split between multiple systems
Sending year-end statements happens in one place
People can see their full donation history in Church Center

Plus, you’ll be able to spot trends across multiple years without toggling between systems. You can even import your donation history without upgrading your Giving account!

Here’s how importing works

The import process is intentionally designed to be simple and straightforward. No need to put on a Steve Jobs turtleneck.

Export a CSV from your previous system. Your giving platform should let you export your data as a spreadsheet file.
Upload and map your columns. In Giving, go to Manage > Import Donations and upload your CSV. The tool walks you through matching your spreadsheet's columns to the right fields.
Review flagged rows. The tool automatically matches existing donor profiles and only flags the rows that need your attention.
Finalize your import. Once everything looks good, Giving creates in-progress batches organized by year, ready for you to review and submit.

If you change your mind about something, or realize there’s an error, you have a two-week window to undo the import. If you need to undo an import after that timeframe, please reach out to our Support team for help.

Import everything at once or slowly, and send single statements

Use this import tool to bring all of your past donations over at once, or use it as needed to move donations in batches.

Using another donation system, but want the giving activity in Planning Center? Import donations from your other system to see people’s donation records next to their attendance, prayer requests, volunteer schedule, and more.
In the middle of migration? Import the donations from your other platform and then send a single year-end statement from Planning Center Giving!
Just migrated but still have records from early 2026 in your last system? Import the donations so you can send a complete statement!
Fully moved over to Giving? Bring your records over to have a full donation history you and your congregants can see.

If you have any questions or want a recommendation based on your unique situation, email our support team! We’d love to help you out.

Built—and tested—alongside real churches

This tool is the result of years of listening to churches and learning what they need out of this tool. We’ve run a beta, ensured imports connect accurately to existing People records, and refined the process based on feedback from churches who tried it firsthand.

So if you’re evaluating Giving, or you’ve already migrated but your data is in your former platform, the donation import history tool is ready to help you make the transition.

Check out our demo for basic steps to get started, or visit our help article to learn how to prepare your CSV and manage your settings.

It makes sense to have all of your giving history in one place. Now it can be.

Not ready to make the full leap? Sign up for our Giving promo and get up to 12 months of your subscription free if you’re stuck in a contract with another donation system.

20 years of Sundays: A reflection from our founders

Jeff Berg — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 15:05:01 GMT

Hi there!

We’re Jeff and Aaron, co-founders of Planning Center. This week marks the 20th anniversary of Planning Center, and we’re deeply grateful for what this occasion represents.

For our churches, that’s 20 years of Sundays and the moments in between: baptisms, friendships made through small groups, and all the ministry moments big and small, seen and behind the scenes.

For us, it means two decades of choosing churches over investors, the long game over the easy exit: building and shipping one feature at a time, listening carefully to your needs, growing at a deliberate pace, and staying true to who we are.

These are the reasons we're still here, still independent, and still building for the future.

2006 was a different world

Before there was Planning Center, there was just a problem.

I (Jeff) was working at a church, overseeing graphics, web, and the internet (yes, all three). Every week I’d update spreadsheets and manually retype run times every time the order changed. At a big church like that, it was a massive headache. So I thought, “There has to be a better way.”

I (Aaron) was on staff at the same church, burning CDs and uploading MP3s for people to learn music, which was its own challenge. We both felt the same pain, and that intersection was where Planning Center started.

The first version was just a drag-and-drop order of service with timing. It was simple, but it solved our problem.

Then we added the accept and decline buttons—a single click that let a volunteer confirm or decline without logging in. That little feature changed everything.

We quickly learned other churches had the same challenges and wanted the tool we’d made, but sharing software was a lot harder in 2006 than it is now.

So we did what we could and worked with what we had: showing people at conferences and visiting churches to help them get set up. If someone suggested a feature, we’d even try to code it that same day.

Little did we know, we were building the DNA of our company that would follow us 20 years later: ship fast, serve well, and keep pushing forward.

A commitment to our customers: never being acquired

Two years ago I (Jeff) wrote a letter outlining our commitment to independence. The short version? Planning Center is not for sale, and we never will be.

Although this was a stance and commitment we had already made to ourselves, this was my first time putting it out into the open. And honestly, we were afraid people wouldn't believe it.

We watched other companies make similar promises and then slowly back away. Each one had good reasons. Each one probably meant it at the time. But once the circumstances changed—once they took an investment, or a number got big enough, or things got hard enough—the promise went out the door.

Our customers love our products in a rare way. They trust us with their ministry work, and we never want to lose that.

I don't think any other company would ever see the value that I see in Planning Center.

I wrote that letter to make it harder to go back on my word, to raise the stakes. Two years later, I have no regrets.

Being independent is a value, not a status

We're people who like to solve problems. And one of the hardest parts of staying independent is learning how to say no (to features, to markets, to opportunities) so that the yes-es actually mean something.

In order to have a good yes, you have to have a whole bunch of hard no's as well.

In our early days, we launched a product called Smart Events. It wasn’t church-specific, but it allowed anyone to handle registration for their events. It worked…kind of. But it wasn't right. So we tore it down and rebuilt it specifically for churches as Planning Center Registrations. That was the moment we finally had words for what we were actually doing: Help churches help people.

Staying independent has given us the freedom to pivot, to make calls that need to be made, and to ensure we realign to the right things.

20 years with churches, and what we’ve learned

We now serve tens of thousands of churches and have the pleasure of hearing from them often—at conferences, through social media, in emails.

What strikes us is that what they say isn’t only about specific features (though it often is). Instead, our customers praise our software as a whole and see that we’re not trying to squeeze them for every cent. That might sound simple, but we believe it’s the result of a conscious choice we’ve made over and over again.

We like to think about Planning Center as a building: We provide the infrastructure, a place for people to come, but we’re not the ministry. You’re doing the ministry. Our goal is to stay out of your way so you can get to the most important work.

Twenty years of serving churches has also taught us how genuinely different churches are from each other. We’re still surprised by it: the range of contexts, styles, and sizes, the number of creative ways people use our products. We want every church to be able to use Planning Center according to their own needs, and they've taught us how to make that possible.

What they've also shown us is that they value how we build, not just what we build. No sales team. No outside investors. No exploitative pricing. They're not just bought into the software; they're bought into the way we operate. That kind of trust isn't something we take for granted.

Looking ahead: we’re not stopping

In some ways, we're more in our groove than we've ever been. The systems, the people, the company infrastructure, it’s all here. Our team is doing the best work we’ve ever seen, and our core values aren't just words we’ve passed around to make ourselves feel good. They actually permeate how our team makes decisions, how we treat each other, how we treat our customers. That's hard to build and maintain, but we’re still up for the challenge.

So to every admin, pastor, worship leader, children’s director, and beyond who has ever logged into Planning Center and will log on today and again tomorrow, we want to say this directly:

Thank you.

Thank you for trusting us. For using our products and, in doing so, giving us the freedom to build Planning Center the way we've always believed it should be built.

There's not a day we’re not in awe that this is the work we get to do, and you’re the whole point of it all.

Thank you for being on this journey with us: 20 years of Sundays. Now here’s to all the ones still ahead.

Jeff Berg & Aaron Stewart

Planning Center Co-Founders