Planning Center quick start guide
Planning Center is a church management software (ChMS) with an integrated suite of products designed to help you keep track of all of your church’s information from your computer or mobile device.
This guide will help you through the Planning Center signup and setup process.
1. Sign up for an account and get started with People
Like other church management software (ChMS), Planning Center's pricing is set by the number of people; however, unlike other ChMS, there's no need to pay for features you won't use.
When you sign up to create a Planning Center account, each product will be selected at the free plan. It is recommended to leave each product at the free plan (you'll upgrade the products you need later) and simply get started with the People product.
People is the central hub for Planning Center products and the place to add and access information for your entire congregation. Plus, it's always free!
Simply leave the entire pricing page as is and select Sign up!
Tip
The email address and password you enter on this page is for you. Each person you give access to your organization will receive their own login information.
2. Set up your account
You should have received an email welcoming you to Planning Center right after you signed up. If you set up your account at that time, great! If you didn’t finish the account setup or haven’t started, this is the time to do it.
Account settings is the place for you to set up your account information. You will also go here to manage your Planning Center billing and subscriptions and add organization administrators.
The Set up a new account article will help you through the setup process, which includes:
Adding your organization information
Setting up billing information
Adding organization administrators and billing managers
Here's a five-minute video of what that setup process looks like:
After you’ve finished setting up your account, it’s time to create some profiles!
3. Add information to your database
After completing your account setup, the next step is to add data to People. The easiest way to add people’s information is to create an online form you can share with congregants that allows them to add their own information.
Steps for creating a form to gather people's information
Decide on the information you want to keep in a person's profile.
Go to your profile to see what information is already allowed from the default fields.
Create custom fields based on what information is not already a default field.
Create a form to gather information on people.
Important
Only people information can be imported into Planning Center. If you want other data to exist in your Planning Center database, you have the following options:
For Giving history, use a third-party integration.
For attendance history, you can add previous sessions and enter attendance manually.
You might not get all of the information you need from people filling out a form, or you might already have the data in a format that you can easily import into people. Here are some other options for adding people's information to the database.
Add each person's information directly into People. You can do this if you have people’s contact information written on paper, in a Word document, etc.
Import data into People if you already have your congregants’ information in a spreadsheet. You can then convert the file to a CSV and import it.
Use a third-party migration tool to import your data.
4. Subscribe to additional products
After you've added people to your database, you can start working with additional products.
Go to the Rolling out Planning Center products article to see the order in which it is recommended that you get started with other products and view the initial setup tasks to get you started.
Need help?
You have plenty of support available to assist you along the way.
Access the help center from the ? question mark icon in the toolbar of any product for step-by-step instructions on setting up and using each product.
Once you've started diving into a product and want more in-depth training, check out Planning Center University, which has videos on best practices for each product.
If you have any questions that can’t be answered in our articles or videos, feel free to contact Planning Center Support , who are happy to help!
Use the 30-day free trial to save money when adding a new product.
To get your team on board, follow this guide: Prepare to use Planning Center with your staff