Guide — Get running in 5 minutes

Quick start (5 minutes)

How do I go from a new account to real numbers on the screen?

1Create your account. The church name you enter becomes your organization — everyone you invite later shares it.
2Connect Planning Center. Open Settings, click Connect Planning Center, and approve the request in the popup as a Planning Center admin. We ask for read access to Giving, People, Check-Ins, Groups and Services.
3Run your first sync. Click Sync now on the connection card. The first sync pulls history and usually takes 2–10 minutes depending on how many years of records you have. Record counts appear on the card so you can reconcile against Planning Center.
4Set your fiscal year start month in Settings so budget forecasts line up with how your church actually plans.
5Invite your team from Settings (admin, analyst or viewer) and share a filtered link to the view they should watch.

After the first sync, a scheduled sync runs nightly and only pulls records that changed, with a full refresh once a week as a safety net. You never have to click Sync again unless you want numbers updated immediately.

What good looks like after 5 minutes

Overview shows attendance for the last 90 days, a giving total with a comparison to last year, and the new-person-to-giver funnel. If a tile says no data, the matching Planning Center product either has no records for that window or was not included in the permissions you approved.

Where to click: Settings → Data connection

Reading the filters

How do I narrow every screen to the people and period I care about?

The filter bar sits under the page title and applies to the whole page. Which filters appear depends on the page — attendance uses location and service/event, giving uses campus and membership.

Date range: The window everything is measured over. Comparisons use the same length of time one year earlier.
Grain: Day, week, month or quarter. Grain changes how points are grouped, not what is counted. Weekly is the honest default for attendance; monthly or quarterly is easier for giving conversations.
Campus: Campus as recorded in Planning Center. People with no campus set are grouped separately rather than dropped.
Membership: The membership value on the person's Planning Center record — useful for separating members from regular attenders.
Location / Event: Attendance only. Location is the headcount attendance type (room, service or online); event is the Planning Center check-in event, such as a specific service time.

Filters live in the page URL, so you can copy the address bar and send a staff member the exact view you are looking at.

Example

Set range to Last 12 months, grain to Month, campus to South, then send the link to your South campus pastor. They open the same filtered page without touching a control.

Overview scorecard

In one screen, how healthy is the church right now?

Attendance: Rolling 8-week average headcount per week, with the change against 8 weeks earlier.
Largest gathering: The attendance type with the most people counted — your main room or service.
New people: Person records added in the window, and how many took a next step.
Serving rate: Share of active attenders scheduled to serve at least once in the window.
Groups participation: Share of active people in at least one group.
Active givers: Distinct giving records with at least one gift in the window (counts, never names).
Total giving: Sum of gifts in the window, with the prior-year comparison.
Funnel: New person → group → serving → giving → repeat giver, so you can see where momentum is lost.

Read the change before the absolute number — flat attendance with fewer new people getting connected is a different story from flat attendance with more.

Example

Attendance holds steady but only 12% of new people join a group, serve or give. Attendance is being carried by regulars. Next step: open Engagement and work the not-yet-connected list by campus.

Where to click: Analytics → Overview

Attendance

How many are in the room, where do they gather, and how does that change through the year?

Attendance comes entirely from Planning Center Headcounts — the totals your team enters per service. Adults are rarely checked in individually, so headcounts are the only reliable source; nothing here depends on per-person check-ins.

8- and 13-week averages: Rolling weekly averages that smooth out one-off weeks and seasonal noise.
Where people gather: Each week's attendance split across your attendance types (rooms, services, online) as a share of the week.
Seasonal pattern: Average weekly attendance per calendar month across every synced year, for service planning.
Best and lowest week: The high and low weeks inside the selected range.

Example

Online share climbs from 15% to 30% over a winter while the total holds flat. The room is emptier even though attendance looks stable — plan in-person next steps accordingly.

Where to click: Analytics → Attendance

Engagement

Do new people get connected, who is serving, and who is in a group?

New people, next steps: Of the people added in this window, how many joined a group, served or gave — and how long it took.
Not yet connected: Active people with no group, no serving and no giving, broken down by campus.
Serving rate: Active attenders scheduled at least once in the window, from Planning Center Services.
Team breakdown: Serving counts per team, so you can see which teams carry the load.
Groups participation: Active people in at least one group, from Planning Center Groups.
Volunteer churn: People who served earlier in the window but not recently — the ones worth a phone call.

Example

Serving rate is steady at 22% but one team accounts for a third of all slots. That is a resilience problem, not a recruiting problem: recruit into the thin teams.

Where to click: Analytics → Engagement

Giving

How is generosity trending, and how does it compare with last year?

Year over year: Grouped bars. The x-axis is the period within the year (day, week, month or quarter) and the bars are this year against last year, so like periods sit side by side.
Trend: One continuous line on real calendar dates — best for spotting drift, one-off spikes and the effect of a campaign.
Small multiples: Turn on a breakout by campus or membership and you get one small chart per segment on a shared scale, instead of a tangle of lines.

Nothing on this page shows an individual donor. Every figure is an aggregate.

Example: reading a dip

March is down 12% year over year. Switch to Week grain — the loss is one week, not the month. Break out by campus and it sits entirely at one campus. That points to a missed service or a batch entered late, not a generosity trend.

Where to click: Analytics → Giving

Planning: Budget forecast

What number should I put in next year's budget, and how confident can I be?

The forecast is built bottom-up: each segment (campus, and optionally membership) is forecast on its own seasonal history, then the segments are added together. That captures the fact that a young campus and a long-established one grow differently, while still reporting one total.

Fiscal year: Totals roll up to your fiscal year, set by the start month in Settings.
Prediction intervals: 80%, 90% and 95% bands produced by conformal prediction — the model is scored against periods it never saw, and the size of its past misses sets the band width.
In-sample accuracy: How the model performed on held-back history. Use it to decide how much to trust the line before you budget against it.
Unattributed giving: Gifts with no donor record attached. Shown as its own category because it cannot be forecast from donor behaviour — treat it as planning uncertainty.

1Choose the fiscal year and the grain you budget in (usually month or quarter).
2Read the central forecast as the expectation, not the plan.
3Take the lower edge of the 80% band as a conservative budget number, and the gap up to the central line as your discretionary or contingency layer.
4Check the unattributed share. If it is large, widen your contingency rather than trusting the band alone.

Example

Next fiscal year forecasts at $2.40M with an 80% band of $2.18M–$2.63M. Budget committed costs to $2.18M, plan the next $220K as approve-if-it-arrives, and note that $95K of last year's giving was unattributed.

Where to click: Planning → Budget forecast

Planning: Fund cohorts & lifetime value

Who gives to a fund, how often, and what is a fund worth over time?

Households are grouped into cohorts using RFM — how Recently they gave, how Frequently, and how much Monetary value. No names, only cohorts and counts.

Recency: How long since the last gift. Recent givers respond to appeals; long-lapsed ones rarely do.
Frequency: How many separate gifts in the window. Frequency separates habitual givers from one-time responders.
Monetary: Total given in the window.
Cohort tiers: Combinations of the three, in plain terms: committed, steady, occasional, new, at-risk and lapsed.
Fund lifetime value: Average total a household in each cohort gives to the fund across its lifetime — the basis for what a similar new fund could raise.
First-90-day projection: A ramp curve fitted to how comparable funds started, used to estimate the first three months of a new fund.

Example

A building fund draws 60% of its money from the committed cohort and almost nothing from new households. A similar new fund should be launched to existing committed givers first; a broad all-church appeal will under-perform the projection.

Where to click: Planning → Fund analysis

Community & census

Who lives around our campuses, and how well do we reflect them?

Community profile: US Census demographics for the area around a campus address — population, income, age, race and education — set beside the same measures for your congregation.
Household map: Household density by ZIP area around each campus. All campuses stay pinned on the map; click a pin to re-anchor.
Campus overlap: ZIP areas served by more than one campus, which campus is strongest there, and whether a household has a closer campus than the one it attends.
Privacy suppression: ZIP areas with very few households are suppressed so no cluster can identify a family.

Campus addresses come from Planning Center Campuses and are geocoded during sync. If a campus is missing from the map, add its street address in Planning Center and run a sync.

Example

The area within three miles of your main campus is 34% under-35, while your congregation is 12% under-35. That gap is a ministry plan, not a data problem.

Where to click: Community → Profile and Map

Team & roles

How do I get my staff in here safely?

Admin: Manages the Planning Center connection, fiscal year, invitations and roles.
Analyst: Sees every analysis and can run a manual sync, but cannot change the connection or the team.
Viewer: Read-only access to the dashboards.

1Open Settings → Team and send an invitation by email with the role you want.
2The invitee creates an account from the invitation link and joins your organization automatically.
3Revoke a pending invitation or change a role at any time from the same panel.

Where to click: Settings → Team

Data, privacy & syncing

What is stored, how fresh is it, and who can see what?

Individual donor names and donor-level lists are never displayed anywhere in the app. Every giving figure is an aggregate.
A nightly sync pulls only records changed since the last run, using a per-entity watermark, so it is fast and safe to repeat.
A full refresh runs weekly to catch anything a changed-since query could miss, such as deletions.
Planning Center access tokens are encrypted at rest and are only ever used by the server, never sent to the browser.
Your data is isolated per organization at the database level, so one church can never read another's records.
Disconnecting Planning Center in Settings stops all syncing immediately.

Where to click: Settings → Data connection

Troubleshooting

Something looks wrong — what do I check first?

"Redirect URI is malformed or doesn't match": The callback URL in your Planning Center application does not match this site. Settings shows the exact callback URL with a copy button — paste it into the Planning Center application and try again.
No campus on anyone: Campus comes from the person's Planning Center record. Run a manual sync after setting campuses; if it is still empty, confirm the People permission was approved when you connected.
Attendance is empty: Attendance uses Headcounts only. If your team has not entered a headcount for the services in the window, the chart will be empty even though the sync succeeded — individual check-ins are not counted.
Numbers look stale: Check the last sync time on the connection card in Settings and click Sync now. Very recent gifts entered in Planning Center are picked up on the next sync, not instantly.
Counts don't match Planning Center: The connection card shows record counts per entity for reconciliation. Small differences are usually refunded or deleted records; if a whole entity is missing, reconnect so the current permissions are granted.

Where to click: Settings → Data connection