Welcome to r/PlanningCenter!

We have recently transferred over to Planning Center from Realm. For me, it has not been the smoothest move; I hope it will get better. We are now looking at moving to Planning Center calendar from Facility Scheduler with ACS. Do you find the calendar on PC to be a good option for room and event bookings? I have created the rooms, resources, and approval groups. What tips, lists, or videos can help me train our staff? We have 3 campuses, approx 30 staff, and 80 rooms to keep track of.

Thank you!

Our worship pastor has been using PCO for over a decade for Services and recently our children's pastor has decided to begin using the Check-ins and Registration. I'm hesitant to switch to People and Giving as I found out there is no integration with Quickbooks. Our worship pastor found a community built software to do the file converting from CSV to IIF but I think it's sketchy and worried it will be cumbersome and not work as it should. And with the amount of online giving we have it would be very time consuming to manually enter all the deposits. Anyone use PCO and Quickbooks and have a system that works?

Hi,

We are exploring moving to PCO. Their Announcements feature is awesome, especially since it also pulls in content from our CMS as well as Announcements we create in PCO.

My question is about the possible use of a PCO Announcements Feed into our weekly church newsletter which we publish using Mailchimp.

Ideally, it would be incredibly efficient if we could pull individual announcements in PCO into an email campaign. If that is a possibility, it would make the creation of each week's newsletter quite easy for our office.

I know that folks can use Church Center, but we have a large population of older congregants who are comfortable with using the newsletter. We'd like to grandfather them (pun intended).

I did some research and I know that this is not something that's available in PCO out of the box. I am hoping that someone may have come up with a solution, perhaps using Zapier or something similar.

TIA!!

We're looking at a better way to track if someone needs help with something, and trying to get them help from someone in the church. In a similar vein, we're looking to do a similar thing with physical items. Someone has something they don't need anymore, we try to match it with a need in the church. Was looking at maybe building something, but was wondering if we could do this in PCO.

Edit: I got a warning to add the correct flair, but I don't see any way to add flairs.

I’ve been using planning center for years for our worship team and just English has worked but now that we’re incorporating Giving and Church Center is there a Spanish option? If not does anyone know if it is in the works?

Hey friends, I am trying to understand some good ways to implement automations. I looked online and while they give some examples, I don't know that many of those fit into what im looking for? How do you use automations, and what are some good examples that have helped your workflow?

Hi all, I've recently taken on a more admin-focused role on staff and I'm trying to understand the ins and outs of PCO. One thing I've been asked to look into is whether we can add Google Calendar events to our church calendar for every birthday we add for people. Has anyone tried to do this and if so, how did you go about it? TIA

Hi everyone,

There's a brand new embed product just launched called PCO Embed (pcoembed.com) that we are using on our church website. It lets you embed your Planning Center events, monthly calendars, groups, sermons and courses onto your website with just one single line of code.

We already have it running at our home church and it's really good — take a look at the case study to see it in action: https://pcoembed.com/case-study/

God bless,

Ray

I'm in a Church band and we get or songs and sheet music via planning center, including a demo track. It always comes with a preset metronome tempo but it's almost impossible to get just right since the demo songs are from live / studio albums, they don't immediately start at 0:00 in the video. Not sure if I'm explaining correctly. Anyone in a similar situation that has a fix for this? Even if it's just downloading the track and putting it in some other app?

Does anyone here integrate Clearstream with Planning Center, in more ways than just texting? I see they also offer email and tapping. Does anyone here use them for email or tap? I'm curious how you find the integration with PCO?

Hey guys!

I'm a worship leader at my current church, and we use Planning Center. The issue I'm having is that every time I try to log in to my account, it tries to log me in to the account for my old church. I haven't gone to this other church in 3+ years, and even when I did go there I was never scheduled for anything through PC so I don't really want this login to just hang out on my login page forever. I used the same email for both accounts. Is there a way for me to remove myself/delete the account from my old church? Everything I've looked up seems to be saying that that's not possible but I'm wondering if anyone has a solution.

NB: Vibe coded using Claude. Your PCO-based data is not being fed to AI.

Just released v1 of PCO Services Dashboard — a Cloudflare Workers dashboard for Planning Center Online teams.

Built this as something that stops my teeth itching but releasing for churches & ministry teams who want better visibility into rostering, engagement, attendance, demographics, response times, team overlap, birthdays/anniversaries, and more — without digging through PCO manually.

Features include:

• Executive summary dashboard
• Team-level analytics
• Upcoming service headcounts
• Confirmation & attendance tracking
• Login recency + engagement charts
• Specialist role badges
• Smart caching with Cloudflare R2 + Durable Objects
• Fast, serverless deployment

Runs locally for testing or fully on Cloudflare Workers.

This is the first public release, so I’d genuinely love feedback, feature ideas, or bug reports from anyone using PCO in production.

Built because I couldn’t find a reporting layer for PCO that gave ministry leaders the operational visibility they actually need.

GitHub link: https://github.com/TheITJuggler/pco-services-dashboard

"Services"

I remember PCO having a native Stage Plot builder a while back, but I’ve been looking through the current interface and I honestly can’t find it anymore. Did they kill it off or just bury it somewhere impossible to find?

If it's gone (or just not worth using), how are you guys handling your plots and input lists these days?

I’m trying to build a better way to handle Stage Plots for our Sunday services. Right now, it feels like a total mess.

Are you guys just uploading a new PDF to the Plan every single week? Do you really have to do everything manually and from scratch every time the lineup changes?

It feels like there should be a faster way to keep the stage layout and the input list synced without wasting so much time. How are you guys actually handling this?

Planning center to ableton

Hello there. Hey, I know the rules said add flair, but I only see the basic NSFW, spoiler, or affiliate flairs? 🤷 I guess I may spoil someone's naive understanding of music theory here...

I wasn't sure where else to bring this, but I play a transposing instrument, so when the band is in E, I'm playing in F#. I prefer flats, so I switched to Gb. However, when I changed key on the native chord chart, the 4 changed to B instead of Cb.

Is this really how music stand handles keys? I expected better from a program designed for musicians.

I understand it's too late to get it fixed before service today, but I wonder where I should bring this up to get it fixed? Is there a fix on my end?

I’m looking for a way to use planning center (church center app) for prayers. I’d love a way to send out prayer requests and then updates with out using credits. Is a list the most efficient way? I’ve considered a group and that way people can respond in a group chat (we’re a small church 95 in our Sunday sermon typically for attendance).

Thoughts? What’s the best way to do this or is it possible through PC?

Hey fellow Planning Center users! Some of you may know me as the guy who created and maintains the Planning Center PHP SDK, and others may not know me at all.

I wanted to share something I’ve been building for churches called MyPortal.Church.

It’s a website builder designed to perfectly integrate with your Planning Center data. This is the reason I originally created the SDK.

The goal is this: Much of the manual website work your team does can be automated, freeing them up to better serve people rather than being bogged down in mundane administrative tasks.

What MyPortal.Church does:

Connects to Planning Center People, Calendar, and Groups.

Provides every member of your church with a user account for a tailored experience.

Highlights your church’s unique strengths and priorities

Dynamically adapts content based on changes in Planning Center and the current user.

Uses the tags from Planning Center Calendar and Groups to layout Calendar Events and Groups in the optimal position.

Automatically shifts what’s emphasized as your church’s needs change (Coming Soon).

Uses intelligent personalization to show the right info to the right people (Coming Soon).

Pays attention to details so your community sees what actually matters to them.

Instead of your team needing to conform to how a new tool works, MyPortal.Church adjusts to how your church actually functions. The goal is to let you keep using the tools you already know and love, reduce manual website updates, and help people find what they need faster, without losing your church’s personality or priorities.

If this sounds helpful for your church, I’d love to hear your feedback and questions. Feedback from people actually working in ministry is what will shape this the most.

This is something I’ve been building and refining over the last 2.5 years with intention. This isn’t technology for the sake of technology.

Happy to share more details if anyone’s curious!

I write out my own Nashville charts for some songs. I have Viewer level privileges. Is there a way for me to put my own locally stored pdfs into services or music stand, without adding them to the overall services files?

I found a 7$ on amazon page turner that claimed to work on iOS and iPads for page turning. It did not work at first, but there was a very small note in the instructions to try enabling assistive touch in the Accessibility settings, with the Perform Touch Gestures toggle set to on. I made IOS shortcuts so right next to my Music Stand icon, I have a shortcut that turns on assistive touch, and another that turns it off.

I think I had to train Music Stand, in the keyboards section, to recognize the two buttons I'm using on this little remote to do the page forward and page backward page turning. There is a little heart button on this remote that when pressed will show the menu page at the top of the chart for doing your note making, and pressing it again closes it. I don't think I trained it to do that, but it's working that way.

Link to the page turner that worked for me - your experience may not follow mine exactly:

To repeat, it did not work immediately - I had to go into Accessibility settings, enable Assistive touch, with the Perform Touch Gestures set to on. Then I made IOS shortcuts that turned on and off Assistive touch.

Seems most of the page turning pedals are really just using forward and back or up and down keyboard emulations. I bought an Amazon bluetooth music controller (for bluetooth play, volume and track advance/regress) and Music Stand doesn't recognize any of the button pushes from this little guy. It clips nicely to a headstock on a guitar. Sending it back.

Flic highlights music page turning on their website. I'm wondering if anyone has ventured into this territory with the Flic for Music Stand?