There are different types of data that exist in Planning Center. Choose a heading to find out how to import your data.
You can import a CSV file of people data into Planning Center People. Once imported, all of your subscribed applications (Giving, Registrations, Check-Ins, etc) will be able to access those people and information.
Planning Center has a list of accepted fields, but if you have custom data for your people in that CSV, you might need to add custom fields, so there's a place to put all the data you are trying to import. Ensure there's a place in Planning Center People for all that data before importing the CSV.
If you already have some people that exist in Planning Center, you can still complete the import. If the person's first name, last name, given name, and name suffix match the record already on file, the system will recognize the duplicate and update their information instead of creating a new person.
Follow the steps in our importing article to import people.
Although your donors can be imported via the importer in Planning Center People, the Giving app does not have a tool available for importing historical donation records.
However, there are a few options for moving your donation history into Planning Center Giving:
-
Review the list of third-party integrations that others have built for Planning Center Giving. Your current donation platform might have already built an integration that can import to or synchronize with Giving.
-
Take a look at Planning Center Giving Import Tool–-a donation import system that works with Shelby Arena, Fellowship One (F1), Church Community Builder (CCB), and most donation systems that allow you to export donation history.
-
Create a payment source named after your old system, and manually enter past donations in batches for each donor. If this is not feasible, you could enter one "lump sum" entry for each fund total given by each donor.
-
Hire a developer to build an import script to bring donations from your current system to Planning Center Giving using the open API.
If you can't find a good way to get your historical donation history into Giving, consider issuing two end-of-year statements to your donors for the first year that you use Giving--one from your old system and one from Giving. If you can export a record of past donations from your old system, you can keep this as a record outside of Giving.
Attendance is taken in Check-Ins, but there's not a way to automatically import attendance. Create events and add past check-ins to each session one by one. You can also add general attendance numbers to Headcounts.
There's not a way to add past attendance from any group events.
Events exist in Calendar, Registrations, Check-Ins, Groups, and Services. Any event you want to have in the database must be created in the appropriate application.
In Calendar, you can import an iCal feed of events.