‘Planning Center is a set of software tools to help you organize information, coordinate events, communicate with your team, and connect with your congregation.’ - the official definition on the Planning Center website.
In short, Planning Center is a church management software with a large degree of flexibility and adaptability, making it useful for centralized organization, administration, and communication for a congregation or diocese.
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When you log into Planning Center, you are ‘Home’. This is designated by a menu in the upper left corner. ‘Home’ has two screens - you can see them along the top to the right of ‘Home’ - for your Dashboard, and your Tasks. These give you an overview of what’s going on throughout the whole system (Dashboard), and what work is lined up for you today (Tasks).
You can learn more about setting up your Home page - including adding widgets - in the **Planning Center Guide.**
If you click the ‘Home’ button, it opens a drop-down menu of all the other Products - areas of ministry - where you can work in Planning Center.
When you click on any of these Products, it will take you to the screen that shows you all of the functions of that Product (notice they’re all color-coordinated!).
This is how you navigate throughout Planning Center - you pick the Product you’ll be working in according to its function (a little about that below!), click on it, and it will open up the related screen.
At the very bottom of the dropdown menu, you’ll notice a gear icon and ‘account settings’. Your settings are not usually part of your regular work in Planning Center, but they’re very important!
Click ‘Account Settings’ for things like setting up Church Center, adding your logo, and setting system administrators (those people who have access to every part of your Planning Center account).
Note that this screen - and ALL Planning Center screens - have various other screens that you can choose from within the larger topic/Product defined on the upper left.
So, in ‘Account settings’, you cal look across the top and see other topics like ‘Products’ and ‘People’, and down the left side you can see topics like ‘Church Center’ and ‘Integrations’. Clicking on any of those will open up other options. Planning Center ‘nests’ information like this to keep things as organized as possible. It’s a great idea to practice clicking on things just to see what’s there!
Note along the top the screens called ‘Products’ and ‘Billing’. Planning Center charges a sliding scale according to how many people are using each Product. You can see that scale - and change it - under ‘Products’. ‘Billing’ is for your payment information for Planning Center…