With great power comes great responsibility! Take a little time to get familiar with things now; it will save you and your volunteers time in the future.
This guide provides an overview of the main concepts to help you have a better understanding of what you are doing when you actually start setting things up.
Service Types and Plans organize information for any services or events happening at your church.
A Service Type contains related Plans, which usually happen weekly. Service Types also contain Teams and Templates related to its Plans.
A Plan is where you store all the details about a particular service. It can include service times, rehearsal times, the teams you've scheduled for that service, and all the items happening in that service.
When you create a new Service Type, you'll be guided through a wizard, which will also help you create the first plan for that Service Type.
Songs and media need to be added to your Services library before you can use them in a plan. You can then add songs, media, and other items to the plan in the order they will occur in the service.
When you are finished adding all your items to the plan, it should look similar to the example below.
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Headers divide your plan into different sections.
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Items are service elements such as announcements, baby dedications, and sermons.
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Song items include songs that are linked from your Song library.
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Media items include media that is linked from your Media library.
Volunteers serve together on teams, so it's best to schedule teams to serve all at once.
If you're taking over a new account, you may need to clean up previous teams.
Important
If you have Scheduler permissions, you can only email or schedule teams for which you are a Team Leader.
The Scheduling Your Teams article walks you through the most commonly used process for creating and scheduling teams.
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Create a team. Teams belong to Service Types, so when you create a team, you can schedule those team members to any plan in a Service Type.
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Set up scheduling templates that you can use to schedule team members who serve together regularly. For example, you could have a template with teams that serve the 1st and 3rd Sundays of the month, and another template for 2nd and 4th Sundays.
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Schedule people to plans. Import your templates to the plans that you want to schedule people to. If you have open needed positions after importing the template, add people to those needed positions.
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Send notifications. Email people that you've scheduled to notify them of their assignments.
Tip
Use the Matrix to schedule more than one week at a time.
Our Support Team is always here to help! Use the ? at the top right of every page to find articles or open a ticket with Support.
When you select that, you'll see this helpful dialog box.
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Type in what you're looking for. This will search our online manual and return articles on that topic.
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Suggested articles are based on the page you're on when you select the question mark.
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View introduction articles, watch video tutorials, or browse documentation to be taken directly to our online manual.
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Send an email to our Support Team. For the most efficient support, be sure to include specifics about what you're working with. When you submit your questions from here, we receive lots of information about your account, including the page you're viewing, which allows for fast and accurate support for your request.
Tip
Planning Center Support is dedicated to getting you an email response within an hour by investigating the issue in detail, asking for help from other seasoned team members, or even consulting a developer, if necessary. This type of direct assistance and shared knowledge is unavailable on the phone.
These requests to Support can only be made by organization administrators:
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Data removal or corrections you can't make yourself (undo old CSV imports, iCal imports, etc)
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Request promotional pricing (legacy plans, church plants, Giving contract promotion)
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Gain access to anything that was created and managed by someone else in the account
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Restore or fully delete a canceled account
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Disconnect a Stripe account
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Request access to Giving (if there are no current Giving administrators in the account)