Integrating with Planning Center Online
ChurchSuite supports a two-way contact sync with Planning Center Online, enabling you to update contact details on one platform and have those contact details automatically updated on the other. ChurchSuite syncs the following fields of data between contacts in PCO People and selected contacts in your ChurchSuite Address Book:
- first name
- last name
- email address
- address
- mobile
- telephone
- work telephone
Planning Center Online Integration
Begin by heading into the Administrator area and the Integrations section. Click the entry marked Planning Center. If this option is not visible on your account, drop us a line at support@churchsuite.com and we'll add the integration to your account.
Click Start.
When prompted, log in to your Planning Center account. Click to Allow integration with ChurchSuite - the integration will fail if authorization is denied.
After successfully logging in you are returned to the Planning Center integration page with all your Planning Centre "People" listed - their PCO ID and PCO Name. You can now proceed with linking some or all of the PCO People to the corresponding Address Book Contact using the Search contacts drop-down next to each person in the list.
You can also optionally search for and select additional Address Book contacts to add as "People" in Planning Center. A PCO ID will be assigned to those added contacts, which will also be surfaced in the ID column. It's not possible to link PCO people to children in the Children module.
Intended sync functionality
The Planning Center sync won't update the ChurchSuite contact's 'modified time' unless it's changing some data for that contact. The 'modified time' is particularly important because it's what ChurchSuite uses to determine which system - ChurchSuite or Planning Center - has the most up-to-date data.
ChurchSuite syncs with Planning Center once each day. ChurchSuite also makes "live updates" to Planning Center whenever a change is made to a contact in the Address Book - the linked person is actively updated in Planning Center at the same time. This means that when the daily sync comes around, both Planning Center and ChurchSuite should already be up to date with any ChurchSuite edits that have been made in ChurchSuite, and only changes made in Planning Center that have a newer "modified date" will be updated back to ChurchSuite's Address Book. When first linking an Address Book contact to a PCO person, the record with the most recent "last modified" is deemed to be the authoritative record and will update the older record accordingly.