Planning Center
· #274 most-usedConnect, serve, and grow your congregation — all in one place
Planning Center is a church management platform built around the rhythms of ministry: coordinating weekend services, engaging volunteers, managing donations, tracking connection cards, and keeping a clean directory of every person your church has ever met. Connect it to Actionist and your agents can pull member profiles, post new donations, create service plans, fire on new workflow cards or form submissions, and coordinate across every PCO module — without anyone leaving the Actionist interface.
Eliminates manual work. Agents eliminate manual data entry across PCO modules — logging donations, routing workflow cards, refreshing lists, and coordinating volunteers — tasks that otherwise require staff to context-switch between four separate PCO apps.
What your Planning Center agent runs on autopilot
A week of scheduled jobs your Actionist agent will execute on your behalf.
Planning Center × every other app you use
End-to-end automations that span multiple apps — each one a real business outcome.
Visitor connection card routed to pastoral follow-up in seconds
When a visitor submits the connection card, the agent deduplicates against the People directory, creates or updates the profile, opens a workflow card for the pastoral team, and posts the visitor's name and interests to the follow-up Slack channel — all within about a minute of submission, so no first contact sits unactioned over the weekend.
Time saved for your team — every week, on autopilot
Savings
What your team gets back — two angles: what you stop doing manually, and what that's worth.
What you do manually today
What your agent runs for you
- Sales45 min / weekManual connection card processing
Staff collect paper or digital connection cards after each service, manually create or update People profiles, and hand-type workflow card assignments — a process that easily takes 30+ minutes per service and risks cards sitting unprocessed until Monday.
Sales Agent0 minAgent processes cards and opens follow-up within a minuteWhen a connection card form is submitted, the agent deduplicates the profile, creates or updates the People record, and opens a pastoral follow-up workflow card — all within about a minute of submission, even over the weekend.
- Marketing30 min / weekManual list monitoring and communication triggers
Staff periodically check People lists for new entrants, manually note which people have reached a given milestone, and hand-trigger communication sequences — a reactive process that misses the hour-of-entry window for follow-up.
Marketing Agent0 minAgent fires on new list entrants within about a minuteWhen a person is added to a key list — First-Time Visitor, Baptism Interest, Leadership Track — the agent triggers the matching communication sequence and logs the milestone automatically.
- Customer Support40 min / weekManual workflow card assignment and notification
When a new workflow card is created, staff check Planning Center, identify the assignee, and manually send a notification — often delayed until the assignee next checks their email or the Planning Center app.
Customer Support Agent0 minAgent notifies assignee in Slack with full contextWithin about a minute of a new workflow card being created, the agent fetches the linked person's profile and sends the assigned staff member a Slack message with name, workflow step, and a direct card link.
- Human Resources60 min / weekManual volunteer scheduling setup per plan
Each time a service plan is created, a volunteer coordinator manually identifies the team leads, sends scheduling emails, and updates the coordination calendar — a process that can take 20-40 minutes per plan.
Human Resources Agent0 minAgent kicks off scheduling the moment a new plan is createdWhen a new service plan appears in Planning Center Services, the agent identifies the relevant team leads, posts scheduling requests to the volunteer Slack channel, and blocks the date on the coordination calendar — all without coordinator intervention.
- Finance50 min / weekManual giving report assembly each Monday
Finance staff export donation data from Planning Center Giving, copy totals into a spreadsheet, verify batch status, and format the weekly giving summary — a task that takes 30-60 minutes before the staff meeting.
Finance Agent0 minAgent delivers reconciled giving summary before the staff meetingEvery Monday morning the agent pulls donations, confirms batches are committed, writes fund totals to the finance sheet, and posts a formatted summary to the #finance Slack channel — before the first staff meeting of the week.
- Operations35 min / weekManual directory deduplication and campus assignment
Ops staff periodically audit the People directory for duplicates, manually check campus assignments, and update incomplete profiles — typically done in quarterly data-clean sprints that are already months behind.
Operations Agent0 minAgent deduplicates and assigns campus on every new profileWhen any new profile is created, the agent immediately searches for duplicates by email and name, assigns the campus if missing, and logs the entry to the directory audit sheet — so the database stays clean from day one.
- Legal25 min / weekManual donation compliance and fund audit
Legal and finance staff manually review donation batches for restricted fund misallocations, pulling reports from Planning Center and comparing against fund designation policies — a process that surfaces issues weeks after the gifts were posted.
Legal Agent0 minAgent audits fund designations on each batchWhen a donation batch is committed, the agent checks each gift's fund designation against the approved fund policy list and flags any anomaly to the finance and legal team before the batch is closed for the period.
Calculate what your team saves
Based on Planning Center's typical team usage — the visible tasks plus a few other automations the agent runs: ~2.5 hrs / person / week of admin work automated.
How to plug Planning Center into Actionist
Pick the connection method that suits your environment.
Connect via Planning Center's official OAuth 2 flow — Actionist opens a Planning Center authorisation window, you sign in and approve the scopes your agent needs, and the handshake completes in under 10 seconds. No tokens to manage.
Find Planning Center in the Apps library and click Connect. OAuth is selected by default.
A Planning Center OAuth window opens. Sign in with your PCO account and approve the permission scopes (People, Giving, Services, Check-Ins, Groups, Calendar). The handshake returns you to Actionist in under 10 seconds.
Actionist runs a read-only People list call to confirm the connection. You are ready to build agent tasks.
15 actions your agent can call
Read and write operations available to your Actionist agent.
6 events your agent can react to
Events your agent watches for, and the actions it kicks off in response.
Skills that pair with Planning Center
Reusable agent skills that work well alongside this app.
Time-blind friendly planning, executive function support, and daily structure for ADHD brains. Specializes in realistic time estimation, dopamine-aware task design, and building systems that actually work for neurodivergent minds.
MCP servers that work with Planning Center
Connect Actionist to MCP servers built for or around this app.
The official Planning Center MCP server for interacting with your ministry's data.