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Help/Importing people

Import from Planning Center (PCO)

Pull people, households, groups, and giving history out of PCO into Scout.

Scout pulls people, households, groups, giving, and your serving history out of Planning Center in one pass. It reads from Planning Center and writes nothing back, and there is no standing connection between the two systems. What lands in Scout is a copy of your PCO data as of the minute you ran it.

Before you start

Four things have to be true, and each of them stops the import cold if it isn't.

  • You have the import permission. It is listed as Import data (CSV, PCO) under Admin in Settings → Permissions. Admin and Pastor have it by default. Staff, Finance, and Volunteer do not, and without it /people/import shows an Access denied page reading You don't have access to this. See What each permission controls.
  • Your Scout login is linked to a person record. If it isn't, the preview works and then Start import fails with Your account isn't linked to a person record. Email support@scout.church and we'll link it.
  • You're on a computer or a tablet. The Import button on the People page is hidden on phone-width screens.
  • You have a Planning Center Personal Access Token. Your Planning Center email and password will not work here.

Get the token from Planning Center

  1. Open your Planning Center account page

    Go to accounts.planningcenteronline.com and sign in. Scout links to the same page from the How do I get these? note on the import screen.

  2. Click New Personal Access Token

    Give it a name you'll recognize in six months.

  3. Grant it access to People

    Add Groups, Giving, and Services too if your church uses those products. The token's access is what decides how much comes across. The role your PCO user account holds is not checked at any point.

    Services is the one with a catch. The token needs Scheduled Viewer or higher — plain Viewer only shows that one person's own assignments, so your serving history comes back empty and Scout can't tell you why beyond "not connected". Fix it in Planning Center and the same token works here without changes.

  4. Copy the Application ID and the Secret

    Both go into Scout on the next screen. The Secret is shown by Planning Center once.

Run the import

  1. Open the import screen

    On the People page, click Import, then From Planning Center (its subtitle reads People, households, groups, and giving). You can also go to People → Import and click the Switching from Planning Center? card. Both routes land on /people/import/pco.

  2. Paste your credentials

    Under Connect your PCO account, fill in Application ID and Secret, then click Connect & preview. If the pair is wrong, Scout says Those PCO credentials didn't work. Double-check the App ID and Secret.

  3. Read the preview

    Here's what we found shows six counts: People, Households, Groups, Donations, Teams, and Services. Nothing has been written yet. A count showing a dash with Not connected underneath means your token can't reach that product, and Scout skips that step rather than failing the run.

  4. Decide what to leave behind

    Everything comes over by default. Under Anything you'd rather leave behind? you can hold back giving history or serving history. Either one can be added later by running the import again.

  5. Click Start import

    Back returns you to the credentials screen if the numbers look wrong.

  6. Wait, or don't

    The run happens on Scout's servers, not in your browser: You can leave this page. It keeps running, and this link brings you back to it. That is literally true — the address bar now carries the import's id, so bookmark it, or come back to People → Import → From Planning Center and Scout offers the finished run back.

    Each step of the import is listed with its own count as it goes, so you can see what is finished, what is working, and what is still waiting.

  7. Read the result

    You end on Import complete, Import finished with some things missing, or Import didn't finish, with a line of counts and a Scout's first read card. Go to People takes you to your directory.

What Scout pulls

People

Every person in your PCO People database, with:

  • First and last name
  • Email, phone, and street address (the primary one only; second emails, phones, and addresses stay in Planning Center)
  • Birthdate, gender, and whether Planning Center flags them as an adult or a child
  • A joined date, taken from the date the record was created in Planning Center

Profile photos are not imported. A PCO photo is a link back to Planning Center that stops resolving once you leave, so people arrive with initials and you upload real photos into Scout.

Households

Households come across with PCO's grouping intact. Planning Center records no per-person role inside a household, so Scout infers one: a child stays a child, the primary contact becomes the parent, and a second adult becomes the spouse. In a household with three or more adults, every non-primary adult lands as other, which is worth a look on the profiles of your multigenerational families.

Groups

Groups from PCO Groups arrive with their members. Anyone whose PCO role contains the word "leader" comes in as a leader, and everyone else as a member. Each group is created as a Small Group with PCO's freeform schedule text on it.

Imported groups also arrive with no Meeting day, because PCO's schedule text is freeform. Scout uses Meeting day to decide when to ask a group leader for a post-meeting reflection, so imported groups never prompt their leaders until you set that field.

Serving

Your teams, the positions on them, who is on each roster, every service in the last twelve months, and who served at each one.

Team names are qualified when they need to be. Planning Center scopes teams under service types, so a church can have three teams all called Worship — those arrive as Worship (Sunday), Worship (Saturday) and so on. A team you already built in Scout by hand is claimed rather than duplicated.

Whoever holds a position Planning Center calls a lead, director, coordinator, captain, or head comes in as that team's lead. It reads the position name, because Planning Center has no separate flag for it, and it is deliberately cautious: Lead Guitar is a guitarist, not a team lead. Check your leads on the Teams page afterwards and set anyone it missed.

Cancelled plans are skipped. An assignment for someone who isn't in the import is skipped too, and counted in the skipped total.

Giving

Your PCO funds, and every donation in your PCO Giving history: amount, payment method, and the date it was received. There is no date window. A gift split across several funds lands on the first fund it was designated to. A gift with no designation lands on your default fund, and if your church has no fund at all yet, it is skipped. Refunds and zero-amount rows are skipped.

A donation whose donor doesn't match anyone in the import is still recorded, with no person attached to it. Those gifts count in your totals but not in anyone's giving history.

What Scout does not pull

  • Check-in history. Past check-ins stay in Planning Center. Ask us if you need them moved.
  • Run of Show detail. Services come across as dates with their volunteers on them. The song list, the order, and the notes inside each plan do not.
  • Custom fields, notes, and workflow history.
  • Profile photos. A PCO photo is a link back to Planning Center that stops resolving once you leave, so people arrive with initials.
  • Logins. Importing a person does not create a Scout account or send them anything.

Running it again

You can run the import as often as you like. There is nothing to disconnect, and nothing to reconnect: go back to People → Import → From Planning Center and paste the Application ID and Secret again.

A second run only adds. Scout tags every imported record with its Planning Center ID, so people, households, groups, and gifts it already has are matched and left exactly as they are.

That has consequences worth knowing before you rely on it:

  • A name, email, phone, or address you fix in Planning Center after the first import will not come across. Make those edits in Scout.
  • A person added to a PCO household after the first import will be created as a person, but will not be attached to that household. The same is true of someone added to an existing PCO group.
  • New gifts do come across on a re-run, because Scout matches gifts one by one.

Scout allows five imports and ten previews per church per hour. Past that you get Too many requests, with the wait before you can try again.

After the import

  1. Check for duplicates, especially if people were already in Scout before you imported. See Cleaning up duplicates.
  2. Publish the groups you want members to find.
  3. Open the Status filter on the People page and look through Inactive for anyone who belongs in your active directory.
  4. Open a few households and confirm the parent, spouse, and child labels landed the way you'd describe that family.

Still need help?

Email support@scout.church and we'll get back within one business day.