Setting up your first service

Scout keeps your Sundays on the calendar from a template you build once. This covers the whole setup, from an empty account to six weeks of dated services already waiting for you. Budget about fifteen minutes.

The Services hub

Open Services in the sidebar, under Sundays. On a brand new account the page reads Services Hub and gives you two ways in: Get Started, which opens an empty template, and three starter templates under Or jumpstart with a starter template.

The starters are Sunday Morning (marked Recommended, Sunday 9:00 and 11:00, five sections), Youth Night (Wednesday 6:30 PM) and Worship Night (Friday 7:00 PM). Clicking Use Template creates the template, its service times and its sections in one action, which means it starts scheduling straight away.

Once anything exists, /services becomes the working hub:

• This week is the Week Stack: every service in the next 7 days as one row carrying one verb. A service with no sections yet gets Start the plan. One with empty roster seats gets Fill roles. One that is covered gets Open. Rows always sort by date, so a calm Sunday can sit above a busier Wednesday.
• Coming up shows what is further out, with All services at the bottom for the full list and a month calendar.
• Your templates is the only place templates are listed. There is no templates index page.
• What Scout noticed is the dark card holding open seats and services with no roster.

If your services arrived through a Planning Center import, you land on this hub rather than the empty state and the Your templates block stays hidden until a template exists, so New is your only route to the first one.

A template versus a scheduled service

A service template is the reusable shape: a name, service times, the default sections and elements, and the serving teams with their position counts. A scheduled service is one dated copy of that shape, with a Run of Show you edit for that week.

The New button at the top right holds exactly two items: Service template, described as a reusable structure Scout schedules forward for you, and Schedule a service, for a single date such as a car show, a funeral, or a special night.

Build the template

1. 1

   Create it

   New → Service template. In the New Service Template modal fill Name *, which is the only required field, plus optional Description and Main space capacity. Click Create. Template names have to be unique within your church.

2. 2

   Add a service time

   On the template page, under Service Times, click Add Time, pick a day, an hour, and minutes (00, 15, 30 or 45), then click Add. To remove one, hover the time pill and click the X.

   This is the step that turns a template on. Until it has at least one service time, Scout schedules nothing from it, and a template created through the modal alone puts nothing on the calendar.

3. 3

   Add the sections and elements

   Click Add Section at the bottom, name it (Worship, Message, Closing), then Add element inside the section card. The Add Element modal has five Type chips (Song, Message, Transition, Video, Custom), Title *, Default Duration and Notes. Duration accepts 5 for five minutes or 4:30 for four minutes thirty seconds.

   Every service Scout schedules from this template copies these sections and elements. One display bug to know about: the template page renders element durations as seconds with a "min" label, so a five-minute element reads 300 min. The value copies into each service correctly and shows there as 5:00.

4. 4

   Attach the serving teams

   Under Serving Teams click Add Team and pick a team, which shows as Per Service or All Morning. Then use the − and + steppers next to each role to set how many people that position needs. Counts are capped at 20.

   A team with no roles yet reads "No positions defined for this team. Add positions on the Teams page first." Set those up in Setting up a serving team and come back.

   Adding a team or raising a count seeds those empty slots onto every upcoming service immediately. Lowering a count or removing a team leaves the slots already on scheduled services alone.

Main Space Capacity is optional. Set it with Set Capacity and Scout flags a service that hits 80% of that number when someone records a headcount.

Two service times, one service

Two Sunday times on one template produce a single service with two time columns. Scout does not create a separate 9:00 service and 11:00 service. Both times show as chips in the Run of Show header, and every element row shows a stacked start time, one line per service time.

Service times belong to the template rather than to any one service. Editing or deleting a time instantly changes the columns on every service built from that template, including ones already published and already past.

The six-week horizon

Adding a date that is not on a schedule

New → Schedule a service creates exactly one date. There is no frequency, no repeat count and no end date anywhere in this modal.

Under What, pick a template to get a normal service on that date with its plan and roster ready to fill, or pick Start from scratch (one-off event) and give it a Name. Set the Date, which defaults to the next Sunday, then click Schedule. A one-off has no template, so it arrives with no service times, no time columns on its rows, no sections and no roster.

You can also open All services, switch to the Calendar tab, and click an empty future day to open the same modal with that date filled in. If the template you pick already covers that date, Scout returns "An instance already exists for that date."

Pausing a template for a season

Youth off for the summer? Open the template and click Pause at the top right. A Paused chip appears next to the name with the line "Scout isn't scheduling new Youth Night services. Already-scheduled ones stay put."

Pausing stops future scheduling only. The weeks already on the calendar remain and there is no delete control to clear them, so plan on those dates sitting there until they pass. Resume backfills the weeks that were missed straight away.

Who can do this

Opening /services and All services needs the View serving schedule permission. Opening a template or a service's Run of Show needs Build services & Run of Show (manage_services), which also gates every change described above.

The split catches people out: a staff member with view access can see the hub and its rows, then hits the You don't have access to this page the moment they click Open, Start the plan or Fill roles. Admins have both. See What each permission controls.

Controls that are not there

• No delete for a scheduled service, and no delete for a template. Pause is the only way to stop a template. The trash icons on the template page remove a service time, a section, an element, or a serving team from the template, never the template itself.
• No copy or duplicate of a service or a plan, and no "import last week's plan." Each week's Run of Show starts from the template structure and gets edited by hand.
• No archive state. A service is draft or shared. A template is active or paused. Nothing gets filed away.
• No recurrence UI. The six-week horizon is the only recurring behavior, and it comes from the template's service times.
• No reordering or editing of template sections and elements. You can add and delete them. The grip icon on a template section header is decorative.

With the calendar filled, the next job is this Sunday's order of service: Building a Run of Show.