Switching to Scout
How to Switch From Planning Center to a New Church Management System Without Losing Your Data
You can leave Planning Center with every record intact. PCO lets you export your full people database and your complete giving history to CSV from inside your own account, before you cancel anything. The safe move is straightforward: export everything first, import it into the new system, confirm the numbers match, and only then close the old account. Hold that order and nothing falls on the floor.
I have run this migration more times than I expected to, and the worry is almost always bigger than the work. Below is the order I trust, what needs to come with you, and the one decision that makes the whole thing easier or harder for a small staff: a slow parallel run versus a fast cutover.
Will I lose my data if I leave Planning Center?
No. Your records belong to your church, and Planning Center gives administrators a self-service export of the entire database plus full giving history. Nothing is held hostage. The one way a migration loses data is sequencing it wrong, by cancelling before you have confirmed the export landed cleanly in the new system. Hold the order and you keep everything.
People picture a locked door. What is actually there is a download button. Per Planning Center's own export documentation, any org administrator, or anyone with "Can export CSVs and reports" checked in their People permissions, can pull the whole thing. So the real question was never whether you lose your data. It is what order to do this in, which is the rest of this post.
How do I export my data from Planning Center?
You export in two places, People and Giving. In People, open the Actions button, choose Import & Export CSV, then Start Export, then Generate and send CSV. PCO emails you a download link for a CSV of every profile. In Giving, open the By Donations tab, set your full date range, and click Export to download the donation history as CSV.
That covers the two files that matter most. A few specifics worth knowing before you click:
- People export gives you the whole database in one file, or you can build a list and export only the columns you choose. For a migration, take the whole database; you can trim later. See Planning Center's export-data guide.
- Giving exports run from the By Donations tab with a date range. Set it wide enough to capture your full history, not just this year. PCO documents this in importing and exporting Giving information.
- Groups has its own CSV export of the groups list, so you do not have to rebuild rosters from memory.
- Services (worship planning, song library, plans) does not export the same clean way, because it is structured as plans and arrangements rather than flat records. More on that below.
What to export from PCO: the checklist
- People: full database CSV (names, contact info, birthdays, status, custom fields)
- Households / families: these come through the People export as household links; confirm they survived
- Giving history: full date-range donation export from By Donations, plus a separate donor/fund summary so you have totals to check against
- Groups: the groups-list CSV plus membership
- Teams / serving: roster lists per team (export each, or rebuild; serving structures rarely map one-to-one between systems)
- A "source of truth" totals snapshot: total person count, total households, total giving by year. You will check the new system against these numbers.
What data actually needs to come with you?
The non-negotiables are people, households, and giving history. Everything else is either nice-to-have or better rebuilt clean. People and households are your church's memory of who belongs to whom, and giving history is the one record you cannot recreate later, the one your treasurer and your donors will ask about at tax time. Protect those and the migration is mostly safe.
Here is how I sort it:
- Bring it, no question: people, contact info, households, giving history (every year you have it), and any custom field you actively use for care or follow-up.
- Bring it if it's clean: group rosters and active serving teams. If your PCO rosters are stale, re-entering the real, current roster is faster than scrubbing a messy import.
- Rebuild fresh: old serving schedules, dead groups, archived plans, and tags nobody has touched in two years.
The way I think about it, you are moving the people and the money, and a migration is the one moment you get to leave the clutter behind without guilt.
Parallel run or fast cutover: which is safer for a small staff?
A parallel run keeps both systems live for weeks while you double-enter; a fast cutover exports once, imports once, and flips on a chosen date. For most small-staff churches, the fast cutover hurts less. Running two systems sounds safe but doubles your data entry and creates two versions of the record that pull out of sync. A clean single-source move is less work and less confusing.
| Parallel run | Fast cutover (single source) | |
|---|---|---|
| How it works | Both systems live for weeks; you enter giving, groups, and updates in both | Export once, import once, flip on a chosen date |
| Best for | Large staff, complex giving, dedicated data person | Small to mid staff (the common church) |
| Real cost | Double data entry; two versions of the record going out of sync | One focused week of work, then done |
| Main risk | Records diverge; nobody knows which system is right | A bug in the import, caught by verifying before you flip |
| Stress level | Low-grade, drawn out for a month | Concentrated into a few days, then over |
The honest case for fast cutover is this. The parallel run's "safety" is mostly the comfort of the old system still being there. Every Sunday gift entered in two places is a chance for the two to disagree, and a volunteer who has to update someone's phone number twice will eventually update it once. A single-source cutover with good verification beats a parallel run that slowly rots.
How do I migrate the data and avoid duplicate records?
Migrate in five steps, and treat duplicates as a verification problem rather than a cleanup chore you save for later. Duplicates almost always come from importing the same person twice, or from members self-signing-up in the new system while an import is also running. You prevent them by importing once, from one clean file, and by checking person counts immediately after.
- Export and snapshot. Pull the People CSV, the Giving CSV, and write down your totals: person count, household count, giving by year. Those numbers are your answer key.
- Clean the file once. De-duplicate in the spreadsheet before import. Sort by name and email, merge obvious doubles. Fixing it here is far easier than fixing it in a live system.
- Import people and households first, giving second. Order matters, because donations need to attach to existing person records, so people go in before money. Import once. Resist the urge to re-run an import to "fix" something; that is how duplicates breed.
- Verify against your snapshot. The next section is the full list.
- Flip on a quiet week, then keep PCO open and read-only for a month as your safety net.
This is the step where Scout does some of the work for you. Scout has a one-click self-serve Planning Center import, and for Tithe.ly, Realm, or Tithely Church Management (formerly Breeze), we run a guided import with you during your trial. Our cutover is add-only, so it brings PCO records in without overwriting what is already there; a second pass adds nothing it has already seen instead of minting a duplicate. Because every record lands as one unified profile, with giving, serving, groups, check-ins, and notes on a single person, the verification step is mostly reading one screen per person instead of cross-checking five modules. Making migration easy is the reason we built the importer the way we did.
What should I verify before I flip the switch?
Before you cancel PCO, confirm that five things match your snapshot. This pre-cutover check is the difference between a calm migration and a frantic one. If the numbers line up here, the flip is a non-event.
- Person count matches your PCO total (within a handful; flag anything bigger).
- Household links survived: open ten families and confirm spouses and kids are connected.
- Giving totals by year match PCO's reports to the dollar. This is the one your treasurer will check.
- Recurring gifts are accounted for. Donors usually have to re-enter card details in the new system, so plan that communication.
- Logins and roles work for every staff member and key volunteer before Sunday, not on it.
Run that list, fix what doesn't match, and only then cancel. Keep PCO in read-only for a month, so that if a question surfaces in week three, the original is still sitting there.
Do I have to leave Planning Center Services too?
No, and you may not want to. If worship planning is the reason you love PCO, with its plans, song library, arrangement details, and rehearsal flow, Services is excellent and exports poorly precisely because it is so structured. Keep it. Move only People, Giving, and Groups to your new system and let Services keep doing the one job it does best.
I would rather a church run that split than force a migration that makes Sunday morning worse. Plenty of churches keep Services for the worship team and move their people, giving, and care data somewhere that puts it all on one profile. That is a legitimate setup, and not a compromise you should feel bad about.
Frequently asked questions
Will I lose my data if I leave Planning Center? No. Planning Center lets you export your full database and your giving history to CSV from your own account before you cancel. Your records are yours. Export everything first, confirm it imported into the new system, and only then close the PCO account.
How do I export my data from Planning Center? In People, open the Actions button, choose Import & Export CSV, then Start Export and Generate and send CSV for the whole database. In Giving, open By Donations, set the date range, and click Export. Both arrive as downloadable CSV files.
How long does a church management migration take? A small-staff church can usually move in one to two weeks of calendar time, with a few focused hours of real work: a session to export and clean, a session to import and verify, and a buffer to fix duplicates. Giving history is the longest part to check.
What's the safest way to migrate church data to a new system? Export from Planning Center, import into the new system, verify person counts, household links, and giving totals against PCO before you flip, then cut over on a quiet week. Keep your PCO account open and read-only until you have confirmed a full month in the new system.
Do I have to give up Planning Center Services for worship planning? No. If Services is the reason you love PCO, you can keep it for worship and song planning and move only People, Giving, and Groups to the new system. Many churches run that split rather than forcing every module to move at once.
Written by Nic Moore, a pastor who has done this migration enough times to stop being afraid of the download button. If you want a hand with the PCO import, that part we'll do with you.