To help your church's budget make the biggest impact possible throughout the year, you can tailor your Planning Center subscriptions to only pay for the products you need, when you need them. You get full control over your account's subscriptions and are never locked into a contract, so you can upgrade and downgrade subscription levels as often as necessary - no limits, no fees, no catch!
Note
Only Organization Administrators can make changes to subscription levels, which can make budgeting less predictable for your bookkeeper if they don't have that level of access.
If your bookkeeper does not need Organization Administrator permissions, consider making them a Billing Manager instead so they can keep track of the current amount due for payments.
Some products may remain steady all year, but a few tend to see less action during the slower months. Expand each section below to find tips on when to choose lower subscription levels.
Churches most commonly see weekly attendance numbers dwindle during the summer months when regular attenders are away on vacation and weekly routines go out the window. You can plan ahead for these months by using the Check-Ins Event Chart to see previous attendance trends.
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Set a custom date range for the months you want to reference from the previous year.
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Select the events that will be going on during the summer.
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Select the weekly view.
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Download a CSV report of that view if you'd like.
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Find the week with the largest attendance and set your Check-Ins subscription accordingly.
Tip
If you know you won't be using some of these events in your new time frame, you can remove them from the Event Chart to see a more accurate attendance.
Regularly go through and archive any seasonal groups or one-time classes that have ended recently. If you prefer to re-use the Group and cycle members through, make sure to remove the current members before adding newcomers. Once you only have active members and groups remaining, check to see if you can downgrade to a smaller subscription level.
Tip
To make your seasonal groups easy to manage, create group types for them.
Filter your groups to the season type that just ended and archive each group individually.
The key to saving some money in regards to signups is to archive your bigger-than-normal signups as soon as they're over. Once the big ones are no longer active, you can downgrade to a smaller plan that fits your regularly scheduled activities.
You may need fewer volunteers in your rotation during the summer when people are on vacation or at a time when you're holding fewer services each week. You can archive those extra profiles until it's time to ramp things back up. Archived profiles don't count toward your subscription limits, but their team assignments and scheduling history remain intact, so there's no need to re-create them when they're ready to be scheduled again.
Filter people based on specific service types, the last time they were scheduled, or the last time they logged in to find profiles that can be archived.
From the bulk editor, you can choose to set their general permission to Archived.
When you're ready to schedule them again, you can restore their profile.
There's a limited amount of file storage included with your Services subscription. To avoid going over the limit and paying extra fees, it's a good idea to go through your files page regularly and delete any files that are unused or non-essential for regular services.
The files must be deleted, not archived, in order to not count towards your storage limits. We recommend backing your files up on a computer, external drive, or in a free cloud account before deleting them from Services so you can still access them for future use.
Go to the files page to manage all files stored in Services.
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Sort files by size to see the files taking up the most space.
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Hover over the file name and click the pencil.
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From the file details modal, click Delete.
Tip
You can hover over a file and type x to delete files faster!