Custom Reports in Planning Center Online

If you work or serve in a church, chances are you use Planning Center Online a lot. We use their Services product to plan and organize our weekend services, schedule volunteers, etc.

Even though they have a mobile app and desktop interface, we still rely on printed reports on the weekend. It’s simple, fast, we don’t have to worry about the internet going down, the team members can write all over them, etc.

Out of the box, Planning Center comes with some great reports that you can print out. They can somewhat tailored to your organization with your church’s name or logo, etc.

In addition to their standard reports, they also support custom reporting. If you know a little HTML, CSS, and are ready to learn some custom tags, it’s pretty easy to jump right in.

The reporting language that PCO uses is called Liquid. If you want a good resource to read that is outside of what PCO offers, here is one.

Liquid is an open source templating language that allows you to do simple conditional and iteration along with filters to parse and control the page as it loads. What this means for you as a user is that you have a lot of simple power at your fingertips to create custom reports designed for exactly what you need!

So, with these tools, I have created several custom reports that our teams use when it is time to print out paperwork for weekend services.

The report I use most often is for our tech team. It prints out a customized version for every person serving on the team that weekend, with their name, the general service flow, and information just for their position, notes, checklists, etc.

 

 

The nice thing about this report is that I only have to run it once and print once. It creates a new page for every person on the team, so I don’t have to remember how many copies I need to print – I just print the whole file and it has exactly what each person/position needs!

This report includes custom plan item notes per position. To add those, just add a plan item with an item note named:

Position Name

The name has to match exactly. The report also includes overall plan notes per position. To add those, just add plan notes like this:

Team Name – Position Name

When you add your plan notes or plan item notes, just type something specific in that field and only that position will see it when it prints. We like this a lot on our teams because it keeps the report looking a lot simpler for those who don’t need all the extra detail.

One thing you may not have noticed is that I include checklists, customized for each position on the team. We have found checklists to be very helpful so we don’t miss any of the mundane stuff, especially when volunteers may only be serving once a month.

If you use my custom report file, all of the checklist code is already created for you. You just need to create the Plan Note fields to correspond with each position. Each position that has a checklist item should have a Plan Note Field like this:

Checklist – Team Name – Position Name

Any item in the list that begins with a “*” (asterisk) will be printed in a “DURING REHEARSAL” section, and only printed once. Any item that begins with a “~” (tilde) will be printed in an “AFTER EACH SERVICE” section for each service time and will include a small blank line for notes. Any other item will be printed in a “BEFORE SERVICE” section and will be printed once for each service time.

So, for example, a plan note in the field “Checklist – Tech Team – Stage Manager”:

*Take out trash

This would only print one time in the checklist, in the “During Rehearsal” section. You can edit the report to rename that header if you’d like.

~Shut all doors

This would print multiple times, once for each service time, in the “After Each Service” section.

Check for presentation

This would print multiple times, once for each service time, in the “Before Each Service” section. This is likely going to be the most-used field, so it is the one with the simplest formatting requirements.

I like to keep all of my checklists in a Template Plan (with no other items or people) within PCO, and just import them each week to the plan before printing. This allows me to update the checklists from time to time without hardcoding it into the report file, and I can customize it per-plan if needed.

I hope this is helpful to you! You can download all of my custom reports here: https://github.com/josephdadams/PlanningCenterServicesReports/