See the people behind the Numbers

No. Parable sits on top of Planning Center. You keep using Planning Center exactly as you do today — your team doesn’t have to learn a new system or migrate any data. Parable reads your Planning Center data every night and gives you a layer of reporting, search, and insight that Planning Center doesn’t offer on its own. Most of our customers use both every day.

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No — and this is the question that matters most. Generic BI tools (Tableau, Power BI, Looker) are powerful but don’t understand church data. They don’t know what a first-time guest is, what a serving team is, or how attendance and giving interact in a ministry context. Parable is built by people who spent years inside churches using Planning Center. Every metric, every question, every default view is shaped by how ministry actually works.

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Parable connects to People, Giving, Calendar, Check-Ins, Groups, Publishing, Registrations, and Services. All your data flows into one unified view, so you can finally see how everything connects.

During onboarding, we'll ask one of your Planning Center Organization Administrators (with Giving Administrator access) to authorize the connection. That gives Parable the access it needs to read data across every Planning Center product — People, Check-Ins, Giving, Groups, Services, and more — so you get a complete picture of your church on day one. From there, Parable syncs your data nightly and keeps your dashboards current. Initial setup usually takes about ten minutes on our demo call, and you can revoke access from your Planning Center account at any time.

Simply connect your Planning Center account and let the initial sync run in the background. Depending on the size of your church, this first sync may take a few hours. Once it’s complete, you can immediately start exploring your data and building dashboards.

Your data stays yours. Parable never sells it, shares it, or trains AI models on it. The connection between Parable and your Planning Center account is encrypted in transit and at rest, authorized by your Planning Center administrator, and revocable at any time. On the infrastructure side, every church's data is isolated at the database level using row-level security, so your data is mathematically separated from every other church on the platform — not just logically partitioned. Full audit logging tracks every access. We take the sensitivity of church data seriously — giving records, kids check-ins, family information — because we've worked inside churches and handled this data ourselves.

Two paths. First, our AI chat handles most questions in plain English — just type what you want to know and you’ll get an answer in seconds. Second, our team builds custom reports with you during onboarding and whenever you need one after. You’re never stuck, and you never have to learn SQL unless you want to.

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We offer a free trial so you can see if it's right for your church. After that, you can cancel anytime—no long-term contracts, no cancellation fees.

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