Planning Center’s attendance reports live in four products: Check-Ins, Groups, Services and Registrations. Each reports only on its own events. Check-Ins holds Sunday attendance: charts and headcount reports give you totals, custom reports give you names.
Key points
- Attendance is recorded in four Planning Center products and no report joins them; Check-Ins is the one holding weekend attendance at the person level.
- Headcounts records numbers without names; Planning Center’s guidance is to use Check-Ins or Groups if you need to track individuals.
- The Check-Ins event chart exports counts by date; a custom report exports the people. Picking the wrong one is the most common wasted hour here.
- One person’s full check-in history exports from their Activity tab in Check-Ins. One person at a time.
- Nothing built in compares a person’s attendance frequency between two periods, and nothing rolls attendance up to a household.
Planning Center tracks attendance well. What it doesn’t do is put it in one place. Four products record attendance, each for a good reason, and each reports on what it recorded. If you’ve gone looking for “the attendance report” and found four half-answers, that’s why. You weren’t missing a menu item.
Where does attendance live in Planning Center?
Five things record attendance: four products plus Headcounts, which is a feature inside one of them. Knowing which holds what saves an afternoon.
Check-Ins is the person-level record for weekend services, kids ministry and anything with a station or kiosk, storing the person, event, time, location and who checked them in.
Headcounts is a feature of Check-Ins with a free companion app. It exists to record the number of attendees at an event without tracking individual details. Names, ages, grades. Planning Center is direct about the trade: if you need to track individuals, use Check-Ins or Groups instead. It’s free with any Check-Ins plan, including the free one.
Services records whether scheduled volunteers turned up, a team at a time or all teams at once, and team leaders can take attendance only for the teams that they lead. It’s wired to Check-Ins: when a scheduled person checks in, the integration will trigger attendance in both.
Groups records who came to each meeting, usually via the email a leader gets afterwards. Registrations records who attended each day of a signup event.
| Product | What it records | Names or numbers | Where the report is |
|---|---|---|---|
| Check-Ins | Weekend, kids, any station or kiosk event | Names | Event chart, Reports tab, person’s Activity tab |
| Headcounts | Room and area counts, feeds Check-Ins | Numbers only | Check-Ins event chart |
| Services | Whether a scheduled volunteer showed up | Names | The plan’s Teams tab |
| Groups | Who came to each group meeting | Names | Group Attendance tab, Groups Reports page |
| Registrations | Who attended each day of an event | Names | The event’s Attendance section |
What do the built-in attendance reports return?
The Check-Ins event chart is the one most people mean by “the attendance report”. It plots the number of unique people checked in or counted in Headcounts over a timeframe you pick, and you can group check-ins by location or by kind: Regular, Guest, Volunteer. There’s a download icon that exports the chart’s data as CSV. That CSV gives you what the chart shows. Counts, not names.
Check-Ins reports are where the people are. The Reports tab on an event offers two types. A custom report shows people who checked in, with a scope you set: the current session, all sessions, first timers only, or the useful one, “Attended before but missed this session”. A headcount report gives totals across up to 53 past sessions, grouped by time or type. Both come out as PDF or CSV, though if you have a lot of custom headcounts, Planning Center drops the PDF option and you export CSV instead.
Fifty-three is a year of Sundays plus one. That’s the built-in ceiling on how far back a headcount report reaches in a single run.
Home dashboard widgets cover the glanceable version. The attendance widget shows the number of unique people who attended all or selected events during a timeframe, with separate widgets for headcounts, first-time visitors and the busiest stations. Enough for a Monday morning, and the limit of what a Planning Center dashboard carries.
The Groups attendance report is the best per-person view Planning Center ships. On a group’s Attendance tab, the % column shows each member’s attendance percentage relative to the number of events in the chosen timeframe, with a green check mark on each date a member attended and visitors tagged until they’re promoted to membership. It exports as a print view or a direct CSV download. Across multiple groups, the Reports page filters by group type, campus, status or tags, and is the one that emails you a CSV link rather than downloading it; since March 2025 its event attendance widget exports to CSV too, splitting members from visitors. In March 2026 Planning Center added an Attendance by group report giving average attendance percentage, typical attendance count and event count per group, sorted worst-first, with member-level drill-down.
Registrations has the one real export gap. Its attendance roster shows who attended each day, and Planning Center states plainly that this data lives exclusively in Registrations and cannot be exported. The filtered attendee list beside it does export to CSV, so there’s a workaround. The roster itself is a dead end.
How do you get one person’s attendance history out?
Open the person in Check-Ins and go to their Activity tab. The Activity Chart shows the past twelve months of activity, with each dot representing a month, and the feed below lists every check-in: time, location, and who checked them in. The Export CSV button downloads their check-in data across all events in your organization.
That’s a complete person-level attendance history, and it’s genuinely good. The constraint is the shape: one person at a time, by hand.
For more than one person, the tool is a People list. Planning Center documents lists built on check-in conditions: children who missed the last few weeks, first-timers at particular locations. It also documents a “No recent activity” list that finds people who haven’t attended, given, or served, refreshed nightly into a workflow.
The catch is what comes out. A People list exports the people: the People CSV export covers contact information and fields, and doesn’t carry attendance dates. You get the list of who’s missing according to a rule you set in advance, not the history you’d need to work out what the rule should have been.
What can’t Planning Center’s attendance reports tell you?
Three things, and they’re the three that came up in every staff meeting I sat in.
Frequency change. Every built-in report answers “how many” for a date range, or “how often” for one person in one group. None answer “whose rhythm changed”. Who came weekly last spring and comes monthly now? That’s a comparison between two windows for every person at once, and it isn’t a report you can run, which is why finding out who stopped coming is a spreadsheet project rather than a click.
Household roll-up. Check-Ins records people. Families attend. A household of four that drops off appears as four unrelated rows. A Check-Ins custom report can include the household’s primary contact, so you can get the number to call. What no attendance report does is collapse the four rows into one.
One person across products. A dad who checks his kids in, serves twice a month and leads a group generates attendance in three products that don’t compare notes. Each is right about its slice; none is right about him. That boundary shapes every report Planning Center can’t run, not just the attendance ones, and our guide to Planning Center reports walks it product by product.
How do you build a frequency-change view from an export?
You can build it yourself. Here’s the honest version, tedious parts included.
- Pick two equal windows. Thirteen weeks against the thirteen before: long enough to survive a vacation, short enough to still be actionable.
- Export person-level check-ins, not chart data. Build a custom report as CSV from the Reports tab on your weekend event; the event chart’s CSV gives counts rather than names and won’t work.
- Check the shape of the file first. You need one row per person per date. If your export collapses to one row per person, the dates are gone and you’ll need to run the report per session and stack the files.
- Keep the person ID column. Match on ID, never on name. Two Sarah Johnsons and a “Mike” who’s “Michael” in half the rows will quietly corrupt every number downstream.
- Add a week-number column derived from the check-in date, so multiple check-ins on one Sunday count once.
- Pivot by person, with two measures: distinct weeks attended in the earlier window, and distinct weeks attended in the recent one.
- Convert each to a rate, weeks attended divided by weeks available, and take the difference.
- Filter to people who were regulars first. Someone who attended twice in the earlier window can’t meaningfully drop. Set a floor, six of thirteen weeks or so, then sort by the size of the fall.
- Collapse to households by hand. Sort by surname and address and merge the rows belonging to one family, so the output is families to call rather than names to reconcile.
- Cross-check the top twenty against serving and giving before anyone picks up the phone. Volunteers usually stop being available before they stop attending, and knowing someone quietly left the schedule in April changes the conversation.
Budget half a day the first time. If you’d rather build it in Sheets and keep the file live, exporting Planning Center data to Google Sheets covers that route.
What the export route costs you
Step 10 is where this usually dies. Not because it’s hard, but because the whole thing has to happen again next month, and the month after, and the version you built in March doesn’t refresh. A drop-off list from six weeks ago is a list of conversations you’ve already missed.
Then there’s the follow-up. Someone at the staff meeting asks whether those families are in groups, and the answer is another export and another join, because Check-Ins data alone can’t say. Reporting that can’t take a second question is a snapshot.
That’s what we built Parable to remove. It reads every Planning Center product through the API each night into one place where they share a person key, so “who came weekly last autumn and hasn’t checked in since Easter” is a question you type and get back as a list of names, with giving, serving and group membership beside them. The recurring numbers sit on a church metrics dashboard, with SQL and warehouse access underneath for anyone who’d rather write the query.
Planning Center already answers the totals: how many came, how many were guests, how’s the trend. If those are your attendance questions, a second login would be a step backwards.
It’s when the question turns from how many to who that the report you want doesn’t exist. That isn’t a gap in Check-Ins. Check-Ins is doing exactly what it was built to do, and doing it well.