Planning Center Check-Ins reports live inside one event: custom reports for rosters and household contact details, headcount reports for totals across up to 53 sessions. They answer how many and who was here today very well. They don’t compare one family’s rhythm over time.
Key points
- Check-Ins records every check-in individually: person, event, time, location, check-in type, and who checked them in. Not just a Sunday total.
- Two report types sit on an event’s Reports tab: custom reports (roster plus selected fields, CSV or PDF) and headcount reports (totals across up to 53 past sessions).
- A person’s Activity tab shows twelve months of their own attendance and exports to CSV, one person at a time.
- Volunteer is a first-class check-in type, and the Services integration produces an absent-people report that is one of the earliest serving signals available anywhere.
- What has no report: a household viewed across every event, and any comparison of one family’s attendance now against six months ago.
Kids ministry is the best-instrumented part of most churches, and almost nobody uses the data.
That’s a side effect of why check-in exists. You installed it for security: a matching tag, an allergy note, a record of which adult collected which child. The reporting was built to serve the same purpose: tell me who is in this room right now.
Which means it’s also the only place in your church where attendance is recorded person by person rather than as a number. It’s worth knowing exactly what’s in there.
What does Planning Center Check-Ins record?
More than most people realise. According to Planning Center’s own documentation on Check-Ins data, each check-in is stored as an individual record. It carries the attendee’s type, Regular, Guest or Volunteer, plus check-in and check-out status, a first-time flag, and a breakdown by event, time and location.
The structure underneath shapes every report you can run. An event is the recurring thing: Sunday Kids, Wednesday Youth, VBS. A session is one occurrence of it. Times sit inside a session, locations sit inside the event, and every check-in carries a timestamp and the name of whoever processed it.
That data surfaces in five places: the event chart, which plots attendance by day, week, month or year and exports to CSV; the Overview tab, with totals by attendee type and location; the Reports tab; the person’s profile; and a Check-Ins attendance widget you can add to a Home dashboard.
Headcounts writes into the same place for rooms where nobody physically checks in. Worth remembering when you go to build a list: a sanctuary counted by headcount produces a total and no per-person rows at all.
What reports can you run on check-in data?
Four routes, and it’s worth knowing which one answers which question.
Custom reports
Created on an event’s Reports tab, per Planning Center’s guide to using reports to track trends. You set a Scope (which attendees to include, with switches for label-only visitors and inactive profiles), a Layout that can separate pages by check-in type, location, time or grade, and an Include list of fields.
The single most useful checkbox in there is Primary contact, which pulls the primary person in the household onto the report. Without it you get a page of four-year-olds with no way to reach anyone. With it you get parents’ emails and phone numbers next to the child who came. Two scopes earn their keep: first timers only, and attended before but missed this session.
Headcount reports
Totals at a glance, no parameters to configure, grouped by Time or by Type, and covering up to 53 past sessions. Fifty-three weekly sessions is a rolling year, which is a deliberate and sensible choice. It means one report can hold this week against the same week last year.
One person’s activity
Open a profile from the People page inside Check-Ins and select the Activity tab. Planning Center’s article on tracking a person’s activity describes an Activity Chart covering the past twelve months with a dot per month, and an Activity Feed logging every check-in with its time, its location, and who checked them in. An Export CSV button on that feed downloads their history across all your events.
The fourth route belongs to volunteers, and is covered below.
| Route | Answers | Scope | Export |
|---|---|---|---|
| Custom report | Who was here, and how do I contact their household | One event, one or many sessions (up to 53) | CSV, PDF |
| Headcount report | How many, over time | One event, up to 53 sessions | CSV, PDF |
| Activity tab | How often does this one person come | One person, 12 months | CSV |
| CHECK-INS: Absent People | Which confirmed volunteers didn’t show | One Services plan | PDF, web page |
What do kids’ check-in patterns tell you about a family?
A child’s check-in record is a proxy for a household, and usually a better one than anything in your adult attendance data. A parent who brings a kid to the 9am service has to stand at a station and be recorded. The same parent slipping into the back row at 11am is a headcount.
Three patterns are worth reading.
A first-time child is a first-time family. The custom report scoped to first timers only returns people who attended that event for the first time, which is not the same as attending your church for the first time. A family who came to VBS in July and appears in Sunday Kids in September shows up as a first timer in September. Read the flag as “new to this room,” and check the household before you send a welcome email that assumes they’ve never been.
Kids who stopped coming are a family who stopped coming. Almost nobody quits a church on a Sunday. A household that came three weeks out of four comes twice a month, then once, then it’s been six weeks. And that pattern is invisible in a weekly total because new arrivals cancel out the departures. Check-Ins holds the evidence at the person level. It just has no report arranged to look for it.
The household is the unit, not the child. One family with a nine-year-old and a fourteen-year-old is recorded twice, on two events, with nothing joining them. The nine-year-old still comes; the fourteen-year-old stopped in March. Nobody has a view where those two facts sit next to each other.
What do volunteer check-ins tell you that the schedule doesn’t?
Volunteer is a check-in type, which means your serving data and your attendance data get recorded by the same act.
Turn on the Check-Ins and Services integration and a scheduled volunteer checking in marks them attended in both products, with a checkmark next to their name in the Services plan. Three things have to line up: the session date and time must match the plan, the event location names must match the Services team or position names, and the person must be scheduled in Services.
The payoff is a report most churches don’t know they have. CHECK-INS: Absent People, under Plans > Actions > Print in Services, lists who was confirmed on the schedule and never checked in.
Confirmed-then-absent is a different signal from declined. A decline is a person managing their calendar. A confirmation followed by silence is a person who meant to come and didn’t, and it tends to arrive months before anything shows up in attendance or giving. That’s the whole reason volunteers don’t quit so much as stop being available.
One honest caveat on volunteer counts. Planning Center notes that when a volunteer pre-checks through the Church Center app and there’s no matching location, they come in as Regular rather than Volunteer. At a manned station or off a classroom roster they’re still typed as Volunteer; at a self station they see No Locations Available and can’t check in at all. So if your locations and team names have drifted apart and your volunteers pre-check on their phones, your volunteer numbers are quietly low and your regular attendance is quietly high.
How do you build a first-time family follow-up report?
The most valuable thing Check-Ins can do out of the box, in six steps.
- Stop using label-only mode for guests you intend to follow up. Planning Center is explicit that visitors checked in this way aren’t saved to your People database and won’t appear in People list results. They exist only in that session’s data. Create a profile and use the Guest check-in type instead.
- Open the event’s Reports tab and create a new custom report. You need Check-Ins editor permissions; viewers can only open reports someone else built.
- Set the Scope to first timers only. Add label-only visitors if you want the full picture of the room, knowing you can’t follow up with them.
- Check Primary contact under Include. This is the step people miss, and it’s the difference between a list of names and a list you can act on: email, phone and address for the household’s primary person.
- Set the Layout to separate pages by location if room leaders are going to work the list, or leave it flat if one person is.
- Download the CSV and work it within the week. The PDF is for handing to a volunteer; the CSV is for anything you want to keep.
Step seven is the one that matters, and it isn’t a Check-Ins report: checking whether those families came back. The nearest thing is a People list with two conditions: first check-in at this event in a date range four weeks back, and any check-in since. That names the ones who returned, provided the visitors were saved to People in step 1. What it won’t give you is the rate (how many of March’s first-timers came back, compared with February’s), or a look at the ones who didn’t without building the inverse list by hand. For a handful of families, the Activity tab one at a time is honestly quicker.
What Check-Ins reports can’t show you
Inside one event, the reporting is good, and the person-level detail is better than most church software bothers with. The wall isn’t inside Check-Ins. It’s at the edges of it, the same boundary behind every report Planning Center can’t run.
Four gaps, in the order churches hit them.
No cross-event family view. Reports are built per event. A household’s attendance across Sunday Kids, Youth, and whatever the parents attend has no single place to be read.
No trend comparison per person. The Activity Chart shows one person’s twelve months. Nothing compares the last three months against the three before for everyone at once, which is the shape of the drop-off question. The nearest built-in tool is a People list for those who attended before but missed a couple of weeks. A useful blunt instrument, not the same thing.
No built-in view past the window. Twelve months on the activity chart, 53 sessions on headcount reports. The older records are still there: the event chart will happily plot totals by year across any custom range. What needs exporting is anything at the person level: which of last year’s regulars is now occasional, and who stopped entirely.
No sight of anything outside Check-Ins. Check-Ins can’t see whether the family who stopped bringing their kids is still giving, still in a group, still on a serving team. Neither can Giving see attendance, which is why the follow-up question always lands outside the product you started in.
Where this leaves you
The built-in route works, and for plenty of churches it’s the right one. The cost is specific: a custom report is a morning’s work the first time and five minutes after that, but any question needing two windows of history or two events compared costs you a CSV export, a pivot table, and a name-matching argument with yourself. Then someone asks whether it’s worse than last spring and you build a second spreadsheet. If that’s your pattern, getting the exports into a sheet on a schedule is a real improvement before you buy anything.
Somewhere past two or three hundred people, noticing stops working and the list has to be produced deliberately. That’s the point Parable exists for. It reads all eight Planning Center products nightly into one place where they share a person key, so a household is one row rather than four reports: check-ins, giving, groups and serving beside each other. You ask in plain English and get back a list of names, with SQL and warehouse access underneath for anyone who’d rather write the query. How that compares to Planning Center is written down honestly, including where you don’t need us.
If your check-in questions stop at “how many came to the two-year-old room in July,” Planning Center already answers them and a second login is just a second login.
But the data you’d need to spot a family leaving is already sitting in Check-Ins, recorded properly, week after week, by a volunteer with an iPad. The record exists. Only the report is missing.