Planning Center dashboards are shareable screens of widgets that live in Planning Center Home, with attendance, giving, workflow and calendar tiles pulled from each product. They put every product’s numbers side by side on one page. What they don’t do is join them.
Key points
- Dashboards live in Planning Center Home, which is included free with every subscription, and hold widgets from Calendar, Check-Ins, Giving, Groups, People, Publishing, Registrations and Services.
- Everyone who logs in gets a private My Dashboard; since April 2025 you can also create extra dashboards and share them with collaborators as viewers or managers.
- Collaborators see the data on a shared dashboard regardless of their own product permissions, which is the most useful and least discussed thing about the feature.
- Every widget reads one product, so a dashboard shows giving and attendance next to each other but never crossed.
- Metrics widgets are counts and sums, so the tile is where the number stops. There’s no click that turns it into a list of households.
Most of what’s written about Planning Center dashboards is either Planning Center’s own documentation or a walkthrough of where the buttons are. Neither tells you the thing you need to decide: whether a dashboard is the right home for your question, or whether you’re about to build a very tidy screen that can’t survive its first follow-up.
What is a Planning Center dashboard?
A dashboard is a screen of widgets that, in Planning Center’s words, “give you information across multiple Planning Center products at a glance.” They live in Home, the product that ties the suite together, and Home is included free with every subscription.
There are two kinds.
My Dashboard is yours, private, and it’s what loads when you open Home. Everyone who can log in to your account has one, and you can add, remove, configure and reorder widgets from any product you have access to.
Shared dashboards arrived in April 2025. You create additional dashboards and add collaborators to them, which lets you build a screen for a specific ministry rather than one screen that tries to serve everyone. Kids, worship, facilities, the elder board. Planning Center’s announcement post describes them as “dedicated launch pads for your teams, projects, events, and ministries.” You add collaborators from the three-dot menu; they get an email and a Planning Center inbox notification, and a new tab appears in their Home. The mechanics are in Planning Center’s help article on dashboards.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. A personal dashboard is a convenience. A shared dashboard is a small act of publishing, and it changes who in your building sees a number without having to ask.
What can you put on a Planning Center dashboard?
More than most churches realise. You add a widget by picking a product from one dropdown and a widget from another, then configuring it. Planning Center’s widget documentation lists the full menu. The short version, by product:
Check-Ins. First-time visitors, most popular stations, attendance, headcounts.
Giving. Total donated, donors, newest donors, recurring donation forecast, batches in progress.
Services. Attendance, scheduled, team breakdown, plans forecast, and your own schedule on your personal dashboard.
Groups. Newest group members, upcoming group events, groups overview. For administrators only: attendance by count, attendance by percentage and memberships.
People. New profiles, newest profiles, demographic breakdown, workflow overview, added to workflow, completed workflow, upcoming birthdays and anniversaries, and list results.
Registrations. Registrations, attendance, recent registrations, and a single-signup widget for one event.
Calendar and Publishing. Upcoming events, pending approvals, recently edited pages, active Church Center app users.
Home. Notepad, quick links, tasks. These are the non-metric widgets that make a dashboard a working surface rather than a wall of charts.
Metrics widgets are configurable rather than fixed. You choose a chart type from line, area, horizontal bar or vertical bar, and you filter by campus, fund, service type, event, team or group. Planning Center’s write-up of metrics widgets describes timeframes of 30 days, 13 weeks or 12 months with a year-over-year comparison available, grouped into four families: attendance, donations, workflow activity and new profiles.
If you’ve been treating the dashboard as decoration, that list is worth a slow read. A kids-ministry dashboard with first-time visitors, attendance for your kids events and a notepad for this week’s staffing note is genuinely useful, and it costs twenty minutes.
Who can see a shared Planning Center dashboard?
Only the people you add, and they’re either viewers or managers.
The part worth knowing is what happens to permissions. All collaborators on a shared dashboard “can view dashboard content regardless of their specific permissions.” A small group leader with no Check-Ins access still sees the Check-Ins attendance widget you put on the dashboard you shared with them. A hospitality volunteer with no Calendar access still sees upcoming events.
This solves a real problem. The usual way to show a volunteer one number is to grant them access to an entire product, which nobody wants to do. A shared dashboard lets you publish the number without publishing the product.
It cuts both ways. A giving widget on a dashboard shared with twelve people is a giving figure twelve people see every time they open Home, including ones you’d never grant Giving access to. That’s the feature working as designed. But it’s a decision, and better made deliberately than discovered later.
One dependency to note: if the person who created the dashboard loses access to a product, the help documentation says those widgets stop showing data. Dashboards built by a staff member who then leaves will quietly go blank in places. Worth knowing before it happens on a Sunday.
What are Planning Center dashboards genuinely good at?
Three things, and they’re not small.
Per-product totals for the product you’re standing in. If you run kids ministry and want to know whether check-ins are up on this quarter last year, a Check-Ins attendance widget with a year-over-year comparison answers that on the screen you already have open. No export, no spreadsheet, no waiting.
Operational awareness. Pending Calendar approvals, batches in progress in Giving, overdue workflow cards, who’s confirmed on Sunday’s team. These are the “what needs me today” facts, and a dashboard is the right place for them. Half the value of Home isn’t analytics at all.
Publishing a number to people who can’t otherwise see it. Covered above, and it’s the strongest thing shared dashboards added.
All three have the same shape: a question that lives inside one product, asked by someone who works in that product. That’s the job Planning Center built dashboards for, and they do it well. If your questions look like that, adding a tool would just be another login.
What can’t a Planning Center dashboard do?
Three things, and they’re the same three every time.
It can’t join products. A widget reads one product. You can put a Giving total and a Check-Ins attendance chart on the same dashboard, and they’ll sit next to each other looking related, but nothing connects them. Giving doesn’t know who attended and Check-Ins doesn’t know who gave. Juxtaposition isn’t a join. This isn’t specific to dashboards. It’s the same product boundary behind the reports Planning Center can’t run, and it’s a deliberate architectural choice rather than an oversight.
It can’t give you the people behind the number. A metrics widget is a count or a sum over a filter, so the unit is the figure, not the household. In our experience the tile is the end of the road: attendance is down eleven percent, and there’s no click that tells you which eleven families stopped coming. Even the People list results widget only shows the totals of a list you built elsewhere in People, and only for lists at least 24 hours old. Dashboards do show names in places: newest donors, newest profiles, newest group members, recent registrations. But those are recency feeds of the last handful of people, not a way into the number a metrics widget is reporting. If you want to understand where lists, reports and dashboards each stop, that boundary is worth working through properly.
It can’t trend a person. Everything on a dashboard is aggregate. Total attendance, total donated, new profiles this month. None of it can show you one household’s line over three years, which is the view that actually tells you whether a family is drifting. A congregation-level total is the average of a lot of individual stories, and it goes flat when half of them are rising and half are falling.
That third one is the quiet one. A flat attendance line was the most common thing I saw running analytics at a large church, and it almost never meant nothing had changed. It meant arrivals and departures happened to cancel out that quarter. The chart was accurate every single week and told us nothing.
When does a church need more than the built-in dashboard?
The test I’d use is a single question: when the number moves, can you name who moved it?
If the answer is yes, because your question lives inside one product and the follow-up is another filter on the same widget, the built-in dashboard is the right tool and you’re done.
You’ve outgrown it when the meeting keeps going after the chart. Attendance is down. Which families. Giving is flat. Are the households who stopped giving still coming. Did the people who joined in January make it to June. Every one of those is a normal question from a normal elder, and every one needs two products to compare notes about the same person.
The usual next step is exports: a CSV from each product, matched on person ID or email, rebuilt each month. It works, and plenty of churches run it into Google Sheets on a schedule. It costs a morning, it’s stale the moment it’s finished, and it can’t take a follow-up without a second morning.
What a church metrics dashboard built from Planning Center data looks like
The difference isn’t prettier charts. It’s what happens after the number.
| Built-in dashboard | A dashboard built on synced Planning Center data | |
|---|---|---|
| Scope of one tile | One product | All eight, sharing a person key |
| Unit of the answer | A count or a sum | A count you can open into households |
| Follow-up question | New widget, or an export | Asked in the same session |
| Per-person history | Not available | Attendance, giving, serving and groups on one timeline |
| Freshness | Live | Synced nightly |
| Cost | Free with your subscription | A paid layer on top |
That last row is not a throwaway. Planning Center’s dashboards cost you nothing, and if they answer your questions, that’s the correct answer.
We built Parable for the churches where they don’t. It reads all eight Planning Center products through OAuth into one place where they share a person key, syncs nightly, and turns “attendance is down eleven percent” into the households behind it, because the join already happened. Dashboards and custom reports are on every plan, with SQL and warehouse access underneath. What a church metrics dashboard built this way actually contains is written down rather than implied, and how the two compare includes the parts where Planning Center is simply better.
Use both, and know which is which
Nothing here is an argument against Planning Center dashboards. Build them: one per ministry, shared with the people who run it, using the permissions bypass to get numbers in front of leaders who’d otherwise be guessing. Twenty minutes of work, no cost.
Just be clear about what you’ve built. A dashboard is a good instrument panel and an honest one. It tells you the altitude. It does not tell you who’s on the plane. And in a church, the second question is usually the one that matters.