A Planning Center list finds people. A report formats those people into a document. A dashboard tracks a number over time. Lists answer who, reports answer give me that on paper, and dashboards answer is this going up or down.
Key points
- Lists let you filter people by their information and activity across all Planning Center applications, and can be set to refresh automatically.
- Reports are the output step: built-in report types per product, plus custom templates that People and plans administrators build in HTML, CSS and Liquid.
- Planning Center’s shareable dashboards live in Home, are either private or shared with collaborators, and show metric widgets over a timeframe you select.
- Pick by the shape of the question: a name you’ll act on is a list, a document someone holds is a report, a number you watch is a dashboard.
- Reports and dashboards read one product at a time; a list can filter on activity across products but returns names, not a side-by-side comparison. A list can take date-bounded conditions (gave last year, not this year), but all three answer as of now: none keeps yesterday’s membership after a refresh, and none puts two periods’ numbers side by side.
Most churches I talk to use all three of these and still aren’t sure where the boundaries are. That’s fair. Planning Center doesn’t present them as a set, and the word “report” gets used for two different things inside the product.
Here’s the short version before the detail.
What’s the difference between a list, a report and a dashboard?
| List | Report | Dashboard | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Answers | Who matches these rules | Give me that as a document | Is this number moving |
| Output | A set of people you can act on | PDF, HTML or CSV | A widget on a page |
| Freshness | Manual refresh or auto-refresh | The moment you printed it | A rolling window |
| Who builds it | Anyone with list permissions | Built-ins: anyone who can print. Templates: administrators | Anyone who can log in to Planning Center |
| Shared how | Collaborators with view or manage rights | The file you hand over | Private, or shared with named collaborators |
| Good for | Follow-up, messaging, bulk edits | Rosters, statements, printouts | Board reports, weekly pulse |
The thing to hold on to: lists and reports are two halves of one motion. You build the list, then you print it. Dashboards are a separate thing entirely. They exist to be looked at, not acted on.
What is a Planning Center list?
A list is a saved set of rules that produces people. Planning Center’s own description is the best one: lists let you filter your people based on their information and activity across all Planning Center applications.
Rules are built from conditions, and the logic goes further than most people realise. Conditions can be grouped so you find people who match all, any or none of them, and once you have three or more conditions in a rule you also get at least, exactly and at most. Multiple rules combine the same way. That is enough expressiveness to build a genuinely specific list without help from anyone technical.
Refreshing
A list can be set to refresh automatically in its list settings, or you can hit Refresh results yourself. Two cautions from the help docs that catch people out:
- When lists depend on each other, they have to be refreshed in the order they were created.
- Some lists shouldn’t be auto-refreshed at all. Planning Center’s common lists article explicitly says not to auto-refresh the parents-and-children list, because it’s built from three interdependent lists.
If you’re driving automations in People from a list, the refresh isn’t optional: the list has to refresh automatically or be refreshed by hand for any automation to run.
What you can do with one
From a list’s results you can send an email, text or Church Center message, export to CSV, print a report, bulk-edit profiles, or step through profiles one at a time in playlist mode. That last set is why a list is the tool for follow-up work. It’s the only one of the three that does something to the people it finds.
Lists are shared by adding collaborators with view or manage rights. One quirk worth knowing before two staff share a list: if one manager created a rule or condition, another manager can view or delete it, but not edit it.
What is a Planning Center report?
Two different things wear this name, and conflating them is where most of the confusion comes from.
Built-in reports are the ones each product ships. Giving has by-donation, by-donor, in-kind, statements and payout reports, and all of them print or export to CSV. Check-Ins has reports for tracking trends: first timers, room roster, missed this session, headcounts, annual attendance as a CSV. In Services, people reports cover directory, future schedule, blockout dates, last logged in, people assignments and people grouped by tags. You filter, hit the print icon, choose a report type, submit.
Custom reports are templates, and there are two editors. In Services, People and plans administrators create or edit custom reports on the Reports page. In People, the templates behind list reports need manager permissions in People. Both are built from HTML, CSS and Liquid markup. In Services there’s a Quick Customization panel for the ordinary changes: toggle email addresses on, widen the photos. For anything real there’s an Advanced Editing mode with an available-variables menu. Planning Center’s own guidance is honest about the bar: a fully customized report needs good knowledge of HTML and CSS and some basic programming.
The two halves meet on a list. From the Results tab, the print icon lets you create a report from the list, using either a built-in or a custom template, and download it as PDF or render it as HTML. Two practical notes: CSV export needs the “Can export CSVs and reports” permission, and large reports can time out as PDF while the HTML version won’t.
If you want the full tour of what each product’s reports cover, that’s the complete guide to Planning Center reports.
What are Planning Center’s dashboards?
Dashboards live in Planning Center Home. Everyone who can log in gets a private My Dashboard, and since April 2025 you can also build shared dashboards for a team, a ministry or a project.
You fill them with widgets. There are widgets from every product: first-time visitors and headcounts from Check-Ins, newest donors and total donated from Giving, attendance by count from Groups, plans forecast from Services, newest profiles and workflow overviews from People, plus a notepad and quick links. The metric widgets that matter for reporting cover attendance, donations, workflow activity and new profiles, each over a timeframe you select, with a year-over-year comparison.
Two things about sharing are worth reading twice, because they’re the opposite of what people assume.
All collaborators can view dashboard content regardless of their own permissions. Add a giving widget to a dashboard you share with your hospitality team and the hospitality team can see it. That’s a feature. It’s how a small group leader sees attendance without a Check-Ins licence. But it means a shared dashboard is a permissions decision, not a layout decision.
And the widgets inherit the creator’s access. If the person who built the dashboard loses permissions in a product, those widgets stop showing data for everyone. Dashboards built by the staff member who left are a known way to end up with a page of blanks. If you want more on how far these get you, we wrote up Planning Center dashboards on their own.
Which should I use for X?
| What you’re asking | Use |
|---|---|
| Who hasn’t checked in since Easter? | List |
| I need the nursery roster for Sunday morning | Report, printed from a list |
| Is attendance up on the same month last year? | Dashboard widget |
| Give everyone in this list a membership status | List, bulk edit |
| Year-end giving statements | Report, from Giving |
| How many new profiles did we add this quarter? | Dashboard widget |
| Which kids in this room have allergies? | Report, from Check-Ins |
| Email the forty people who registered but never came | List, then send message |
| Something for the elders’ meeting on Tuesday | Dashboard, printed or shown |
| Who gave last year and hasn’t this year? | A list, in two steps. See below |
That last row deserves its own note, because people assume it’s impossible in Planning Center and it isn’t. It’s just two lists instead of one. Planning Center documents the pattern for adults who haven’t given: build a list of everyone who donated in the period you care about, then a second list whose rule is not on that first list. Point the first at this year and add a “donated last year” condition to the second and you have your lapsed givers. Two cautions from the same page: don’t set the dependent list to auto-refresh, because lists that depend on each other have to be refreshed in order, and the result is names only. How much each household gave, and whether they still attend, stay in Giving and Check-Ins. That’s the point where the export route starts.
The rule of thumb I use: if the answer is a number, it’s a dashboard. If the answer is a name you’re going to do something with, it’s a list. If the answer needs to exist on paper or in someone’s inbox as a document, it’s a report. And it’s almost always a report of a list.
Where do all three stop?
Two limits, and they’re the same two limits wearing different clothes.
Each one reads a single product. A list’s conditions can draw on more than one product, which is more than most people expect. But the answer it gives you is a set of people, not a comparison. You can find everyone who gave in the last year, and you can find everyone who attended last month, and you cannot get a column of what each household gave next to a column of how often they came. Reports render one product’s data in that product’s shape. Dashboard widgets sit next to each other on the same page, but an attendance graph beside a giving graph is two graphs, not a relationship. This is the wall between products, and it’s why the last row of the table above stops at names: the list can tell you who lapsed, and nothing built in can put what they gave beside whether they still come.
All three answer as of now. A refreshed list overwrites yesterday’s answer; nothing anywhere records who was on it last month and isn’t today. A report is true at the second you printed it. A dashboard shows a rolling window. So the questions that need memory have nowhere to live: who dropped off, what changed, is this cohort behaving differently from the one before it. Finding out who stopped coming is hard for exactly this reason, not because the data is missing.
There are smaller ceilings too. Check-Ins session-count reports cap at 53 past sessions, so multi-year attendance analysis means combining CSVs by hand.
None of this is a criticism. Lists, reports and dashboards each do their job well, and the job was scoped on purpose. The trouble is only that church leadership questions have a habit of landing in the gap between them.
What does the built-in route cost you?
Assume you’ve done it properly: good lists on nightly refresh, a couple of custom report templates, a shared dashboard for the staff meeting. That setup is worth having and I’d build it at any church I worked at.
What it still costs you is the follow-up question. The dashboard says attendance is flat and giving is down four percent. Someone asks which households are behind that, and you’re now exporting from Giving, exporting from Check-Ins, and matching them in a spreadsheet on email address. It’s the same morning’s work whether you asked in January or June, because nothing you built stores the join.
That gap is what we built Parable for. It reads all eight Planning Center products nightly through the official API into one place where they share a person key, so you type the question in plain English and get back a list of people with their giving, attendance, serving and group history attached. The questions in that last table row become one query. On Scale and Enterprise there’s SQL and warehouse access underneath for whoever on staff wants to point Sheets or Metabase at it.
We’re not a replacement for any of the three tools above. Lists still do the bulk edits, reports still print the roster, dashboards still run your Tuesday meeting. Parable is for the question that arrives after the dashboard.
If your questions live inside one product, Planning Center already answers them and a second login is just a second login. It’s when you find yourself joining two exports on an email address for the third time this year that the tooling, not your discipline, is what’s short.