For data teams
Your Planning Center data, in a warehouse you can query
Most churches will never open this page, and that is the point — Parable answers questions in plain English for everyone else. If you have an analyst on staff, everything underneath is open to them.
Read your warehouse directly
Parable keeps a modelled copy of every Planning Center product — People, Giving, Check-Ins, Groups, Services, Calendar, Registrations, Publishing — in one schema, synced nightly. Query it with the SQL you already know. No CSV exports, no scraping the API yourself, no rate limits to babysit.
Joins Planning Center cannot do
Giving lives in one product, attendance in another, groups in a third. In the warehouse they share a person key, so "givers who are also group members" is a join rather than a project. The query on this page is a real one, run against a real church.
Connect the tools you already use
Point Power BI, Tableau, Looker Studio, Metabase or Google Sheets at your Parable data and build whatever your board asks for. Export anywhere. Your data is yours, and it leaves whenever you want it to.
The rest of the team never sees SQL
Your pastors keep asking questions in plain English and reading dashboards. The warehouse sits underneath for whoever wants it — one tool for the analyst and the executive pastor, instead of an analytics stack nobody else can open.
What you're actually querying
The query above is real, and the reason it works is the shape underneath it. Four things are worth knowing before you decide whether this fits your stack.
- One schema, one person key
- Everything lands in a single `planning_center` schema. Tables are named `<product>_<entity>` — `giving_donations`, `groups_memberships`, `checkins_check_ins`. The `*_relationships` tables carry a `relationship_id` that identifies the same person across every product, which is the key that makes cross-product joins possible at all.
- Modelled, not raw API dumps
- Planning Center exposes each product through its own API with its own pagination and its own id space. Parable resolves that into typed relational tables with real foreign keys, so a join is a join rather than a reconciliation project.
- Refreshed nightly
- The sync runs overnight, so a query answers as of last night rather than as of this second. For engagement, giving and attendance analysis that is the right granularity — but it does mean this is a reporting warehouse, not an operational read replica.
- Full history, not a rolling window
- The initial sync pulls everything Planning Center has, not the last N months, so year-over-year comparisons work from the first night.
The practical version: questions that take a morning of exports in Planning Center — who gave last year but not this year, who is attending but not in a group, which volunteers quietly came off the rota — are single queries here, because giving, check-ins, groups and services finally share a person key. The same joins are what Parable's own reporting is built on; this page is just the layer underneath it, opened up.
The available tables, how they relate, and worked example queries — product by product — are in the Parable developer docs, alongside the API reference. Worth a look before you book a call: it is the fastest way to tell whether the joins your church needs are already there.
Direct database access is included on the Scale plan and above. See pricing.