A Step-by-Step Import Experience Built for Churches

Most migration anxiety comes from not knowing the shape of the thing. You know you have to move, you know roughly what you have, and you have no idea whether this is a two-hour job or a two-month job.

Here is the whole sequence, in order. Most churches finish inside 30 days, and the majority of that is waiting on decisions rather than working.

Step 1: Export everything, before you cancel anything

This is the step that causes the most irreversible damage when it goes wrong, and it happens before Port is involved at all.

The failure mode is ordinary: a church gives notice on its old system, the contract lapses at the end of the month, and three weeks later somebody discovers the pledge export was incomplete. By then read access is gone and the data is gone with it.

So: export first, verify the exports open and contain what you expect, and only then cancel. Keep the raw exports somewhere safe even after the migration is finished.

What to pull, per data type:

• Giving — donor records and full donation history, not just the current year
• People — the full membership list, including inactive people you want to keep
• Groups — rosters with member and leader assignments
• Notes — pastoral and internal notes with their original dates
• Pledges — active and historical commitments

Planning Center’s own guidance on transitioning from another system is worth reading alongside this, particularly for the people import you will run natively.

Step 2: Import your people first

Order matters, and this is the dependency everything else rests on.

Giving, groups, notes, and pledges all attach to people. If the people are not in Planning Center yet, there is nothing for those records to attach to. Import people first — Planning Center does this natively by CSV — then confirm the result before layering anything on top.

Spend real time on this check. Look specifically at:

• Duplicates. Every long-lived system has them. Merging two profiles now is trivial; merging them after both have giving history attached is not.
• Families and households. Confirm they came across as related rather than as unconnected individuals.
• Inactive people. Make sure the people you deliberately kept are actually there.

Step 3: Upload your files to Port

Drag and drop your exports in. CSV and Excel both work.

You do not need to reshape them first. Port ships a parser for each of the 21 supported source systems, so it reads the export in the format your old vendor produced it. Header matching is case-insensitive and unrecognised columns are ignored, which means a slightly unusual export still lands. If your system is not one of the 21, Open Import handles any well-formed CSV.

This is the step that surprises people. There is no spreadsheet prep stage.

Step 4: Map your funds

Planning Center requires every imported donation to land on a fund that already exists in your account. Your old system’s fund names will not match Planning Center’s — they never do.

Port’s Magic Map proposes the mapping and shows it to you. Your job is to review it, not to build it. Two things to look for:

• Funds that matched but shouldn’t have. Similar names are exactly where a bad automatic match hides — check any building or campaign funds carefully.
• Funds with no match. Port flags these. Use Bulk Create to add them to Planning Center without leaving the migration.

Give this step proper attention. It is the one where an error is both easy to make and expensive to find later, because a misfiled donation surfaces at year-end in front of a donor.

Step 5: Run a small test import

Do not go straight to the full file.

Import a small batch — a few dozen donations, or one or two groups — and then go and look at the result inside Planning Center, not inside Port. Open a donor you know well. Check the amount, the fund, the date, and that it attached to the right person rather than creating a second profile.

Every Port plan includes unlimited imports for the length of your access window, so a test run costs nothing but the time to look at it. There is no reason to skip this and every reason not to.

Step 6: Import the rest

Once the sample looks right, run the full import. Port stays connected to Planning Center throughout, so new people and funds created along the way stay in sync rather than drifting from a stale snapshot.

Import order for the remaining types:

1. Giving history — usually the largest volume
2. Pledges, in the same pass as giving where possible, so commitments show correct progress rather than reading as unfulfilled
3. Group memberships
4. Pastoral notes

Step 7: Verify before you announce

Before you tell the congregation anything, tell yourself the truth about the data.

• Pull a giving statement for two or three donors you know and compare it against the old system.
• Open a group and confirm the leader is attached, not just the members.
• Check a pledge and confirm progress reflects the giving that fulfils it.
• Spot-check notes on a family with a long history.

If something is off, fix and re-run. Corrections are re-runs, not new invoices — that is the point of unlimited imports.

How long it actually takes

Most churches finish within 30 days. Every plan includes 180 days of access, deliberately more than needed, because the common delays are not technical — a busy season, an export that needs a second request from the old vendor, a decision about what to carry forward that needs a meeting.

If your timeline is longer than that, tell us and we will work to your schedule. If you want the shape of the whole thing before you commit, the migration FAQ answers what most churches ask first, and the pricing page has no surprises in it.