Moving to Planning Center Shouldn’t Put Your Most Important Data at Risk
By Port Team · · 5 min read
Answers to the questions churches ask before a Planning Center migration — what moves, what Planning Center can’t import, how long it takes, and what it costs.
If you have searched “how to import data into Planning Center” or “Planning Center migration help,” you have probably hit the same wall every church hits: Planning Center is excellent software, but it has no built-in way to bring your giving history, group memberships, pastoral notes, or pledges with you.
Planning Center’s own documentation is candid about this. Their guidance on transitioning to Planning Center Giving points churches toward third-party tools or the public API for historical donations, and their import documentation covers people data by CSV rather than the relational records that make up your church’s actual history.
That gap is the reason Port exists. Below are the questions we are asked most often before a migration starts.
What Port moves, and what it doesn’t
How do I move giving history into Planning Center Giving?
Port imports historical giving directly into Planning Center Giving, preserving donor relationships, fund assignments, dates, and payment types. This matters more than it sounds: giving history that arrives detached from the right donor or fund is not history, it is a spreadsheet. Year-end statements, generosity reporting, and donor care all depend on those relationships surviving the move.
Fund mapping is usually the messiest part, because almost no two systems name funds the same way. Port’s Magic Map step matches your old fund names to Planning Center funds so you are reviewing decisions rather than typing them.
Can Port import group memberships, notes, and pledges?
Yes — all three, and group memberships are worth calling out specifically because most import tools do not handle them at all.
- Group memberships move with member and leader assignments intact, across small groups, teams, and rosters.
- Pastoral notes land in Planning Center People, so the care history behind a family stays attached to that family.
- Pledges move as both active and historical commitments, so campaign reporting survives.
Does Port work with my current giving platform?
If your system can export, Port can work with it. There is no integration list to check against, because Port works from your exported files rather than a direct connection to your old vendor — which is also why it keeps working when a vendor changes its API or sunsets a product.
How a migration actually runs
Do I need to be technical to use Port?
No. Port is built for church staff and volunteers, not developers. Every stage is guided: export checklists tell you what to pull from your old system, drag-and-drop upload handles the files, and validation explains what needs attention in plain language before anything is written to Planning Center.
What if my data is messy?
Assume it is — everyone’s is. Fifteen years of a church management system means duplicate people, retired funds, inconsistent name formats, and donations attached to records nobody remembers creating.
Port validates before it imports, catches errors while they are still cheap to fix, and includes duplicate reduction so you are not merging records by hand afterward. Messy data is the normal starting condition, not a reason to delay.
Can I test a small sample first?
Yes, and you should. Run a small batch, look at the result inside Planning Center, and confirm it looks the way you expect before committing the full dataset. Every Port plan includes unlimited imports for the length of your access window, so test runs cost you nothing but time.
Timeline and cost
How long does a typical migration take?
Most churches finish within 30 days. Every plan includes 180 days of access, so the deadline is deliberately generous — the extra time is there for the church that starts in a busy season, or discovers mid-way that the old system’s export needs a second pass.
What if my timeline is longer?
Plans can be extended. If 180 days will not cover a phased migration or a campus-by-campus rollout, get in touch and we will work to your schedule rather than ours.
What does it cost?
Pricing is per data type, and every plan is unlimited for that type:
| What you’re moving | Price |
|---|---|
| Giving | $499 |
| Group Memberships | $249 |
| Notes | $249 |
| Pledges | $99 |
| Everything Bundle (all four) | $999 |
There are no per-record fees and no volume tiers, which matters most for large or long-established churches — a church moving 65,000 donation records pays the same as one moving 500. See what’s included in each plan.
What if something goes wrong?
Port validates everything before import and explains errors in plain language rather than error codes. Our support team responds within 24 hours, and because imports are unlimited within your access window, a correction is a re-run rather than a new invoice.
Before you start
The single biggest predictor of a smooth migration is the quality of the export you begin with. Our step-by-step import guide walks through what to pull from your old system and in what order, and the support documentation covers file preparation for the formats we see most often.
Port was built by Threefold Solutions out of hundreds of real church migrations — every feature in it exists because a migration went sideways without it. If you want to talk through your situation before buying anything, contact our team.