Powerful Features That Make Migration a Breeze

Feature lists are usually written backwards — someone builds a thing, then invents a reason it matters. This one runs the other way. Port was built inside a consulting practice that was already running Planning Center migrations by hand, so every feature below started as a specific afternoon that went badly.

Here is what each one is actually for.

Magic Map: the fund problem

Fund mapping is where giving migrations quietly consume a week.

Planning Center requires every imported donation to land on a fund that already exists in your account — that is a documented constraint of its own donation import, not a Port limitation. Meanwhile your old system has fifteen years of accumulated fund names: “General”, “General Fund”, “GENERAL OPERATING”, the building campaign that ran from 2014 to 2017, and four designations nobody can identify.

Someone has to reconcile those two lists. Done manually, that means a spreadsheet, a lot of cross-referencing, and a real risk of donations landing under the wrong designation — which is the kind of error you discover at year-end, in front of a donor.

Magic Map proposes the mapping for you. It matches your source fund names against your Planning Center funds and shows you the result, so you are reviewing decisions rather than making them from scratch. Where a fund has no match, Port flags it rather than guessing.

Bulk Create: for the funds that don’t exist yet

Reviewing a proposed mapping surfaces a second problem — some of your funds genuinely have no Planning Center equivalent yet.

The manual path is to stop the migration, open Planning Center, create the missing funds one at a time, and come back. Bulk Create does it in place, so a missing fund is a click rather than an interruption. The migration keeps moving.

Two-way Planning Center sync

Port stays connected to Planning Center for the duration of the import rather than treating it as a one-shot file upload.

That matters because a migration is not a single moment. People get added, funds get created, and someone on your team is usually still working in Planning Center while the import is in progress. Live sync means Port is matching against what is in your account now, not against a snapshot taken an hour ago — which is where duplicate records come from.

Duplicate reduction

Every church management system accumulates duplicate people. Fifteen years produces “Bob Smith”, “Robert Smith”, and “Robert & Linda Smith”, all with giving attached.

A naïve import makes this worse: it creates a fourth. Port matches on the remote ID from your source system wherever one is available, which survives nicknames, married names, and inconsistent data entry in a way that name matching does not. Where no remote ID exists, ambiguous rows are surfaced for review rather than silently resolved.

The data types that matter most

Port handles four, and three of them have no native Planning Center import at all:

• Giving history — years, not just recent months, with donors, funds, dates, and payment types intact.
• Group memberships — rosters with member and leader assignments, not just a list of names.
• Pastoral notes — attached to the right person, with original dates preserved.
• Pledges — active and historical commitments, linked to donors and campaigns.

Planning Center imports people by CSV and now imports donations. Groups, notes, and pledges are on you. See the full comparison for exactly where each tool stops.

In-Kind and Check: the records other tools reject

Two specialist providers exist because the general case does not cover everything.

In-Kind handles non-cash gifts — donated vehicles, equipment, professional services. Planning Center’s native import states plainly that in-kind donations cannot be imported. If your church receives them, this is the difference between complete records and a gap.

Check carries routing, account, and check number fields through to Planning Center, rather than flattening every paper gift to a payment method of “check” and discarding the detail.

Works with the system you’re leaving

Port ships a purpose-built parser for 21 source systems — ACS, Breeze, CCB, Church Windows, ChurchTeams, Church Office Online, Elexio, Elvanto, FellowshipOne, FellowshipOne GO, Facts (Aware3), MinistryPlatform, Pushpay, Realm, RockRMS, Servant Keeper 8, ShelbyNext, Subsplash, Tithely, Touchpoint, and Xero.

A parser means Port understands that vendor’s export format on upload. Header matching is case-insensitive and unknown columns are ignored, so a slightly different export from the same system still lands cleanly. You are not reshaping columns in Excel to hit a required schema.

Coming from something not on that list? Open Import takes any system that produces a CSV.

A guided interface, not a database tool

The people doing church migrations are pastors, administrators, bookkeepers, and volunteers. Almost none of them are database administrators, and the tooling should not assume otherwise.

Every stage in Port includes guidance about what is being asked and why, and validation runs before anything is written to Planning Center. Errors are explained in plain language rather than returned as codes. The intent is that you can hand this to a capable volunteer without also handing them a manual.

Field-tested, not experimental

Port is the same tool Threefold Solutions uses for professional Planning Center migrations. It was not built speculatively and then sold — it was built to do work that was already being done, by people who had to live with the results.

That is also why the pricing works the way it does: every plan is unlimited for its data type, because a tool that charges per record encourages churches to move less of their history than they should.

Ready to start? Run your first import, or talk to us about what you are moving.