Move years of donation history into Planning Center Giving with donors, funds, dates, and payment types intact — including the in-kind and check records the native import tool can't take.
Giving history is the hardest part of a Planning Center migration and the part churches most regret getting wrong. A donation that arrives detached from the right donor or the right fund is not history — it is a spreadsheet. Year-end statements, generosity reporting, and every donor conversation that starts with "you have been giving here since…" all depend on those relationships surviving the move.
Planning Center now has a built-in donation import tool, and it is worth understanding precisely before you decide whether you need anything else. It takes a CSV of up to 152,000 rows and 30MB with six required columns, matches donors by remote ID, then by name plus email or phone, and creates a new profile when it finds no match at all.
Its documented limits are where most church migrations run into trouble:
None of that makes the native tool bad. It makes it a loader, not a migration. It assumes you already have a correctly shaped CSV — and producing that file out of fifteen years of a system that was never designed to be left is the actual work. Port reads exports from 21 systems directly, so that step is handled rather than delegated back to you.
Port ships a purpose-built parser for each supported system, so you upload what your old system gave you instead of reshaping columns in Excel. Header matching is case-insensitive and unknown columns are ignored, which means a slightly different export from the same vendor still lands cleanly.
Almost no two systems name funds the same way, and Planning Center requires every donation to land on a fund that already exists. Magic Map proposes a mapping between your old fund names and your Planning Center funds so you are reviewing decisions rather than typing them — the single biggest time saving in a giving migration.
Port has a dedicated In-Kind provider for non-cash gifts, which the native import cannot take at all, and a Check provider that carries routing, account, and check number fields through to Planning Center.
Where your source system provides a remote ID, Port matches on it. That is materially stronger than name matching, because it survives nicknames, married names, and the duplicate profiles that accumulate in any system over a decade. Ambiguous rows are surfaced for review rather than silently creating a second profile for the same family.
Export everything before you cancel anything. The most expensive migration problem is discovering a gap after the old system's contract has lapsed and read access is gone. Our step-by-step import guidecovers what to pull and in what order, and thesupport documentation covers file preparation per system.
Partly. Planning Center added a donation import tool that accepts a CSV of up to 152,000 rows and 30MB, with six required columns: amount, fund, received date, payment method, donor first name, and donor last name. It works, but it starts from a correctly shaped CSV — producing that file from your old system is the actual work, and it is the part Port does for you.
In-kind donations cannot be imported at all. Negative amounts and refunds cannot be imported. Payment methods are limited to cash, check, card, and ach. Every fund must already exist in Planning Center before you start. Imports can only be undone within two weeks. Port has a dedicated In-Kind provider and a Check provider that carries routing, account, and check number fields.
Port matches on the remote ID from your source system where one exists, which is stronger than name matching because it survives nicknames, married names, and duplicate profiles. Where no remote ID exists, Port falls back to name and contact matching and surfaces ambiguous rows for review rather than silently creating a second profile.
Planning Center requires every imported donation to map to a fund that already exists. Port’s Magic Map step matches your old fund names to Planning Center funds so you review a proposed mapping instead of creating and matching funds by hand — which is where most of the manual effort in a giving migration goes.
Port charges $499 for unlimited giving imports with 180 days of access. There are no per-record fees and no volume tiers, so a church moving 65,000 donations pays the same as one moving 500.
Yes. Imports are unlimited for the length of your access window, so you can import a small batch, check it inside Planning Center, and adjust before committing the full file. Test runs cost nothing but time.
Supported systems
Port ships a purpose-built parser for each of these, so your export is understood on upload instead of reshaped by hand. Coming from something else? Open Import handles any system that produces a CSV.
