Move your care history into Planning Center People — attached to the right person, with the original dates intact, instead of archived in a system you no longer pay for.
Pastoral notes are the quietest thing in a migration and often the most valuable. They are the record of who visited whom in hospital, which family went through a hard year, what was promised and by whom. They are also the data most likely to be silently abandoned, because unlike giving history nobody audits them at year end — you only discover they are gone the first time you needed one.
Planning Center imports people from a CSV, and it now has a donation import tool for giving. Pastoral notes have no equivalent. Without a tool, the realistic choices are retyping them into People or leaving them in a system you are about to stop paying for — and once that contract lapses, read access usually goes with it.
Notes routinely contain the most sensitive information a church holds. Two things are worth doing deliberately rather than by default.
First, treat the export file as confidential from the moment it is created. It is an ordinary file sitting in someone's downloads folder, and it contains material you would not email. Delete it when the migration is finished.
Second, a migration is a natural moment to decide what should not be carried forward at all. Some records were written for a situation that resolved a decade ago. Choosing not to move them is a legitimate decision — the point is to make it on purpose, rather than discovering later that the decision was made for you by a tool that dropped them.
Notes attach to people, so people land first: import your people into Planning Center natively, confirm that looks right — particularly duplicates — and then import notes on top. Imports are unlimited within your access window, so start with a small batch and check how it reads inside a profile before running the rest.
If you are also bringing giving history,group memberships, orpledges, theEverything Bundle covers all four for less than buying them separately.
Not natively. Planning Center imports people by CSV and has a donation import tool for giving, but pastoral notes have no built-in import path. Without a tool, the options are retyping them into People or leaving them behind in a system you are about to stop paying for.
In Planning Center People, attached to the person they were written about — which is the whole point. A note that arrives detached from its person is an archive; a note attached to a profile is context the next staff member sees when that family comes up.
Yes. Notes carry their original dates, so the sequence of a pastoral relationship is preserved. A care history that all shows the same import date tells you nothing about when anything happened.
Notes often contain the most sensitive information a church holds. Review what you export before you import it, and treat the export file itself as confidential — it is a plain file on someone’s laptop until it is not. Some churches take a migration as the moment to decide what should not be carried forward at all, which is a reasonable thing to do deliberately rather than by accident.
Port charges $249 for unlimited note imports with 180 days of access. There are no per-record fees and no volume tiers.
Yes. Notes attach to people, so import your people into Planning Center first, confirm that looks right, then bring notes in on top.
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.
