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Planning Center Integration
Planning Center Integration

Setting up and configuring your Planning Center Integration with Subsplash Giving

Cody Walton avatar
Written by Cody Walton
Updated over 9 months ago

Integrating Subsplash Giving with Planning Center is easier and more secure than ever before, utilizing Planning Center's preferred method of secure authentication. With a few clicks, you'll be good to go!

Setting Up your Planning Center Integration

Note! This Integration connects Subsplash Giving, Planning Center People, and Planning Center Giving. Your organization must be subscribed to all three systems for the integration to work.

Step 1

Add your Planning Center (PCO) funds that you plan on using for Subsplash Giving (SSG) to the Funds section of the dashboard. This is very important to ensure a seamless sync experience across systems. More information on how to do so can be found in our Funds article.

Make sure your fund names match exactly in both PCO and SSG. For example, if your fund is titled "General Fund" in SSG, it must be titled "General Fund" in PCO as well.

Warning! PCO does not support campuses. However, you can link campuses through SSG in a particular way to record campus data. Do so carefully, as this will not link complete donation information over to PCO due to those system limitations.

Step 2

Log in to your Subsplash Giving Dashboard and navigate to settings. IntegrationsPlanning Center → Connect to Planning Center

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Here, you will be prompted to log in with your Planning Center admin credentials and allow Subsplash to access Planning Center Giving & People.

The person who is setting up your integration must have full admin privileges in PCO.

They will also show as the creator of batches in PCO. If this is not ideal, we suggest you use a different administrator account named “Subsplash Giving” and use that to integrate the two systems.

Step 3

Your integration is now live and syncing will begin! Depending on the amount of data you will be syncing, you can expect a wait time around 45 minutes or less for a full sync.

Managing your Planning Center Integration

Managing your Planning Center (PC) integration is pretty quick and easy! Make sure you check out our guide on Setting up your Planning Center Integration before moving forward. After the two systems are connected, it may take about 40 minutes for the integration to complete. Once everything is set up and running, we recommend checking on your integration once per week to ensure things continue to run smoothly.

The unsynced transaction notice is NORMAL. As the week goes along and donations come in, this number will increase. After your weekly or daily transfer, this number will reset to 0, indicating that the transactions have been sent through.

Data Syncing

PC will sync with Subsplash Funds, Donors, and gift amounts. The sync happens when we transfer funds into your account. For example, if you received your deposit on Wednesday, there will be a batch in PCO waiting for you to review and commit.

Note! Only processed transactions are transferred. If a donation was gifted through ACH, that transaction will not be sent over to PCO until it has been processed and when it comes through on your transfer date.

When setting up funds, do not add sub-funds since PCO does not support sub-funds or campuses. If you choose to use sub-funds, when the data syncs, the sub-fund will be stripped from that donation and only the fund will be recorded in PCO. Therefore you will lose part of the financial record. For example, if you give to the Missions fund, and you select a missionary as a sub-fund, only the fund Missions fund will be recorded in PCO.

Matching Members

If one of your members used a nickname or a different email address instead of the information they are using in PCO, you’ll need to manually match them up. Don’t worry, we’ve made matching member profiles easy. Click on the profile, run a deep search, and match the person to their designated profile.

Note: If you can't find the profile you're looking for and you know that the donor has a profile in Planning Center, run a search in the members section of your Subsplash Integration to see if they have two profiles. If they already have a profile linked from Subsplash to PCO, you'll need to either add the second profile to PCO or unlink the first profile in order to link the second one.


To check on your integration, click on "Integrations" in the side menu and click anywhere in the PCO area.

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Here we can see that there are a few issues with your donors. Click on Members.

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You’ll see a Manual Link Required flag on any members that need to be synced. Click on the unsynced member.

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You can search your PC database for your donor to find the correct match. Click on the name to match.

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Tip! Searching by last name is sometimes the quickest way to find the member, or click on Deep Search to search by alternative names and email addresses.

When you find the correct donor account in PC, click on Link.

Adding Members to PC

However, if you have done a Deep Search and the donor is not found, the donor may not exist in PC. Click on Add to Planning Center, which will create the donor account in the other system.

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Alternatively, the donor could have duplicate accounts in SSG. Check out this article on Managing Duplicate Donor Accounts with a ChMS Integration to learn more.

Linking Funds

You may need to link funds, especially if they are newly created. You can’t add funds to PC via SSG.

Warning! You will need to use the same fund name in both systems. If you need to add a new fund, do so in PC first.

Go to ChMS > Planning Center > Funds.

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Below we can see that the General fund has a gray link icon, indicating that that fund has been linked. The Missions fund has yet to be linked, but there are not any donations that have come into that fund yet. It’s recommended to link up all your funds regardless of what donations have been made.

The Kid’s Ministry fund is requiring a manual link. Click on the fund.

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Click on the fund that matches. If you just created a new fund, click on Refresh Funds to update the list.

Unsynced Transactions

It is normal for the number of Unsynced Transactions to increase throughout the week. Data is synced between the two systems when funds are deposited into your account. For example, Wednesday morning in PC you should be able to go to Batches and match up the total of your batch to your SSG gross total for that week’s transfer.

However, you will also want to ensure that your Members and Funds are linked to ensure that no data is left behind.

If a Member link issue is resolved after a transfer has gone through, the original batch should now include the recently linked member.

If transactions continue to not sync, check and see if the transactions that are not syncing are connected to any batches that have been closed in Planning Center. If there are batches connected to those transactions, then you will need to open them back up and then either you or a Subsplash Giving agent can Force Sync them over.

Sub-Funds

Unfortunately, PC does not utilize sub-funds, so we won’t be able to sync your sub-fund data over to Planning Center. We recommend you do not use this option in Subsplash Giving.

If you do proceed with using sub-funds within Subsplash Giving, all sub-fund donations will be transferred as if they were donated to the fund within which the sub-funds were created. All sub-fund data will be available in the transaction and transfer exports from Subsplash Giving.

For example: If donors have donated to the Thanksgiving Dinner and Christmas Dinner sub-funds within your Special Donations fund, you will see all donations within both sub-funds in your Special Donations fund in Planning Center.

Campuses

Today Planning Center does not have a campus-specific setup for Giving, so you will need to have a separate fund set up for each campus. Additionally, you will need to name each fund with the campus name and fund name. Example: Campus: Fund Name or North: General

For example: If you have the General, Missions, and Building funds for your North and Main campuses, you will need to create the funds:

  • North: General

  • North: Missions

  • North: Building

  • Main: General

  • Main: Missions

  • Main: Building

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