From your first sign-in to your first card in Planning Center.

Choose what your card asks

In Connections, open your name at the top right, then Settings. Card fields is the first thing under What the card asks. Turn each question on or off to match your printed card: email, phone, address and household are on to start. Comments, birthday, gender, anniversary, marital status, campus, how did you hear, prayer requests and the visit question are there to turn on if your card asks them.

If the defaults already match your card, press These are right. Only the questions that are on are saved to Planning Center. Turning a question off does not hide it on the photo: the whole card image is still sent to be read, so a prayer request written on the card is in that image either way.

Printing a new card? The free connect card builder designs one from the same questions and downloads a print-ready PDF.

Choose where answers go

Name, email, phone, address, birthday and the other standard details have fixed places in Planning Center People. The rest need a home you choose. Open Church setup, then Field map, and pick one for each:

• Yes or no questions, like "I'd like to join a group", go to a yes/no custom field, a checkbox option, or a workflow so someone follows up.
• How did you hear about us goes to a note category or a text field.
• Prayer requests and comments go to a note category, so the people who can see that category are the people who see the request.

If what you want is not in the list, the field map says Not listed? Create it in Planning Center and links to the right page. Create it there, come back, and it appears.

Membership: if you want new people marked as, say, Visitor, set it in Settings, under What the card asks, in Membership. You can choose one for every new person, and by visit when your card asks whether it is someone's first, second or third time. Connections sets membership only on a person it creates, never on someone already in Planning Center.

Scan your first card

On the Capture page, line the card up inside the guide and take the picture. A phone's browser works, and so does a laptop camera. The Connections iPhone app, in beta, scans up to 20 cards in one go; it signs in with Planning Center the same way.

Choose Upload, review when you are done, and the card goes to the review queue. Reading a card takes a few seconds.

Approve it into Planning Center

Open the Review queue and the card. The photo sits beside everything Connections read from it, so you can fix a misread letter in place. Below, Connections shows anyone already in Planning Center who might be this person, and how it found them.

• Pick the match when it is the same person. Connections adds what is new and leaves the rest of their record alone.
• Choose Create new person when nobody matches.
• Press Approve and sync. The person, their household and the answers you mapped are written to People, and the card moves to History.

If Planning Center refuses a write, the card says so. Approving again retries only what failed, without repeating what already landed.

How matching and approval work

Connections looks for each person on the card in your Planning Center People three ways, in this order, and shows every person it finds with how it found them.

• Email. An exact match on the email address written on the card, after tidying it up (case, and the dots and plus-tags Gmail ignores). The strongest signal.
• Phone. The phone number, read as a US number whatever way it was written. Strong, but a shared household phone can point at a spouse.
• Name. Planning Center's own name search on the first and last name. The weakest signal, so a name-only match is only ever a suggestion.

When several people could match, every candidate is listed with its method, email first, then phone, then name, and nothing is chosen for you. When nobody matches, the list offers only Create new person. Before approving, the reviewer confirms the names and fields read from the card and picks the match or Create new person; a card cannot be approved without that choice, and a card with no readable name cannot be approved until someone types the name in.

On the person you picked, approving adds the contact details the record is missing, fills in details like birthday or marital status only where the record has none, writes the card's answers to the places you mapped (custom fields, checkbox options, note categories, workflows), and adds a second adult to the same household. The card adds to the record and leaves the rest of it alone. Connections shows likely matches; it does not promise there can never be a duplicate, which is why the choice stays with your reviewer.

Bring your team in (optional)

Anyone at your church with Editor or Manager permission in Planning Center People can sign in at connections.thechurchrocket.com with their own Planning Center account and start reviewing cards. There are no invitations to send and no seats to buy. Settings and Church setup stay with administrators.