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Your first Sunday with Ministry Manager

A calm, 15-minute path from signup to a Sunday that runs on Ministry Manager — and a Monday morning that closes the loop.

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What this does

Walks you through the smallest set of steps that gets your church running on Ministry Manager by next Sunday.

When you’d use it

You signed up Wednesday evening, you preach in four days, and you want to walk in Sunday morning with a real welcome card on the table and a way to find new visitors again on Monday. This is the one-evening setup that gets you there.

It assumes you have nothing in the app yet — no people imported, no service scheduled, no team invited. If you already have a Planning Center export sitting in your downloads folder, you’ll use it in step 2.

Step by step

Before Sunday (15 minutes)

  1. Set your church name and timezone. Open Settingsand confirm the church name and timezone are right. The timezone drives every attendance timestamp and the Monday morning summary, so it’s worth one extra glance.

  2. Get your people into the app. Open People. If you have a spreadsheet or a Planning Center CSV, click Import peopleand upload it — the column mapper handles first name, last name, email, phone, and household. If you don’t have a list, click Add people and add your core team by hand. Five to ten names is enough to start.

  3. Create your Sunday service. Open Events and create a new service. Use the Sunday servicepreset if it’s listed — it sets the right defaults for a recurring 9 a.m. Sunday gathering, and you can edit the time and location. The event needs to exist before you can take attendance for it.

  4. Print your welcome card. Go back to the Dashboard. The Print your welcome card tile sits at the top until your first visitor scans in. Click Print QR, send it to your printer, and put it on the welcome table or tape it inside the bulletin. One QR is all you need — every visitor uses the same code.

  5. Invite the volunteer who runs the welcome table. On Settings, scroll to the team section and send an invite by email. Give them the Memberrole — they can check people in and see the directory without touching billing or the church profile. If they’re going to run a kiosk on an iPad, set a 4-digit Kiosk PIN on the same page so they can hand the tablet back to a volunteer without giving up admin access.

On Sunday

  1. Open the service on your phone. Walk into the building, open Events, and tap into this Sunday’s service. You’ll see a Start check-inbutton at the top of the event page once it’s the day of the service.

  2. Check people in. Tap Start check-in and tap names as people walk in. If you’re running a kiosk on the welcome table, your volunteer launches kiosk mode from the same event page and members check themselves in by tapping their own name.

  3. Let visitors fill out the card themselves. When a first-time family scans the QR on the welcome table, they fill in their info on their own phone and the card lands in your follow-up pipeline before the sermon ends. You don’t do anything — they self-introduce.

  4. Move new visitors to “Reached out” in the parking lot. After the service, open Follow-ups. Each new card sits in New. When you’ve said hello or gotten a number, swipe or tap the card forward to Reached out. That’s the whole interaction — no note required.

Monday morning

  1. Open the AI weekly summary in your inbox. Monday morning, you’ll get an email: how many attended, who’s new, who’s missed three Sundays in a row. Two minutes of reading is enough to know your week before you’ve had coffee.

  2. Send the “thanks for visiting” note. Open Messages, pick By tagor select last Sunday’s visitors from the recipient picker, and write a short email. Two or three sentences. The summary email tells you who they are; this is just the reply.

  3. Close out the cards you actually handled. Back in Follow-ups, advance any visitor you’ve had a real conversation with to Connected. Anything still in New Monday afternoon is a card you owe a call.

If something goes wrong

  • The QR code doesn’t print, or you forgot to print it. Open the dashboard on your phone, tap Open public pageon the welcome card tile, and ask the visitor to type the URL into their browser. It’s the same form — no QR required.

  • Your CSV import dropped people or scrambled households. The import is non-destructive — nothing was overwritten. Open People, find any rows that came in wrong, and edit them directly. For large fixes, ask your volunteer to delete the recent import (the date stamp is on each row) and try again with a cleaner file.

  • No visitors scanned the card.That’s normal week one. Most churches see the first scan in week two or three once visitors start noticing the card on the table. Add it to the bulletin and announce it once from the front — most don’t scan things they haven’t been invited to.

  • The Monday email didn’t arrive.Check spam first — the first one sometimes lands there. If it’s not in spam, you may have signed up after Sunday’s cutoff; the summary covers the week that just ended, so a Wednesday signup means the first one arrives the following Monday. The weekly summary card on the dashboard shows the most recent one any time you want it.

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