FAQ

Church Gains is the intelligence layer on top of Planning Center. It connects to your existing PC account through secure OAuth and gives your staff three capabilities they don't have today: photograph a paper connect card and have it land in the right PC profile in seconds (Snap-to-Import), ask plain-English questions about your people data and get real answers (Ask Your Data), and receive an AI-generated Monday morning staff brief that highlights who needs attention this week (Weekly Digest).

We don't replace Planning Center. We make it smarter by surfacing the insights already sitting inside your data.

It's the heart of why Church Gains exists. In the parable of the lost sheep (Luke 15:1–7), a shepherd leaves the ninety-nine to go after the one that is missing, and rejoices when it is found. Most churches already have what they need to notice who has been away, but it's buried in reports nobody has time to run. We bring it to the surface so a person can reach out to a person.

Church Gains helps you notice people while there is still time to reach out. Your Monday digest tells you who hasn't been here in three weeks and who just walked in for the first time. Your Spaces dashboard keeps a list of guests who haven't heard from anyone yet. Each name is a person, so every suggestion ends with a call, a visit or a prayer from someone who knows them.

No. Planning Center is your system of record — Church Gains never replaces it. We read your PC data (with your permission, through OAuth), analyze it, and write back only when you explicitly approve. Think of us as the analytical brain that sits on top of the data you already collect, so your leaders can spend their time with people instead of spreadsheets.

Machine learning (ML) is a branch of computer science where systems learn patterns from data rather than following hard-coded rules. When Church Gains scans a handwritten connect card and reads “Sarah Johnson” from messy cursive, that's an ML model (Gemma 4) recognizing letter shapes it learned from millions of examples.

Guardrails are the safety constraints we wrap around every ML operation:

• Human-in-the-loop: Every write to Planning Center requires a staff member to review and approve. The ML proposes; your team commits.
• Confidence scoring: Each extracted field shows a confidence percentage. Low-confidence fields are flagged for manual review.
• Scope-limited OAuth: Church Gains only requests the PC permissions it needs for the features you use. No blanket access.
• Audit trail: Every PC write is logged with who approved it, when, and what changed. Your admin can review the full history at /audit.

The guardrails exist because church data is pastoral data. A typo in a prayer request or a mismatched family member isn't just a data error — it's a pastoral failure. We treat it that way.

“AI” has become a marketing buzzword that can mean anything from a chatbot to a self-driving car. We prefer “ML” because it's more precise about what Church Gains actually does: we use trained models to recognize handwriting, understand natural-language questions, and generate staff briefs.

More importantly, we want to set the right expectation. Church Gains is not an autonomous agent making decisions for your church. It's a tool that helps your leaders work faster by doing the analysis they'd do manually if they had unlimited time. Every action that changes your data requires human approval.

Here are three concrete examples from our beta churches:

• Sunday morning: A volunteer photographs 15 connect cards after service. Instead of someone spending 45 minutes Monday morning retyping them, Snap-to-Import extracts and commits them in under 5 minutes — with human review on every card.
• Monday staff meeting:The pastor asks “who are our first-time guests from the last two Sundays that we haven't followed up with?” Instead of someone digging through PC reports, they type the question in Ask Your Data and get the list in 12 seconds.
• Weekly prep:The staff brief arrives at 8am Monday with attendance trends, volunteer gaps for next Sunday, and a short list of families who haven't been here in a while, and who knows them. No one had to build that report — it was generated from your PC data automatically.

“Working faster” means your staff spends less time wrangling data and more time with people.

Your data lives in Planning Center — we don't replicate it. When you use Church Gains, we make API calls to PC on your behalf (using the OAuth token you granted), process the response to generate insights, and return the results to you. We store:

• Your OAuth tokens (encrypted, in Supabase)
• Query logs for audit purposes (PII is redacted)
• Your account and organization info

We do not store copies of your PC people records, attendance data, or giving data. We read it when you ask, analyze it, and let it go.

No.We use third-party ML models (Anthropic Claude for text analysis, Google Gemma for form extraction) via their APIs. Under both providers' commercial API terms, they do not train on the prompts we send or the responses they return. Your church data is never used to improve any ML model, including ours.

When Church Gains sends a query to an ML provider (like Anthropic or Google), the provider processes the request and returns a response. We send data only to answer that request. Providers may keep request logs for a limited period for abuse monitoring under their own policies, but they do not use it to train their models.

No.Every write operation — adding a person from a connect card, updating a field, creating a record — requires explicit human approval. The ML proposes changes and shows you exactly what it wants to do. You review, edit if needed, and then click “Commit.” Nothing touches Planning Center until a staff member says so. Every commit is logged in your audit trail.

Prayer requests and personal notes extracted from connect cards are shown to the reviewing staff member during the Snap-to-Import flow. When committed to Planning Center, they're stored in the appropriate PC field (typically a note or custom field). Our query audit logs redact personally identifiable information so that names, phone numbers, and prayer content don't appear in system logs. The actual content lives only in Planning Center, where your existing PC permissions control who can see it.

No. Church Gains connects to your existing PC account through OAuth — the same secure sign-in method PC uses for all third-party apps. You click “Connect Planning Center,” approve the permissions, and you're live. No data migration, no CSV exports, no schema changes. If you ever disconnect, your PC data is completely unaffected.

Your Planning Center data is untouched — we never modified the source except for the specific writes you approved. Disconnecting revokes our OAuth access immediately. We retain your account info and anonymized query logs for 90 days (per our Privacy Policy), then delete them. You can request immediate deletion at any time by emailing privacy@churchgains.com.

Credits are how we measure usage. One credit is a tenth of a cent of actual AI cost, so a credit's worth is the same for every action. Roughly, and depending on what you ask:

• Cloud form scan: about 2 credits (extracting fields from a photographed connect card). Scans done on-device cost 0.
• Ask Your Data question: about 20-30 credits on Standard, the default, or 60-80 on Advanced, a stronger model you can pick for harder questions (a question looks across your Planning Center data; simple ones cost less, long multi-step ones more). The Ask screen shows the estimate for each before you ask.
• Weekly digest: 20 credits (generating your Monday staff brief)
• Spaces AI build or edit: about 32 credits each time the AI drafts or revises a Space dashboard. Applying a draft you already have costs nothing.
• AI provisioning design: about 30 credits each time the AI drafts or revises a Workflow, Form, List, Group or Service plan for you (long conversations cost more). Approving the draft into Planning Center costs nothing.

Every plan includes a monthly credit allotment: Starter 8,000, Growth 18,000, Large Church 40,000 credits (Network plans are custom; contact us). That is roughly about 275-400 Ask questions on Standard (100-135 on Advanced) or 4,000 form scans on Starter, as an estimate. If you need more, you can buy a top-up at any time: $5 for 2,000 credits or $25 for 10,000 credits. Top-up credits never expire; the monthly allotment does not roll over.

Yes. Every new organization gets a 14-day free trial with 1,500 credits. That's about 50-75 Ask questions on Standard (19-25 on Advanced) or 750 form scans, plenty to see if Church Gains fits your workflow. No credit card required to start.

The mobile app is in active development and will be available on iOS first (with Android to follow). The mobile app will enable on-device form extraction — meaning PII from paper forms won't need to travel to the cloud at all. For now, the webapp handles all the same functionality through cloud extraction. We'll announce the mobile launch on our website and to all active accounts via email.