Moving churches is hard. Moving church software isn’t.
Here’s the whole plan, in public: what you export, what we import, what gets decided in which week, and who’s responsible for each piece. Most churches run their first real Sunday on Churchory inside a month. Adding just one product? Week one and that product’s week are all you need. The rest is for churches moving everything.
The three fears, answered.
“We’ll lose our data.”
You won’t, because you keep it. Nothing is deleted from your current system by moving. You export a copy, we import it, and your old tool stays exactly as it is until you choose to cancel it.
“It’ll eat our whole spring.”
The work that genuinely needs your staff is roughly a call a week for four weeks. The import, the cleanup, and the configuration are ours.
“Our people won’t adopt it.”
The honest risk. It’s why, if you’re taking Chat or Groups, they go live first: people open the app for the conversation, and everything else gets discovered from there.
A month, week by week.
Faster if you’re small and organised, slower if your data is thirty years old. Both are normal.
One call, one export
We meet for 45 minutes, look at what you run today, and agree what moves first. You export your people from your current system as a spreadsheet. Whatever comes out is fine, including the messy version.
- Export people, families, and groups
- Decide who your administrators are
- Set up your church in Churchory
- Review your export and flag problems
Your directory, in and clean
We import your people, match them into households, and walk the duplicate review with you. This is the part every migration gets wrong, so it goes first and it gets done properly.
- Sit with us for the duplicate review
- Confirm household groupings
- Import and match
- Merge duplicates, clean up orphaned records
Roles, ministries, and the shape of your church
We build your roles together (access set product by product, four levels each) and name them what your church already calls them. Then the groups, teams, and ministries in the products you’ve chosen get set up around them.
- Tell us who does what
- Name your roles in your own language
- Build the permission matrix
- Set up groups, teams, and tags
The parts that touch money and children
If you’re taking Giving, Events with paid registration, or Kids, this is their week: connect your church’s Stripe account for online giving and paid events, and configure kids check-in and family intake. Both get tested with real people before a real Sunday depends on them.
- Connect Stripe for paid event registration
- Pick who runs kids check-in
- Configure check-in and intake links
- Connect Stripe and set up your giving funds
Invite your church
Announce it, get people onto the app, and run a Sunday with whatever your products start with: chat channels, the first weekly guide, the first check-in. We’re on call for the whole first Sunday.
- Announce it from the stage
- Ask leaders to post first
- On call all Sunday morning
- Fix whatever the first real week surfaces
Export this, and we’ll take it from there.
Every church database exports a spreadsheet. That’s all we need to start. You do not need to clean it first, and you should not spend a weekend trying.
- People: names, emails, phone numbers, addresses, and whatever custom fields you’ve accumulated.
- Families or households, if your system models them. If it doesn’t, we’ll build them from shared addresses and surnames and you’ll review the result.
- Groups and their rosters, even if it’s a list of group names and a list of members.
- Your giving provider’s records stay where they are. We don’t migrate giving or donation ledgers. Your old system or processor remains the record for past gifts. New gifts start in Churchory the day you switch, and if you want this year’s statements in one place you can import past gifts yourself from a spreadsheet.
What usually doesn’t move, and why that’s fine
Our free, staff-run migration moves your people and households, groups with rosters and leaders, upcoming events and open registrations, serving teams and upcoming schedules, documents, and kids data (allergies and guardians), and imports 12 to 24 months of attendance and event history, so your attendance trends work from week one. We migrate from Planning Center, Breeze, Church Community Builder, Tithe.ly and Elvanto, Realm (ACS), Servant Keeper, ChurchTrac and spreadsheets.
What we deliberately don’t move: giving and donation ledgers, old email and text logs, chat transcripts, and passwords. Keep a read-only export of your old system for the record. And nobody gets an email from Churchory until you say go. Imports are silent, and inviting your people is a separate step you choose.
Running both at once
Nothing stops you keeping your current tools running while Churchory fills up. Most churches overlap by a month: giving switches over at a clean month boundary, and the old system stays readable until the next renewal date comes around.
One more thing about adoption
The single biggest predictor of whether a church app sticks is whether the leaders post in it during week one. Not the staff: the small group leaders, the worship lead, the youth volunteers. We’ll help you line that up before you announce anything from the stage.