Calendar & Room Conflict Sync
One source of truth for rooms and people across three calendars. Catch collisions Friday, not Sunday.
One source of truth for rooms and people across three calendars. Catch collisions on Friday, not Sunday morning.
| Category | Operations |
| Church-health domain | Operations & Governance |
| Data-privacy tier | Medium — names, contact; minors in events = high |
| Mastery-ladder target | Level 4 · Context |
| Build stack | Planning Center Calendar (source of truth) → Google Calendar (one-way); nightly scan; Slack digest |
The problem
Mid-size churches typically run triple-entry: a facilities calendar, a public website calendar, and Google Calendar, kept in sync by hand. The cost is double-booked rooms discovered on Sunday morning and the same person quietly scheduled on two teams at once. Because three calendars don't talk to each other, collisions surface too late to fix gracefully.
(An honest note: there's no published statistic quantifying church room-conflict frequency. The "Friday not Sunday" pain here is operational reasoning, not cited research.)
What good looks like
Planning Center Calendar becomes the single source of truth for room bookings and mirrors one-way into Google Calendar. Each night, a scan over the combined dataset flags three things no single tool catches together: room collisions, the same person on two teams at overlapping times, and weeks with more than three evening events. Conflicts post to a Slack ops channel each morning with snooze/approve buttons. The double-booking gets caught Thursday night, not at the 9am service.
Market scan
| Tool | Fit | Pricing (verify) |
|---|---|---|
| Planning Center Calendar | Room/resource booking + conflict detection + approvals | À-la-carte |
| Skedda | Space booking, two-way Google/M365 sync | ~$249/mo+ |
| eSPACE (Smart Church Solutions) | Church event scheduler + work orders | ~$60/mo to custom; onboarding $499–1,299 |
| FMX | Facilities/event management for religious orgs | Quote-based |
| Google Calendar | Free mirror target; no cross-team logic | Free |
| Make / Zapier | Glue layer; Zapier syncs PC → Google no-code | $9–29/mo |
The gap: these tools do room-level conflict detection within their own grid; none cross-checks a person double-booked across teams or weekly evening-event load. Buying Skedda or eSPACE replaces the booking grid — it doesn't deliver the cross-team person and over-programming checks. That combined nightly scan is the DIY value.
Data privacy & security
- Medium for names/contact; high for any minors involved in events.
- Mirror only the fields you need (event, room, time); avoid pushing personal data into the public-facing Google Calendar.
- Tokenize people before any AI call (the LLM only phrases the digest); demo on synthetic events.
How to build it
Planning Center offers a free, documented API with webhooks (real-time, no polling) and no rate limits.
- Sync Planning Center → Google Calendar via Make/Zapier or Apps Script (one-way).
- A nightly Apps Script (or Make scenario) reads the combined calendar and runs deterministic overlap checks for the three conflict types.
- Post the digest to a Slack ops channel via an incoming webhook with snooze/approve actions.
- (Make.com works but is less documented for Planning Center than Zapier — expect a custom HTTP module against the API.)
Rollout plan
- Q1: Declare Planning Center Calendar the source of truth; stop maintaining parallel room calendars by hand.
- Q2: Stand up the one-way mirror and the room-collision scan.
- Q3: Add the person-double-booking and evening-load checks; tune the morning digest.
Effort & cost
- Build: ~25–40 hours (more than a pure-analytics build because of the sync layer + conflict rules).
- Run: Planning Center Calendar add-on + optional Make ($9–29/mo) + free Google Calendar/Apps Script + minimal LLM.
Sources
- Planning Center developer API & webhooks — https://developer.planning.center/docs/
- Zapier: Planning Center ↔ Google Calendar — https://zapier.com/apps/planning-center/integrations/google-calendar
- Skedda pricing — https://www.skedda.com/pricing
- eSPACE / Smart Church Solutions — https://www.smartchurchsolutions.com/software/pricing/
- FMX (religious) — https://www.gofmx.com/solutions/industries/religious/
Note for Orlando Grace: Robert Jackson is already pursuing a 3-way room-reservation sync (Google Calendar, Monday.com, Planning Center). This brief documents the single-source-of-truth pattern and the cross-team conflict checks that turn a sync into an early-warning system.