Church Operations Intelligence
One leadership dashboard for the six numbers an XP checks every week, with an AI-written Monday narrative.
One leadership dashboard for the six numbers an Executive Pastor checks every week — with an AI-written Monday narrative.
| Category | Dashboard |
| Church-health domain | Operations & Governance (serves all three) |
| Data-privacy tier | High — giving + care data are sensitive |
| Mastery-ladder target | Level 5 · Systems |
| Build stack | Next.js + Supabase + Vercel; Planning Center API + giving CSV + Google Sheet |
The problem
Most Executive Pastors assemble the weekly leadership scorecard by hand: attendance and check-ins out of Planning Center, giving from a processor export, volunteer fills off a roster, and the guest and care items from a couple of spreadsheets. Planning Center keeps these in separate à-la-carte modules — People, Check-Ins, Giving — so there is no single native view that fuses them. The result is a Sunday-night scramble to reconstruct the picture before Monday's elder brief.
The cost is real and recurring. At a blended staff rate of $2,000–4,000/month for whoever builds the report, reclaiming ~4 hours a week is a measurable saving — and the bigger win is that leadership finally reads the same numbers off the same page.
What good looks like
A single page with six tiles — attendance trend, giving vs. budget, volunteer fill rate, guest pipeline, facility load, care queue — and, every Monday at 7am, a five-paragraph plain-English narrative posted to a leadership Slack channel: "Giving is 4% under budget on flat attendance; volunteer fill dropped in kids; the guest pipeline is healthy." The XP walks into Monday already briefed, and the elder meeting starts from shared facts.
Market scan
The honest finding: tools give you charts; none writes the commentary or fuses your exact six numbers.
| Tool | What it does | Pricing (verify) |
|---|---|---|
| Planning Center | Dominant US ChMS; modular People/Check-Ins/Giving | People free; Check-Ins from $14/mo; Giving $0–199/mo |
| Pushpay Insights / ChurchStaq | Fuses giving + engagement trends | Quote-only; ~$500–800/mo loaded |
| Church Metrics (Life.Church) | Free attendance/giving/baptism tracker | Free |
| Vitals (vitals.church) | Newer metrics dashboard, AI insights | Unverified |
| Tithely | Giving + ChMS bundle | All Access $119/mo |
| Power BI / Looker Studio | Generic BI on your CSVs | Free tier |
Pricing reflects late-2025/2026 public figures and quote-only vendors; confirm before purchase.
The gap: none fuses all six weekly numbers into one board view with an LLM-written narrative tuned to this church's budget targets, and none will read your idiosyncratic Google-Sheet care queue. That last-mile fusion is the DIY win.
Data privacy & security
This dashboard touches high-sensitivity data, so it must be built to the workshop's red line from day one:
- Giving = high (PII + financial), attendance = medium, care queue can include pastoral/health notes = high.
- Store only aggregates (weekly totals, fill %) — never individual gift rows — in Supabase.
- Aggregate/anonymize before any LLM call, and use a zero-retention API tier (the Claude API under Commercial Terms is not trained on your data).
- Keep giving-CSV ingestion server-side; gate the dashboard behind SSO; build and demo on synthetic data only.
How to build it
- Scaffold Next.js + Supabase + Vercel with Claude Code or Codex.
- Connect Planning Center via its free OAuth API for attendance/check-ins.
- Add a server route to ingest the giving CSV and a Google Sheets read for the care/guest queue.
- Store weekly aggregates only.
- Build six metric cards + trend charts.
- Make one Anthropic API call over the aggregates to generate the narrative.
- Deploy on Vercel behind auth; schedule the Monday 7am Slack post.
Rollout plan
- Q1 (0–90 days): Stand up three tiles you already have clean data for (attendance, giving vs. budget, volunteer fill). Ship the Monday narrative.
- Q2: Add the guest pipeline and care-queue tiles; wire the facility-load tile.
- Q3: Tune thresholds; let the narrative flag exceptions automatically.
Effort & cost
- Build: ~30–50 hours over 3–5 weekends for a non-engineer pacing with AI.
- Run: under ~$50/mo (Supabase free/$25 + Vercel free/$20 + a few dollars of API) on top of existing Planning Center.
Sources
- Planning Center pricing — https://www.planningcenter.com/pricing
- Pushpay Insights — https://pushpay.com/solutions/church-reporting-and-insights
- Church Metrics — https://churchmetrics.com/
- Vitals — https://vitals.church/church-metrics-dashboard
- Tithely pricing — https://get.tithe.ly/pricing
- Claude API data retention — https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/manage-claude/api-and-data-retention