Congratulations on upgrading to Church Admin Premium! You have made a great choice — the premium version unlocks the full power of the plugin, including service schedules and rotas, communication tools, giving forms, the Our Church smartphone app, and much more.
When you first activate the premium plugin, you will notice a **Quick Start** button at the very top of the Church Admin main screen in your WordPress dashboard. It is worth clicking this before you do anything else. The Quick Start page walks you through seven essential setup tasks and gives you a clear, colour-coded status for each one — green ticks for things that are already in order, red alerts for things that still need your attention.
This article explains each of the seven steps in plain language, so you know what to expect and what to do if any of them flag a problem.
—
How to Access the Quick Start Page
After installing and activating the premium plugin, go to your WordPress dashboard and click **Church Admin** in the left-hand menu (or in the admin bar at the top of the screen). At the top of the Church Admin main screen you will see the Quick Start button. Click it and you will be taken to the Quick Start page, which checks your setup and reports the status of each of the seven areas below.
You can return to this page at any time — it will always reflect the current state of your setup, so it is a handy diagnostic tool even after initial configuration is complete.
—
Step 1: Check Emails Send Okay from the Website
The very first thing the Quick Start page checks is whether your website can send emails. This matters enormously for Church Admin Premium, because email is at the heart of how the plugin communicates with your congregation — from registration confirmations and password reminders to weekly rota notifications and bulk announcements.
The page will check whether WordPress’s built-in email sending is available and report one of three situations:
**All good — email is working.** If email is already configured, you will see a green tick and two buttons: one to send a test email to yourself, and one to review your email settings. It is worth sending that test email just to confirm everything is working end to end.
**Basic email is available but not yet configured.** If the server can send emails but you have not set up a method in the plugin yet, the Quick Start page will automatically set the method to “native” (using the server’s built-in mail function) and confirm this with a green tick. Again, use the test email button to verify it is actually reaching your inbox — sometimes native sending works in principle but emails end up in spam or are silently dropped by the recipient’s mail server.
**Email sending is disabled.** Some web hosts — particularly budget shared hosting — disable server-level email sending entirely. If this is the case, you will see a red alert and three options for resolving it:
– Add SMTP settings for your own email address (e.g. Gmail, Outlook, or your church’s email provider). This is the most reliable approach and uses your existing email account to send messages.
– Set up a free account with **Brevo** (formerly Sendinblue), which is free for light users and is a popular choice for churches.
– Set up an account with **Mailersend**, another reliable transactional email service.
Do not skip this step. If email is not working, your congregation will not receive registration confirmations, your volunteers will not receive rota notifications, and many of the premium features will not function properly. There is a full tutorial on setting up email at https://www.churchadminplugin.com/setting-up-email-with-church-admin-plugin/.
—
Step 2: Address List
The address list is the core of Church Admin — it is your congregation database, and almost everything else in the plugin connects back to it. The Quick Start page checks two things here.
First, it checks whether **you** are in the address list. When you activated the plugin as an admin user, your WordPress account’s email address and display name should have been picked up. If an entry already exists for your email, you will see a green tick. If not, the plugin will automatically create a basic entry for you and offer a button to edit it — you should click that and fill in your details properly (full name, phone number, etc.).
Second, it checks whether there is a **page on your website** where the address list is displayed. This is the front-end page where logged-in church members can view the congregation directory. If no such page exists yet, the Quick Start page will prompt you to create one, suggesting either the shortcode `
Please log in
If you are not sure how to create this page, the tutorial at https://www.churchadminplugin.com/tutorials/showing-church-admin-elements-on-your-website/ walks through the process clearly. Remember that the address list page should be set to require login — you do not want your congregation’s personal details visible to the public.
—
Step 3: Import Your Address List
Once your own entry is confirmed, the Quick Start page checks whether there is anyone else in the address list. If the database contains only your entry, it will flag this with a red alert and offer two options.
The quickest way to populate the address list for an existing church is to **import a CSV file**. If you have been keeping your congregation’s details in a spreadsheet — Excel, Google Sheets, or any similar tool — you can export that as a CSV and import it directly into Church Admin. The import button https://www.churchadminplugin.com/tutorials/import-address-list-csv/.
The second option is to create a **registration page** on your website where people can add themselves. The Quick Start page provides a button to create a new WordPress page and suggests the shortcode `
Register/Login
The page also reminds you about the registration flow: when someone registers through the website, they will receive a confirmation email to verify their address before their account is created. You can customise all the email templates for this process using the link provided. It is worth reviewing these templates early on so that the emails your congregation receive look and sound like they come from your church, not a generic system.
—
Step 4: Create Your Services
This is where you tell the plugin about the regular gatherings your church holds — your Sunday morning service, an evening service, a midweek prayer meeting, and so on. Services are the foundation of the rota/schedule feature, so the Quick Start page checks whether you have any set up.
If no services exist yet, you will see a red alert and a button to add your first service. Clicking it takes you to the Add a Service screen, where you give the service a name, choose which day of the week it falls on, add a time, and select the venue (called a “site” in the plugin). You can also link the service to your calendar at this point.
One useful option is the “as arranged” day setting, which lets you create schedules for one-off services like weddings, funerals, or special events that do not follow a regular weekly pattern.
Add all your regular services before moving on. If you have a green tick here already, the page will tell you how many services are configured and you can proceed.
—
Step 5: Service Schedules / Rotas
With your services in place, step five checks whether you have set up any schedule tasks (called “schedule jobs”) and whether any future services have rotas built for them.
Schedule jobs are the roles that need to be filled at each service — worship leader, preacher, welcome team, sound technician, children’s ministry leader, and so on. If none exist yet, the Quick Start page will flag this and offer a button to add your first schedule task.
For each schedule job you can link it to a ministry (a group of people in your congregation who fill that role). When you then come to build the actual rota, anyone in the linked ministry will appear as an option for that slot, making the scheduling process much faster.
Once your schedule jobs are set up, the Quick Start page will show you how many future services have rotas filled in for each of your services. Early on this will likely be zero — you will need to go and build the rotas — but it gives you a clear at-a-glance view of how far ahead you are scheduled.
For a full walkthrough of setting up and managing rotas, see https://www.churchadminplugin.com/tutorials/rota-schedule/.
—
Step 6: Sermons
Church Admin Premium includes a full sermon management and podcasting system. You can store audio and video sermons, organise them by series, speaker, and Bible passage, and even distribute them to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Amazon Podcasts.
The Quick Start page checks two things: whether you have any sermons stored, and whether there is a page on your website where sermons are displayed. If either is missing, you will see a prompt to address it.
If you have been uploading sermons to another system — SoundCloud, a podcast host, your own media library — this is a good moment to think about migrating or linking them into Church Admin so everything is in one place. The tutorial at https://www.churchadminplugin.com/tutorials/podcasting/ explains the full setup.
To create a sermons page, the shortcode is `
—
Step 7: Google Maps Integration
The final step is connecting a Google Maps API key. Google Maps integration is used in several places throughout the plugin — displaying a map of your congregation’s households, showing where small groups meet, and geolocating addresses. Without an API key, these map-based features will not work.
If you have not yet set up a key, the Quick Start page will flag this and link you to the tutorial, which walks through how to create a key in the Google Cloud Console and add it to the plugin. There is also a text field on the Quick Start page itself where you can paste the key directly.
Once a key is saved, the page will display a small static map to confirm that the key is working correctly. If the map area appears blank rather than showing a map, the page advises right-clicking inside it and opening the image in a new tab, which will display any error message from Google — usually indicating that billing has not been enabled on the Google Cloud account or that the key’s permissions are not set up correctly.
—
One More Thing: The Manual
At the bottom of the Quick Start page you will find a link to download the full Church Admin Plugin manual as a PDF. The manual covers every feature of the plugin in detail and is well worth downloading and keeping to hand, particularly in those first weeks when you are still finding your way around.
—
What Comes Next?
Once all seven items on the Quick Start page are showing green, you have the core of Church Admin Premium up and running. From there, you can explore the full range of features at your own pace — setting up small groups and classes, configuring giving forms, building out your communication tools, or setting up the Our Church smartphone app for your congregation.
The full library of tutorials is always available at https://www.churchadminplugin.com/tutorials/, and if you get stuck the support team is there to help.
Welcome to Church Admin — now go and organise your church!