Building a service schedule is a powerful tool in the Church Admin plugin. It can appear on your front end using a shortcode, it’s on the smartphone app and you can automatically email it out or manually send it to participants with a message.
It’s available on standard and premium versions of the plugin.
Step 1 Setup your sites and services
Step 2 Setup the schedule jobs for your services
Step 3 Create your schedules
Step 1 – Setup Sites and Services
If you have the premium version of the Church Admin Plugin, you will be able to see the schedule menu item box on the main Church Admin Plugin Screen.
If you don’t have any sites/services setup you will see a button “Please set up a service first”.
Otherwise go to step 2.
The Add a service screen
Service Name – give your service a name (the time and day will be shown with it).
Pick a Service Day – “as arranged” allows you to create schedules for ad-hoc services like weddings and funerals.
Add a service time.
Site is your venue for the service.
You can add the service to the calendar by using the dropdown to connect it if there is already a calendar entry for the service, or check the box for a new calendar entry.
The other fields were more relevant during the Covid-19 pandamic when numbers were limited and pre-booking was required.
Lastly click Save Service.
You now have your first service setup. Add more if necessary
When you have added yoru services, you are ready for Step 2.
Step 2 Set up schedule jobs.
Think about the tasks required to put on your services – worship leader, meeting host, welcome team, ushers, preacher, kids ministry leaders and so on.
The schedule section of the main screen is now showing dropdowns to select services, but also a button if you need to Please set up some schedule jobs first. Go ahead and click that.
The next screen will show just an Add a schedule job button for setting up your first job. Go ahead and click that.
In the plugin you can assign a ministry to a schedule job. People who are in that ministry, will be shown when setting up the schedule to help you do your scheduling.
The fields should be self-explanatory.
Enable use initials is for PDFrotas, to make long names fit.
Schedule order allows you to set the order schedule jobs appear in.
You can select which services the job is used for if you have more than one service.
Show on calendar service item – shows that job on a calendar listing.
You can then choose which ministry fills that job or create a new one and add people to it.
Lastly click Save schedule job.
Once you have added and edited all your jobs for your services, then you are ready to begin setting up your schedules.
Step 3 Setting up your schedule
At teh top of the schedule jobs screen you can select “Schedule” in the dropdown or from the Schedule section on the main Church Admin Page.
The schedule page defaults to the current month and first service. A month of services are automatically shown. You can change month and/or service at the top of the screen.
You can assign people to each service and schedule job in one of two ways.
On a large screen, it is quickest to click “Click to enter data”. a form field appears where you can enter some text (a name, sermon title etc) or select a person from the dropdown if you have a ministry connected to that schedule job. Tabbing to another item saves it.
You can also click Edit, to be presented with a form for that service.
Click Save to save that service.
Continue for as many services instances as you wish.
You can also copy one service schedule to another date using the form on the right of each service instance.
Premium plugin users also get the “availability” functionality, where you can setup a page with a shortcode/block to allow logged in users to indicate their availability/non-availability to serve. If they are not available you cannot add them to a particular date’s schedule. See the tutorial.
Next Steps
Email/SMS out the schedule to participants, manually each week or set it up to be sent automatically.
Display the schedule on your website with a block/shortcode.