Help

Setting it up

Connect Planning Center. Whoever does this needs to be an administrator in Planning Center. You are signing in to Planning Center, not creating a password with us.

Choose what to show. Each product has a “Show on my site” switch and its own settings. Nothing is on your website until you turn it on.

Paste the line. Your dashboard gives you a single line of code and the exact steps for your website — we have them written out for these builders, and general instructions for anything else.

Squarespace, Wix, WordPress (your own hosting) and WordPress.com.

One thing to check before you buy

A few website builders will let you save the line and then quietly refuse to run it, on their cheaper plans. Nothing looks broken — the embed simply never appears. If you are on one of these, check your plan first.

• Squarespace. Squarespace only runs code blocks on the Core plan or above. On the Personal plan the block will save and the embed will never appear.
• WordPress.com. WordPress.com removes script tags unless your site is on a plan with hosting features switched on (Business/Creator or above). Below that the block will save and the embed will never appear.

Why isn’t something showing?

Almost always the same reason: we only ever show what you have already made public in Planning Center. We never decide what is public — you do, there. So if something is missing, the switch to check is in Planning Center, not here.

Two other things worth checking before you go hunting: the product needs to be switched on in your dashboard, and your church needs to be published rather than in preview.

I changed it in Planning Center. When does my website catch up?

We would rather say fifteen minutes and mean it than say “instant” and have you refreshing a page that was never going to change. If you want it sooner, your dashboard has a Sync now button.

Within about fifteen minutes for everything. Planning Center offers no way to tell us when these change, so we check on a schedule instead.

Showing different things on different pages

You are not limited to one embed. Make a placement in the Pages tab for each page of your website — your groups page, your events page, your giving page — and each one gets its own line to paste, with its own products, layout and filters.

Change a placement in the dashboard and the page updates itself; you never have to touch your website again.

Making it look like your site

The Brand tab sets colours, fonts and corner style once, and every product follows it, so your site reads as one thing. Any single product can override the brand if it needs to.

Match my website will read your existing site and suggest a starting point — nothing changes until you pick one.

Embeds take your page’s own background instead of adding one, so they sit inside your design rather than in a panel on top of it. If your page is dark, your text colour lightens just enough to stay readable — you do not have to keep a second set of colours, and nothing you saved changes.

Choosing a layout

Each product comes with a few layouts — a card grid, a compact list, a poster wall, and so on — and you pick one in the Layout tab beside the preview.

They are not extra work: every layout draws the same information, so switching costs you nothing and changes nothing you have set.

A layout belongs to the page, not to the product. The same groups can be a card grid on your homepage and a compact list on your groups page, because each place you paste the line remembers its own. That also means changing a layout here does not disturb a page you have already published — it keeps the one you gave it.

Signing up and giving

Browsing happens on your website, in your design. The moment somebody signs up, fills in a form or gives, Planning Center’s own window opens over your page and takes it from there.

That is deliberate, and it is the answer to the question churches ask first: we never handle a payment or store an answer. Money and form responses go straight into the Planning Center and Stripe setup you already have, exactly as they do today. Nothing about your existing arrangements changes, and there is no second place for your data to live.

What we read, and what we don’t

We only ever read what you have already marked as public inside Planning Center — a group type visible in Church Center, an event with open signups, a form that does not require a login. If it is not public there, it does not reach us, and turning a product on here cannot make it public.

Addresses are the one place we go further than that. A meeting address is only ever published when you have set that location to exact in Planning Center; anything marked approximate reaches us as a town and state and nothing more.

Our privacy policy

Preview and publishing

Connecting is free, and you can preview every product against your own real data for as long as you like. The embed only goes live on your website once Sync is part of your church's plan in the wtxLabs Hub — until then the line you paste will not show anything to your visitors. That is the only thing the plan changes.

Turning it off

Disconnect and delete my data in your dashboard removes our connection to Planning Center and deletes every record we copied, straight away. Your design choices are kept so reconnecting is not a blank page. You can also revoke us from inside Planning Center itself.

More than one of us works on the website

That is fine, and common — the person who administers Planning Center is often not the person who looks after the website. There is no separate Sync account to create and no password of ours to share: each person signs in with their own Planning Center login, through the wtxLabs Hub.

Signed in through the Hub, Sync already knows your church, so if your church has agreed to Sync's documents — here, or in the Hub before opening Sync — there is nothing to tick. Connecting Planning Center directly, without the Hub, shows the boxes each time, because until Planning Center tells us who you are we cannot know which church you belong to. Ticking again adds nothing to the record: your church's original agreement, and the date on it, stay exactly as they were.

One thing worth knowing before a second person connects. Planning Center gives access to a PERSON, not to a church, so connecting does not add a second connection — it replaces the one that was there. From then on we read your data as the most recent person to connect, and what they can see in Planning Center is what we can show on your website. If something that used to appear has gone missing, that is the first place to look. We email you when this happens, so nobody has to notice it on their own.

Our emails follow the connection too, unless you have set a notification address. Set one in your dashboard — a shared office or admin mailbox is the better answer anyway, because it outlasts anyone's employment — and that stops being true.

Who can change or cancel the subscription?

Billing is in the wtxLabs Hub: an owner or billing admin there can change or cancel your church's plan. Everything in this dashboard is shared — anyone at your church who can sign in to Sync can restyle the embeds, switch products on and off, and copy the script tag, because all of that is reversible.

If the person who looks after billing leaves, an owner can give the role to someone else from the Hub's Team page. If nobody who can is still with you, email us and we will help.

Still stuck? Email a real person

There is no support robot here and no ticket queue. Every message goes straight to a real person — the one who builds this — and you will get a reply as soon as I can write one.

Use the email button at the top of your dashboard and it arrives already knowing your church, your plan, when you last synced and which product you were looking at. That usually means the first reply is an answer rather than three questions.

Nothing is too small. If something is confusing, that is worth knowing about — it is usually a sign the product should be clearer rather than that you missed something.

sync@wtxlabs.com