What Urim Is — and Why We Built It

Almost every church staff member we talk to loves Planning Center. It's the operating system their church runs on — the place where people are managed, groups are organized, events are scheduled, check-ins happen, and giving is recorded. It's flexible enough to fit every church we've ever met, powerful enough to handle real complexity, and reliable enough that leadership stops thinking about it. That's a rare combination in software.

It's also the reason Urim exists.

Because Planning Center is so comprehensive, most churches accumulate an enormous amount of good, well-structured data inside it — years of memberships, groups, check-ins, forms, workflows, and campuses. And the more that data grows, the more valuable a second, complementary view becomes: a purpose-built dashboard whose only job is to give leadership an instant, at-a-glance picture of what's already in Planning Center.

That's what Urim is.

What Urim Actually Is

Urim is a companion dashboard for Planning Center. You connect it once with a Planning Center OAuth login, and every page pulls live from PCO in real time. Nothing gets imported, nothing gets copied, nothing gets migrated — Planning Center remains the single source of truth for your church, exactly as it should be.

What you see when you log in is a summary view of your church built on top of the data Planning Center already has: active members, new people this month, group participation, upcoming events, open groups, retention, and leadership pipeline — all in one place, all current, all sourced from PCO.

It's built for the people who don't have time to build reports for themselves: pastors, executive directors, connections staff, kids' directors, worship leaders. The kind of people whose day gets interrupted by real ministry every twenty minutes.

If you can open a browser tab, you can use Urim.

Why a Companion Dashboard

Planning Center is a system of record — and it's the best one available for churches. It has to be flexible, thorough, and configurable, because every church is different and every ministry decision depends on getting the underlying record exactly right. That flexibility is a feature, not a limitation.

Urim is a system of insight — a purpose-built view on top of that record. Where Planning Center gives you access to everything, Urim gives you the twelve numbers leadership looks at most, arranged so a staff member can glance and go.

The two are complementary. Planning Center is where the day-to-day work of ministry happens. Urim is where leadership pulls back for a moment to see the whole picture before diving back in.

The other thing Urim adds is history. Planning Center shows you your church as of right now — which is exactly what it should do as the system of record. Urim takes a daily snapshot of your organization and stores it, so every metric on your dashboard can also show you where you've been. Not just "we have 812 active members" but "we have 812 active members, up from 790 three months ago and 743 a year ago." That kind of longitudinal view is the kind of thing that shapes how leadership talks about growth in a staff meeting.

The Kinds of Questions It Makes Easy

Planning Center can answer almost any question a church could ask about itself — that's part of what makes it such a strong platform. The role of a summary dashboard is to make the most common leadership questions ambient — the ones a pastor wants to glance at on a Monday morning without opening a report.

The chart is illustrative, but the principle is real: these are the numbers leadership wants to check on repeat, sometimes several times a week. Urim's summary keeps them ambient — one glance away — so nobody has to interrupt their day to open a report every time the question comes up.

When numbers are ambient, questions get asked more often. When questions get asked more often, ministry gets more informed. That's the whole point.

What's In the Dashboard

Every Urim account has the same core surface:

Overview. The whole church on one screen — active members, new people this month, group participation, open groups, upcoming events, and 90-day trend charts underneath each of them.

People. Your full member directory, sourced from Planning Center, searchable by name, email, or phone. New members badged automatically. Retention cohorts broken out by how long ago someone joined, color-coded so you can see which windows are healthy and which need attention. Demographics — age, gender, membership type, kids vs. adults — charted automatically.

Events. Every upcoming calendar event from PCO, grouped by Today, This Week, and Coming Up. Tag filters. A mini calendar. Registration status and attendee counts.

Groups. Every group in your church, sorted into Open, Request to Join, and Closed. Enrollment status, capacity bars, group type breakdown, and a growth trend over time.

For multi-campus churches, every one of these tabs filters by campus with a single click in the sidebar — matching how Planning Center already organizes campuses.

For churches with more complex needs, we build custom views on top of the core — discipleship pathways, volunteer pipelines, event connection tracking — using the PCO Workflows, custom fields, and lists the church has already invested in setting up.

Read-Only. Live. Secure.

Urim is a strictly read-only integration. It never writes anything back to Planning Center, ever. Planning Center remains the source of truth, and Urim just gives leadership a second, purpose-built way to see it.

The connection is standard PCO OAuth. Each staff member logs in with their own Planning Center credentials, and their individual PCO permissions carry over — a campus pastor sees their campus, an admin sees everything, exactly the same way PCO already handles access. Urim never asks anyone to lower their PCO permissions, share credentials, or work around Planning Center's model.

The only data we store on our side is the daily aggregate snapshots that power the historical trend charts. If you disconnect Urim tomorrow, nothing about your Planning Center account changes.

Why Churches Are Asking For This

The most common thing we hear from pastors after they've used Urim for a few weeks isn't "look at this cool chart." It's something quieter: "I finally saw the thing I've been trying to see."

Sometimes it's a retention drop in the 6–12 month cohort they'd never surfaced before. Sometimes it's a kids' ministry roster that shows 40 people on the team but only 12 who've served in the last month. Sometimes it's just a simple picture of growth over time that changes the conversation at a staff meeting from opinion to observation.

Every one of those insights lives in Planning Center already. Urim just makes them ambient enough that leadership doesn't have to go looking.

Data doesn't do ministry. People do. But when leadership can see clearly, more of the people the numbers are pointing at get seen too — the new family that never got a follow-up, the volunteer who quietly stopped showing up, the group that hasn't taken a new member in eighteen months.

That's the whole point. Not analytics for the sake of analytics. Clarity in service of people.

See It on Your Church

The best way to understand what Urim is is to see it walked through — ideally on your own data.

If your church runs on Planning Center and you'd like a live walkthrough, reach out through the contact form and we'll set up a short call. We'll show you the full dashboard, answer any questions about how Urim fits alongside your Planning Center setup, and — if you'd like — connect it to your own account in about five seconds so you can see your church's real numbers together.

Urim is built to sit alongside Planning Center, not to replace it. Planning Center does the hard work of holding your church's data faithfully. Urim gives leadership a fast, focused view on top of that work — so the questions you care about most are never more than a glance away.

That's it. That's what we built, and why.