In this tutorial, Joshua Riggs, creator of worshipresources.church, walks viewers through the process of adding guest participants to a service plan in Planning Center Services. He first introduces Planning Center as a suite of church‑management apps and highlights the Services app for scheduling volunteers and communicating with teams. Using the new Plans page, he demonstrates two main workflows: (1) adding an existing person (e.g., a guest speaker) as a temporary guest by using the keyboard shortcut “P”, selecting the Guest role, assigning a custom temporary position (Guest Speaker), and configuring service‑time and rehearsal settings; and (2) creating a brand‑new person in the system, assigning them a temporary staff role (Intro Pastor), and confirming that the person does not become a permanent team member. Throughout, he points out UI cues such as italicized guest titles, the Manage Teams view, and the lack of a permanent position. He explains why using guests is valuable: it lets churches schedule occasional speakers, worship leaders, or musicians without cluttering the permanent team roster. The video also includes a call‑to‑action to download Planning Center keyboard shortcuts, subscribe, and contact him for further help.
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I love Planning Center. Planning Center is a suite of apps you can use to make your church better in just about every area. Planning Center Services is an app you can use to plan your services, schedule volunteers, and communicate with your teams. In this video, I'm going to show you how to add a guest to your Planning Center Services plan and why you should consider using guests in the future. Okay, here we go. Hey everybody, I'm Joshua. I'm the creator of worshipresources.church. We help you discover and learn how to use quality resources that will make your church better. If you haven't yet, be sure to follow the link in the description to download all the Planning Center shortcuts that will help you get better at Planning Center Services. Okay, let's dive in. So I'm in Planning Center Services and under plans. Okay, if you see the old plans page and you are an admin, click try it now so you can see the new page. Now this is the new normal, so you might as well get used to using it. Okay, we're gonna learn how to add a guest to our plan. There's a couple of ways to do it. Over here on the left, you can see teams You can click Add, Schedule People, or if you're under the Teams tab here, you can click Add, Schedule People. But the easiest way to add a new person is just to click the letter P on the keyboard. That stands for schedule a person. Now if I click Team Member, I can see all the team members under the Audio Visual team. I can see people with conflicts, and at the very bottom, I can assign a new team member to one of these positions. But what I wanna do is add a guest to the staff position. So I'm gonna click on Guest, and there's our guest. This is our guest speaker, Alan. So I'm going to change this team to Staff, and he's not an assistant, he's not an intro, he's not the pastor or worship pastor, he's just the guest speaker. So I'm just gonna type in Guest Speaker, and I'll tell you why this is important in a minute. Click Service Times, he's speaking at both services, and he doesn't need to come to rehearsal, so I'm gonna uncheck that. Then I'm gonna click Save. Now you can see Alan is scheduled. I haven't sent him an email yet, but he's scheduled to be the guest speaker. Now notice guest speaker here is in italics. That indicates that this is a temporary position. It's not a new position, it's just a temporary position. And just to show you, if I go to manage teams and staff You can see there's not a new position called guest speaker, and also Alan Baker is not listed as a team member. And that's why it's important to add guest. Sometimes you have a guest speaker or a guest worship leader, maybe a guest musician. You don't want them to be on your team all the time, you just want them to be a part of that service. So adding them as a guest will enable you to add them to the service without adding them to a team in the future. Okay, so that's how we add somebody as a guest who's currently in Planning Center. But what if they're not in Planning Center? I'm gonna get rid of Alan for now. I'm going to click the P to schedule a person, and I'm gonna click New. Okay, so now I'm gonna search for Walter Robinson. Okay, I don't have Walter in my system, so I'm gonna click Create a New Person. Gonna fix his capitalization, and I'm gonna add his contact, Walter@test.com. Now I'm gonna click Save, and I don't want to send him a welcome email. His permissions are normal. I click Submit, and now I'm back to this screen where I'm going to sign him as a staff member. But instead of an assistant, I'm gonna just put him as intro pastor, and then check that he's serving in both services, and he doesn't need to come to rehearsal. Now I click Save, and you can see Walter Robinson is listed under the intro pastor position. But I wonder if it added him to that team. So I'm gonna go to Manage Teams, click on Staff, Intro Pastor, and there's no Walter here. Okay, that's how you add a guest to your Planning Center services plans. I hope this has been helpful to you, and I hope you'll utilize all the new tools in the new Planning Center plans page. If you haven't yet, will you like and subscribe below? And also go to worshipresources.church, where we help you discover and learn how to use quality resources that will make your church better. I put a link in the description below of all the Planning Center shortcuts. It's yours free, just click on that link below. And if I can help you in any way with Planning Center or anything worship related, Just shoot me an email, Joshua@worshipresources.church. Hey, thanks everybody.
