User Support Forum

I suspect my church will soon be moving to PowerChurch Online. I've found the .csv option for importing family data. Is there anything comparable for person data, or does all of that need to be added by hand?

If we supplied a spreadsheet, could the PC team do the import, and do you have an approximate cost for that?

thanks,
Julianna

When we receive your order for PowerChurch Online, we will have you send us a backup of the existing PowerChurch Plus data. All of your existing information will move over to the online service as-is.

Yes... but if, by some terrible accident, a backup was not available and we were starting from scratch, with a few spreadsheets?

Specifically, I have a Person export I'd like to use, but I'm not sure there's an interface for uploading that data.

There is the import families utility, import contributions from file, and some various other file imports added in Version 12.

Unfortunately, there still isn't an import people utility.

OK, as I suspected (I'm sure there's a good reason, but it would be useful!). Is that kind of upload a service the PC team offers?

The problem is people in the database are linked to families by an ID number assigned by the software behind the scenes. To import people, you would either need to know the family ID numbers and have them listed in your import file, or be importing families and people at the same time, with a much more complicated file format.

There is a data conversion service, which ranges from $250 to $400 depending on which areas of the database you're wanting to have imported:

https://www.powerchurch.com/conversion

Are you currently using Powerchurch? If so, are you not doing regular backups of the database? That's the only thing that you need to move to Powerchurch Online.

Or is there a reason you don't want to move the entire membership database?

Hi, Zorak, thanks. My 'person' spreadsheet does include what I believe is that number, listed as mail_no in the export.

jbuck wrote:Hi, Zorak, thanks. My 'person' spreadsheet does include what I believe is that number, listed as mail_no in the export.

That's not the number that is assigned by the system. It is an internal index not usually visible to the user.

As I asked previously, is there a reason you don't want to migrate the current database (if you're already using Powerchurch locally) to PCPlus Online? Do you need to clean the database or something like that?

NeilZ wrote:

jbuck wrote:Hi, Zorak, thanks. My 'person' spreadsheet does include what I believe is that number, listed as mail_no in the export.

That's not the number that is assigned by the system. It is an internal index not usually visible to the user.

As I asked previously, is there a reason you don't want to migrate the current database (if you're already using Powerchurch locally) to PCPlus Online? Do you need to clean the database or something like that?

Hi, Neal. Upthread I mentioned that we've had a database catastrophe, & we have no backups. I'm hoping to avoid reentering more than a thousand people manually.

jbuck wrote:

NeilZ wrote:

jbuck wrote:Hi, Zorak, thanks. My 'person' spreadsheet does include what I believe is that number, listed as mail_no in the export.

That's not the number that is assigned by the system. It is an internal index not usually visible to the user.

As I asked previously, is there a reason you don't want to migrate the current database (if you're already using Powerchurch locally) to PCPlus Online? Do you need to clean the database or something like that?

Hi, Neal. Upthread I mentioned that we've had a database catastrophe, & we have no backups. I'm hoping to avoid reentering more than a thousand people manually.

You said " but say if someone " that usually means a hypothetical. Not having any backups whatsoever is going to cause you to have to manually enter all that data.

There isn't ONE backup available?

NeilZ wrote: You said " but say if someone " that usually means a hypothetical. Not having any backups whatsoever is going to cause you to have to manually enter all that data.

There isn't ONE backup available?

I don't want to go into details here, but let's just say we aren't happy. At the moment, I'm planning to use the household CSV upload to do some of it, but the individual people will be a job and a half, not to mention whatever our bookkeeper's going to have to do.

Any recommendations would be deeply appreciated.

jbuck wrote:

NeilZ wrote: You said " but say if someone " that usually means a hypothetical. Not having any backups whatsoever is going to cause you to have to manually enter all that data.

There isn't ONE backup available?

I don't want to go into details here, but let's just say we aren't happy. At the moment, I'm planning to use the household CSV upload to do some of it, but the individual people will be a job and a half, not to mention whatever our bookkeeper's going to have to do.

Any recommendations would be deeply appreciated.

FWIW .. if you have a backup from a previous version of Powerchurch, that would help. Other than than, set aside a bunch of time to enter the data. The good news is that with Powerchurch Online, you don't have to do this at the church, you can do it at home.