FairTurns and Planning Center Services for a small church

Two different sizes of job

St Columba’s has about 70 adults on a Sunday. The rosters are welcomers, readers, morning tea, the sound desk and the flowers: five teams, around 40 people. Nobody plans chord charts. Margaret, who does the rosters, wants each team filled three months ahead, a link she can put in the newsletter, and to stop hearing “I’ve been on three weeks running”.

A church of 300 with a worship band, a kids programme and three Sunday times needs much more: song keys, run sheets, rehearsal files, check-in for children. That is the work Planning Center Services is designed around.

What Planning Center Services does

From Planning Center’s own pages, Services covers worship planning (service types, order of service, plan notes, a song library with arrangements and keys) and volunteer scheduling. Teams have positions. Auto-schedule fills positions based on when someone was last scheduled, their preferences and their blockout dates. Reminder emails can go out automatically. People can mark blockout dates, sign themselves up through signup sheets, and set household preferences. Volunteers use the Services mobile app to respond to requests, view plans and chat with their team.

Other Planning Center products sit alongside it: People (a free member database), Check-Ins, Giving, Groups and more, each priced separately.

What it costs

Services is priced by team members, which Planning Center defines as team leaders, volunteers or anyone who needs access to planning or scheduling. The pricing page lists, per month in US dollars:

FairTurns is free for any number of people. Pro, which adds emails and replies, is A$1 a month per organisation, paid one to five years at a time, GST included.

Side by side

When Planning Center is the better choice

• You plan the order of service, songs and keys every week and want the roster in the same place.
• You want volunteers to sign themselves up, answer requests in a phone app, or chat with their team.
• You also need child check-in, giving or a member database, and prefer one family of products.
• Your church already uses it. Moving away from a system people know rarely pays off.

When FairTurns fits a small church

If your rosters are names on dates, FairTurns does that part with less to set up. Click a Sunday, choose “Every week on Sunday” or “Every second Sunday”, give each team its positions (“Morning tea, 2 people”), and press Fill. Each place goes to whoever has had the fewest turns. People mark when they’re away. Older members can be added by name only, with no email, and still appear on the printed roster and the public roster link for the newsletter.

There is no song library, no check-in and no app to install: FairTurns is a website that works on any phone. The church roster page shows a full example.

Questions

Checked against Planning Center’s own pages on 24 October 2026; prices and features change, so check theirs before you decide.