Getting started as the account owner: your first week

Day one: your church exists. Now what?

Signup created your account, your church, and a person record for you. The plan step right after is what starts your 14-day Starter trial: choosing Starter begins the clock, with no card collected, and signup on its own starts nothing. The optional context step you saw, denomination, language, the scripture choice for the future, is editable any time in Settings under Church profile, so nothing you answered or skipped is locked in.

Then comes the setup-path screen with five honest choices: connect Planning Center, upload a CSV, set up manually, explore a demo church, or decide later. If you want to feel the app with data before committing your own, the demo church is exactly that, and it stays walled off from your real church.

• Signup creates your church and your record; choosing Starter on the plan step starts the 14-day no-card trial.
• Context answers are editable later in Settings under Church profile; nothing is locked in.
• Bring people in by Planning Center, Notebird with notes history, CSV, or by hand. Nobody counts toward billing until you review them.
• Invite teammates linked to their existing records, so accepting never creates a duplicate.
• Write care assignments so follow-ups, filters, and suggestions route to the right people.
• Log the first care note; it starts private and sharing is your per-note choice.
• Leaders take Sunday attendance for their own groups; a Sunday-afternoon nudge keeps the habit.

Bring your people in

If your church runs Planning Center, connect it and import: you choose the scope, starting from active adults, and people arrive with contact details, addresses, and photos, matched rather than duplicated on every re-run. Coming from Notebird, the Notebird importer carries both your people and your full notes history, with a visibility gate protecting confidential notes. From anything else, export a CSV and walk the mapping preview.

However they arrive, nobody counts toward billing until you review them, and the directory is immediately useful: profiles, households, and the Add a family wizard for the visitors who show up next Sunday.

Invite your team onto their own records

From Settings, invite each teammate by email, and link the invitation to their existing person record with the picker, so accepting attaches their sign-in to the record your church already keeps. Admins, including elders serving as admins, get an access level, with Full admin as the starting point; care partners get their assignments after they join.

You and your admins enroll in multi-factor authentication; care partners are asked only if you require it. When an invite is accepted, a card on your Home says so, and a new care partner lands on a guided first screen naming you as their inviter.

Write the care map, then log the first care

Care assignments write down who looks after whom: attach people, households, groups, or ministries to care partners, admins, or yourself. The assignment board under Care shows the coverage and, more usefully, the gaps.

Then log something real. Open the quick log, choose the person, write what happened. Every note starts private to you, and sharing is a per-note choice in plain words. The first honest note is worth more than an evening of configuration.

Set the Sunday rhythm and watch the week

If your groups meet on Sundays, your leaders can each take Sunday attendance for their own group on the face grid, nudged every Sunday afternoon by email or push. That single habit gives you an honest picture of presence without anyone at the door counting heads.

During the trial, the billing page shows the end date, and a reminder email arrives about three days before. Add a card only if you are staying; if you let it lapse, your church goes read-only and your data stays yours, exportable the whole time. Questions along the way go to support@flockconnect.com, and a person answers within 1 to 2 business days.