Importing & Exporting Data
Your data belongs to you. Bring it in from the system you are leaving, and take it out again whenever you want.
Import your data
Admin → Settings → Import Data.
Most churches arrive from another system. Passport imports from three sources, and you do not have to do it all at once — bring your people across first and come back for attendance history later.
| Source | What comes across | What you need |
|---|---|---|
| Breeze | People, groups and tags, events, attendance history | Your subdomain, and an API key from Breeze under Account Settings → Extensions → API |
| Planning Center | People, groups, calendar, check-ins, service plans | A Personal Access Token — in Planning Center, Developer → Personal Access Tokens → New. Paste the Application ID and Secret |
| CSV file | People | A spreadsheet with name, email and phone columns |
Imports run in the background. You can close the page, keep working, and come back — the Import Data tab tells you whether one is still running and what the last one added.
Preview before you commit
Passport always offers a preview first. Nothing is saved: it reads your data, reports what it found, and shows you the first 100 records of each kind exactly as it read them.
Read the preview properly — this is the moment to catch a problem. Check the names and the phone numbers in particular. A column that has landed in the wrong place is obvious here and expensive later, because undoing an import that has already run means finding the records by hand.
When it looks right, select Looks good — import now.
:::tip Run it twice safely Passport matches people it has already seen rather than duplicating them, so re-running an import after fixing something in your old system does not give you two of everybody. :::
Importing is not the same as syncing
Two different things, and it is easy to conflate them:
- Import (this page) is a one-off migration — bring what you already have into Passport.
- Sync (Admin → Settings → Integrations) keeps Breeze updated afterwards, sending new and changed people back to it.
You can import without ever switching sync on. Most churches leaving Breeze do exactly that.
Export your data
- In Passport, go to Admin → Settings → Export Data.
- Choose which data set to download:
| Export | What it contains |
|---|---|
| Visitors (CSV) | All person records including name, email, phone, baptism date, Holy Ghost infilling date, attendance count, first visit date, and whether the person is a child |
| Attendance (CSV) | Complete attendance records for all services and events |
| Journey Progress (CSV) | Member progression through your church's discipleship path |
- Click the button for the export you want. Your browser downloads the file immediately.
There is no limit on how often you can export, and exports always reflect your current data.
What to do with a CSV export
CSV files can be opened in any spreadsheet application, including Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel, and Apple Numbers.
Common uses:
- Backup — Keep a local copy of your member records separate from Passport
- Mail merge — Import addresses into a mailing tool for printed communications
- Reporting — Analyze attendance trends or growth data in a spreadsheet
- Migration — Transfer records to another church management system
Next steps
- Church Profile — Update the church information that appears in your member records. See Church Profile.
- Users & Roles — Manage who has access to Passport and what they can do. See Users & Roles.