CCB Extract Scripts

We did our migration from Community Church Builder (CCB) to Planning Center Online (PCO) in the Fall of 2016, and we have been very happy with the platform, as well as the excellent support that the Planning Center team provides.

While CCB was largely in our rearview mirror, I still continued to be engaged in discussions with other churches that either thinking about or actively making a similar migration from CCB to PCO, and asked about the process of extracting the data out of CCD and into PCO. Through these numerous conversations, I continue to be reminded how painful getting information out of CCB was.

Since I was already working on some programming projects for the church, and I started working on this side project to simplify, even in some small way, the migration process for churches existing CCB. For reasons outside the scope of this discussion (and pretty funny reasons at that), we continued our CCB subscription for a year past migrating everything to PCO. Because I had a subscription open, I was able to develop and test several scripts that allow extracting much of the pertinent information from CCB. These scripts include:

• Extracting all of the people records, including all of the personal and family photos in CCB
• Extracting all of the batch and transactional data
• Extracting all of the event data

Each of these scripts outputs a CSV file with normalized data — in other words, a batch with multiple transactions, which each might have splits into different funds, will create one line per batch/transaction/split. In the case of the people extract, a second CSV file is created that is essentially pre-formatted for PCO import, at least at the time of this writing.

** As of October 1, 2017, our CCB subscription has expired, so my ability to do any level of revision and testing is very limited.

I hope you find the scripts useful, making the transition to PCO so much simpler!!

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash