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Importing and Exporting Data

Youth Ministry is designed to work alongside the tools your church already uses. You probably have a roster in a church management system, a spreadsheet of parents, or a shared document you’ve been maintaining by hand. And at various points in the year you’ll need to hand data back to a secretary, a pastor, or a parent. Import and export features exist to make those hand-offs painless.

Importing a roster from CSV

The most common “get started” path is to bring in your existing roster from a CSV file.

Preparing the file

The importer is flexible about column order, but it looks for specific column headers. A minimal CSV needs at least a Name column. The importer also recognizes (and will map automatically if found):

• First Name / Last Name / Name
• Email
• Phone
• Birthday (most common date formats work)
• Graduation Year
• Person Type (Student, Leader, Parent, Alumnus, Guest, Other)
• School
• Engagement Level
• Notes
• Gender
• Group

Extra columns you don’t care about are ignored. Missing columns become blank fields on the person.

If you’re exporting from a church management system that uses “Grade” instead of “Graduation Year”, you have two options: rename the column in your CSV to Graduation Year and convert the values (a 9th grader this year is Class of 2029), or just import with the Grade column and manually set graduation years later.

Running the import

From Settings → Import Roster, choose your CSV file. The importer shows a preview of the first several rows with its best guess at how columns map to person fields. You can correct any mapping before confirming. On confirm, each row becomes a person in the roster.

Handling duplicates

If a row matches an existing person by name and email, the importer will ask whether to update the existing record or skip it. Nothing is silently overwritten.

After importing

Once the import completes, head to the Roster tab and spot-check a few records. It’s worth setting engagement levels by hand for the core students in your ministry right after import — that data is what drives most of the app’s suggestions later on.

Exporting your data

You can export data from several places in the app:

Roster CSV

From Settings → Export Data, export your full roster as a CSV. The export includes every field on every person and is useful for handing data to a church administrator, producing a printed directory, or just keeping a backup.

Events CSV

Export all events in a given fiscal year, including dates, type, progress, and total costs. Good for year-end reports.

Attendance CSV

Export attendance records as a CSV showing person, event, and date. Useful for answering questions like “how many students came to at least three meetings this quarter” — pull the CSV into a spreadsheet and pivot.

Budget CSV

Export a budget (all line items for a given fiscal year) as a CSV for finance meetings.

Schedule PDFs

Individual events with a Schedule component can export a printable PDF of their schedule. Open the event, go to the Schedule component, and tap the export button. The PDF uses a clean layout suitable for handing to students, parents, or volunteers.

Data ownership

Everything the app stores is yours. The CSVs and PDFs you export are plain files — no proprietary format, no cloud lock-in, no dependence on the app staying around forever. If you ever stop using Youth Ministry, you can export your roster, events, attendance, and budgets and take them with you. That’s a deliberate design choice: the app is a tool that serves your ministry, not a container that captures your ministry.