A weekend retreat, a mission trip, or even a packed weekly meeting can live or die by its schedule. The Schedule component is the place in each event where you turn “what we’re doing” into a time-blocked agenda — and then hand it to students, leaders, and parents as a printable PDF.

When to use the Schedule component

The Schedule component is automatically active on most event types that involve a run of the day: retreats, mission trips, camps, service projects, weekly meetings, classes, and special events. If it’s not there and you need it, add it from the event’s component list.

For a weekly meeting, a schedule might just be three or four blocks (games, worship, teaching, small groups). For a weekend retreat, it might be fifty blocks across three days with sessions, meals, free time, and lights-out.

Schedule blocks

Each entry in the schedule is a schedule block with:

• Start time and end time
• Title — what’s happening
• Location — optional, where it’s happening
• Info — optional notes, supplies needed, who is leading, etc.

Add a block with the + button. The form lets you pick start and end times, type the title and location, and add any info you want printed on the final schedule.

Ordering and editing

Blocks automatically sort by start time. If you’re building a multi-day schedule, just enter the real date and time for each block and they’ll group themselves by day. Edit any block by tapping it. Swipe to delete.

The “Schedule Finished” checkbox

Like every component, the Schedule rolls up into event progress through a milestone — in this case, Schedule Finished. Check it when the schedule is truly done and ready to share. Until then, the event’s progress bar will reflect the missing milestone, and the Dashboard’s Pressing Tasks may surface it as the retreat gets closer.

Exporting to PDF

Once the schedule is ready, tap the export button in the Schedule component to generate a printable PDF. The PDF uses a clean, readable layout:

• Event title and dates at the top
• Blocks grouped by day, with day headers
• Start/end time, title, location, and info for each block
• Minimal branding so it prints well in black and white

You can share the PDF directly from the iOS share sheet (Messages, Mail, AirDrop) or save it to Files on Mac. Parents love a printed schedule before a retreat, leaders appreciate one in their pocket during the event, and you can keep the file with your event records.

Tips

• Build the skeleton first. For a retreat, block out sessions, meals, and sleep before filling in details. You’ll notice gaps and conflicts faster.
• Be generous with the Info field. Print-time is not the time to remember who’s leading games. Put it in Info and it shows up on the PDF.
• Print once, adjust, print again. Generating a PDF is free — use it as a proofing tool, not just a final export.
• Re-export after last-minute changes. If something changes the morning of the event, regenerate the PDF. It takes seconds and prevents confusion.

The Prayer Space is deliberately different from the rest of the Youth Ministry app. Dashboard, Events, Roster, and Budget are administrative tools — they help you do ministry. The Prayer Space exists to help you be with God about the people you’re doing ministry with. It’s calmer, warmer, and more spacious on purpose.

The design philosophy

A youth minister’s prayer list is made up of real people with real situations — a student whose parents are divorcing, a leader discerning a call, a teenager wrestling with faith. The Prayer Space is built to keep those names and stories close at hand without losing them in a notebook, and to give you a dedicated, undistracted place to actually pray through them.

The design intentions:

• Quick capture. You should be able to add a prayer request in under ten seconds, because the moment you notice it is often the best moment to record it.
• Community-connected. Requests can link to people in your roster, so a prayer for “Jake” carries all of Jake’s context with it.
• Contemplative. The Carousel mode strips away every UI element that isn’t the prayer itself, one at a time.
• Celebratory. Answered prayers should feel like answered prayers, not like closed tickets.

Prayer requests

A prayer request has a short title, a longer details section, a category, and optionally a link to a person in your roster. You can mark a request as urgent or pinned to keep it surfaced. Each request has a lifecycle:

• Active — an ongoing prayer need. The default state.
• Answered — God answered. The date is recorded and the request is marked for celebration.
• No longer needed — the situation changed or resolved. The history is kept but the request is out of rotation.

Each request also tracks when you last prayed for it. The app gently marks requests as stale when they’ve been active for a while without being prayed for — not to shame you, but to make sure nothing quietly slips off the bottom of the list.

Categories

Prayer requests are organized by category:

• Student — for a specific youth
• Community — church or neighborhood
• Ministry — direction, decisions, provision
• Personal — your own needs
• World — missions, global concerns
• Other — anything else

Categories aren’t prescriptive — use them as broad buckets, not rigid definitions.

The Prayer List

The Prayer List is the main view of the Prayer tab. It shows all your requests with filters for status and category, a search box, and sort options (most recent, urgent first, least recently prayed). Pinned requests rise to the top. Each row shows the category icon, the person link if there is one, and any staleness or urgency indicators.

From the list, you can swipe to mark a request as answered or delete it. Tap a request to open its full detail view.

Prayer detail and updates

A prayer situation usually isn’t static — things develop, get worse, get better. The Prayer Detail view lets you add prayer updates over time: brief notes about what’s happening. Updates appear as a timeline on the request, and when the prayer is eventually answered, you can see the whole arc of how it unfolded. This is what turns a prayer list into a testimony journal.

From the detail view you can also:

• Tap I Prayed for This to update the last-prayed date.
• Tap Mark as Answered to record the answer (with an optional celebration note that becomes a final update).
• Edit, delete, or re-categorize the request.
• Jump to the linked person’s profile.

The Prayer Carousel

This is the heart of the Prayer Space. Tap the carousel button from the Prayer List and the app goes full-screen into a focused prayer mode:

• One prayer per page with generous whitespace and larger typography
• Soft warm gradient background — visually distinct from the rest of the app
• Swipe or tap to move through the list
• “I Prayed” button on each page with a gentle checkmark animation
• A progress indicator showing where you are in the list
• Shuffle and filter options before you start, so you can pray through only urgent requests, only stale requests, or a specific category

The intention is that you sit down with your coffee in the morning (or in a quiet corner of the sanctuary), choose how you want to pray, and spend real time with God about each situation before moving on. Nothing else on your screen fights for attention.

Group prayer with external displays

When you’re leading a prayer meeting, connect your device to a TV or projector via AirPlay mirroring. (Yes, we know that “mirroring” feels wrong, but just trust us.) The external display shows a large-format version of each prayer request — title, person, details — in typography sized for a room. Your device keeps the controls, and you can set an auto-advance timer (30, 60, or 90 seconds) so the group can pray through a list together without you having to touch the screen.

A note on privacy

Prayer requests are often deeply sensitive. Like the rest of your ministry data, they sync through your private iCloud account — they’re not on any shared server, and they’re not visible to anyone else. Use the details field to record whatever level of context you need without worrying about who might see it. The carousel and external display features only show what you put in the request itself, so you can keep a fuller private version and a shorter version suitable for group settings if you want.

The Budget section is a birds-eye view of your ministry’s finances. Individual events already track their own costs and surpluses in the Costs component. The Budget section sits one level above that, letting you plan a year of spending across every category and see — at a glance — how your real spending is tracking against the plan.

Fiscal years

Budgets are organized by fiscal year, not calendar year. If your church runs on a July–June year, set that in Settings → Fiscal Year Start Month, and every budget view will automatically group events by your real financial year. A fiscal year is named by the calendar year in which it begins, so “FY2026” with a September start runs September 1, 2026 through August 31, 2027.

Budgets and line items

A budget is a container for one fiscal year. Inside it you add line items — the individual things you’re budgeting for. Each line item has a name, a category, a budgeted (planned) amount, and an actual (spent) amount. The sum of all your line items is your total budgeted spend for the year.

Line item types

Not every expense works the same way. Youth Ministry supports three kinds of line items:

• Manual — You type both the budgeted and the actual amount. Use this for things that aren’t tied to a specific event: office supplies, a curriculum subscription, staff training, a speaker stipend that isn’t attached to a retreat. The actual amount is whatever you enter, updated as the year progresses.
• Single Event — Linked to one specific event in the app. The budgeted amount is what you planned to spend on that event; the actual amount is pulled live from the event’s total costs. Great for “Fall Retreat” or “Spring Mission Trip” line items — the number updates automatically as you plan and reconcile the event.
• Event Type — Linked to an event type rather than a specific event. The budgeted amount is for the whole category; the actual amount is the sum of every event of that type within the fiscal year. Perfect for “All Service Projects” or “All Weekly Meetings” where you don’t want a separate line item for each one.

This flexibility means you can budget at whatever level of detail makes sense for your ministry. Some categories deserve a line per event; others can ride on a single rolled-up line.

Categories

Line items are grouped into categories so the view stays organized:

• Events — spending tied to gatherings
• Operations — facilities, admin, recurring costs
• Personnel — staff, stipends, contractors
• Curriculum — teaching materials, subscriptions, books
• Outreach — community engagement, communications
• Other — anything that doesn’t fit the above

The Budget Overview

The main Budget Overview screen shows:

• Summary cards — Total Budgeted, Total Spent, Remaining, and % Used. Color-coded: green when you’re under, yellow as you approach the line, red when you’re over.
• Category sections — Every line item grouped by category, showing name, budgeted, actual, and variance.
• Charts — A horizontal bar chart comparing budgeted to actual per category, and an optional donut chart showing your spending distribution.
• Year picker — Jump between fiscal years, or create a new one.

Tap any line item to drill into its detail view. For single-event line items, you’ll see that event’s full cost breakdown. For event-type line items, you’ll see every matching event with its individual totals. For manual line items, you can edit the actual amount and notes in place.

Copying from a previous year

When you create a new budget, you can choose to copy line items from an existing budget. The app carries over the names, categories, types, budgeted amounts, and event-type links. Single-event links are cleared (since those events belong to a specific year), and manual actuals reset to zero. This lets you build on last year’s plan rather than starting from scratch every September.

Comparing years

The Budget Comparison view lets you put two fiscal years side by side. Matching line items (by name) appear with columns for each year’s budgeted and actual amounts and the year-over-year delta. It’s the tool for conversations with your pastor or finance committee about where costs are drifting and where the ministry is growing.

Income vs. expenses

The Budget section is primarily expense-focused. Income (per-participant charges, budgeted funds, surplus) stays on individual events where it belongs, because most youth ministry income is event-specific. If you want the full picture of an event’s finances — what you charged, what you budgeted, what you actually spent, whether you came out ahead — open that event’s Costs component. The Budget section tells you how your planned ministry spending is tracking against reality across the whole year.

Youth ministry runs on relationships, and relationships run on showing up and staying in touch. Youth Ministry treats attendance and contact as two sides of the same coin: the app records who was present at each event, and surfaces the people you should probably reach out to based on who’s gone quiet.

Attendance vs. registration — two different things

Many tools conflate “who signed up” with “who actually came.” Youth Ministry keeps them separate on purpose:

• Registration is stored on the event as an Event Participant. It tracks who committed, whether they paid, whether forms are in, and any medical notes. One participant record per person per event.
• Attendance is stored as an Attendance Record. It records that a person was physically present on a given date. Multi-day events can have multiple attendance records per person — one per day you check in.

This matters for two reasons. First, your weekly meetings, classes, and drop-in events have attendance but no registration — you want to track who showed up without inventing a sign-up list. Second, for a retreat, you probably care both about who paid and who actually made it on the bus. The separation keeps both answers clean.

Taking attendance

From any event, open the Attendance component (or tap Take Attendance on a simple event). You’ll see a check-in view with your roster on one side and the current session on the other. Tap each person as they arrive. You can:

• Filter the list to students, leaders, or a specific group to speed things up
• Add a guest on the fly if someone new walks in — the guest is added to the roster immediately as a person of type Guest
• Take attendance across multiple sessions for multi-day events (day 1, day 2, morning session, evening session, etc.)

Only people you mark present get an attendance record. The app doesn’t store “absent” entries — silence means absence, which keeps the data clean and makes “last seen” calculations straightforward.

The Contact Log

Everything else — the text you sent a student, the call you had with a parent, the coffee you grabbed after school — goes in the Contact Log. From a person’s profile, tap Log Contact and fill in the date, method (text, phone, email, in-person, social media, other), and any notes you want to remember.

Contact logs power the “Students to Contact” section of the Dashboard. A student who was contacted two days ago drops off the suggestion list; a student nobody has talked to in three weeks surfaces near the top.

The Contact Management view

The Contact Management view (accessed from the Roster tab) is a dedicated workspace for outreach. It’s organized into sections:

• Birthdays This Week — everyone whose birthday falls in the next seven days
• Needs Follow-Up — students flagged for follow-up or who’ve gone quiet
• New Guests — recent guests you haven’t contacted yet
• Recently Contacted — a record of who you’ve been reaching out to

You can filter all of these by engagement level, grade, school, gender, or group, and each row offers one-tap shortcuts to text, call, or email.

Attendance reports

The Attendance Report feature (launched from Contact Management) answers questions like: “Which Core-level 10th graders haven’t been to a Wednesday meeting in the last month?” You pick engagement tiers, event types, and a time window, and the app returns the list. Use it when you’re planning a push to re-engage a specific slice of students, or as a regular check-in on the health of your community.

The rhythm

The whole attendance + contact system is designed to run on a weekly rhythm:

1. Take attendance at each event. It’s quick — a minute or two at the door.
2. Check the Dashboard each morning and reach out to the one or two students it surfaces.
3. Log each conversation so the list stays accurate.
4. Once a month, run an Attendance Report on the engagement tiers that matter most and catch anyone the Dashboard missed.

You don’t need to keep the app open to do ministry. You need a tool that notices the drift between Sundays so you can go do the ministry.

Building Your Roster

The Roster is where the people in your ministry live — students, leaders, parents, alumni, guests. The app treats the roster as more than a contact list; it’s the lens through which attendance, contact history, and prayer are all tied back to real people.

The Person record

Every person in the roster has a single record that captures:

• Name, contact info, and birthday — the basics
• Person type — student, leader, parent, alumnus, guest, or other
• Graduation year — used instead of a fixed grade so the student’s grade stays accurate automatically as school years roll over
• Engagement level — how involved this person is in your ministry
• School, notes, medical info, emergency contacts — as needed
• Groups — custom tags you define for small groups, teams, or affinity groups

You can access a person’s full profile by tapping their row in the Roster list.

Graduation year vs. grade

A common frustration with youth ministry tools is that students’ grades go stale on September 1st. Youth Ministry stores a graduation year instead and derives the current grade from today’s date. A student you enter as “Class of 2028” will show up as a 9th grader this year, a 10th grader next year, and age out of the youth group on their own without any maintenance from you.

Engagement levels

Engagement levels describe how deeply someone is participating in the ministry. The defaults are things like Core, Regular, Occasional, and Fringe, but you can rename and reorder them in Settings. Engagement levels drive several features:

• Filters in the Roster and Contact Management views
• The Attendance Report (see the Attendance & Contact guide), which can look for students at a given engagement level who haven’t shown up recently
• Sorting priorities on the Dashboard

Update a student’s engagement level as their involvement grows or fades. The app uses it to help you notice and respond to those shifts.

Filtering and finding people

The Roster list supports filtering by:

• Person type (students only, leaders only, etc.)
• Grade (derived from graduation year)
• Engagement level
• Gender, school, and group
• Free-text search for names

Filters combine — so “11th graders at Central High who are Core-level” is one tap and a search box.

The Person detail view

Tap any row to open a person’s detail view. Along with their contact info and notes, you’ll see:

• Attendance History — every event they’ve been checked in to, most recent first
• Contact History — every text, call, email, or in-person conversation you’ve logged
• Prayer Requests — any prayers in your Prayer Space linked to this person

This gives you a quick, complete picture before a conversation: I know this student hasn’t been here in four weeks, I know I last texted them on the 3rd, and I know what’s going on in their life that I’ve been praying about.

Adding and editing

Adding a person is a tap of the + button on the Roster list. You can also import a whole roster from a CSV — see the Importing and Exporting Data guide. The Person record is deliberately simple: add what you need, leave the rest blank. Nothing is required except a name.