You've just created your church on Unison, which makes you its first admin. This is the hour that decides whether the rest of it is easy. Six things, in order.
Nothing here is urgent in the sense that something breaks if you skip it. It's urgent in the sense that every one of these is harder to do later, with people watching.
Make a second admin. Only an admin can create an admin, and you cannot promote yourself — your own tile shows your role as plain text, not a dropdown, so nobody can quietly promote themselves. That is deliberate, and it has a consequence: if you are the only admin and you leave the church, change email, or simply stop answering, nobody left can add a member, build a rota, or fix the team list, and there is no self-service way back in.
Two is the minimum. Three is better if one of them is a volunteer. It takes about forty seconds: Team → add them → tap their tile → role Admin.
Admin is not a seniority badge, and it is not the same as being a worship leader. It's a maintenance job: the person who keeps the team list true, the rota buildable and the church's settings sensible. Most of it is done once and then touched monthly.
The reason to read this table now is that it prevents the most common first-week message a church sends us — "the button we talked about isn't on my screen." Almost always, it's an admin button and the person asking isn't one.
| Area | Admin only |
|---|---|
| Home | The management overview — church stats, next service, and the rota gaps card. Everyone else gets their personal schedule instead. |
| Team | Adding, editing, roles, instruments, password resets, removing people. Even the heading differs: Manage the team for you, See the team for everyone else. |
| Rota | Auto-fill, Save, How many of each, the accept/decline switch, and the replace / swap / remove menu on anyone's spot. |
| Services | Choose the team, editing another leader's service, and Select → Archive / Restore / Delete on All sets. |
| Songs | Editing and archiving church songs, and importing into the church database rather than your own list. |
| Reports Plus | Admin and Plus. A leader on Plus still doesn't see it. |
| Settings | Two whole groups only you see: the church's name, and billing. |
"If a button we just talked about isn't on your screen, you haven't broken anything and you're not going mad — it's an admin button. Tell me and I'll either do it or make you an admin."
The team list is the spine of everything. The rota is built from instruments, alerts go to people on it, and a leader can only pick from who's in it. Ten minutes of care here saves an hour of confusion later.
Leader follows the instrument. Anyone given the Worship Leader position becomes a Leader automatically, and picking the Leader role adds that position. The two can never disagree.
Admin is separate, and is never implied by an instrument. You grant it deliberately — which is exactly why step 0 above exists.
These sit in the instrument list and look like instruments, but they grant something rather than describing what someone plays.
| Tag | What it actually does |
|---|---|
| Vocal Lead | Lets that person mark up vocal parts and edit the band's shared notes. |
| Projection | Gives them the projection console. Without it there's no Present heading in their sidebar even though your church has paid — this is the single most common "we bought it and it isn't there". |
| MD | Musical director. |
Rota → the guitar icon, top right → How many of each. Two vocals, one bass, one drums, and so on. Press Save.
Scroll past the instruments and you'll find the accept/decline switch — whether people are asked to confirm their spot rather than just being told about it. It is off by default, it is genuinely hard to find, and it has to be Saved: toggling it and walking away silently reverts it. Decide now whether your church wants it, because nobody discovers it by accident.
Ten songs your church really sings beats a hundred it doesn't — people learn the app on music they recognise, and a library full of strangers makes every screen feel like someone else's.
As an admin you get a choice nobody else does: Settings → Library → Import songs asks whether songs go into the church database (everyone sees them) or your own list. Everyone else can only import to their own.
That same screen is where you check syncing if something looks stuck: it lists writes still waiting and names the reason if one was rejected, and Re-sync library to server re-pushes your whole local library. It matches by ID, so it never makes duplicates and is always safe to run.
Do this once yourself, on a real Sunday, before you show anyone. It takes about ten minutes and it is the whole product in miniature.
Saving tells nobody. Unison cannot tell a leader who has finished from one who is coming back after dinner, so announcing is a deliberate act, not a timer. Press Tell the team and it will say how many people it reached — and name anyone it couldn't, because their alerts aren't switched on yet.
If you change the rota afterwards, an amber line appears: "Changed since you told them." That is your reminder, and it is the only one you get.
Same day you build the rota. Put a name against it or it won't happen.
A trial unlocks every plan feature, so during it your team sees things your paid plan may not include. Tell them which ones before it ends — the surprise is what causes the complaint, not the limit. One exception: the projection add-on is never part of a trial and isn't part of any plan. It's bought separately.
Don't put everyone in one room. The keyboard player sits through fifteen minutes on projector cabling and stops listening; the AV volunteer sits through transposing and does the same. Both leave having learned the other person's job badly.
Admins move on. The job survives if the next person gets six things — written down somewhere that isn't one person's phone.
Unison · worship charts, setlists and rota for your whole team. A product of Wellspring Scheduling Ltd · unisonapp.io · 10% of our revenue goes to charity.