Services — API endpoint to trigger scheduling emails (with Accept/Decline buttons)

[davidnemes]

Related Product
Services

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
We're automating volunteer scheduling for our church's worship teams. A Google Sheet
holds which worship leader is assigned to each Sunday; a small service reads it and
writes the corresponding team to the matching plan via
POST /services/v2/service_types/{st}/plans/{plan}/team_members. That part works well.

The one step we cannot automate is the last one: actually notifying the people we
just scheduled. As confirmed in #1475, the Accept/Decline buttons are appended by
Services when the scheduling email is sent from the UI and are not part of the email
template, and there is no supported way to send scheduling emails from the API. #1273
and #500 reach the same conclusion from different angles.

So every week someone has to open each plan in the browser and click Send, purely to
trigger an email whose content and recipients our integration already determined.
It's the only manual step in an otherwise fully automated pipeline, and when it's
forgotten the volunteers are silently left unnotified — they can't see the plan and
can't respond.

Describe the solution you'd like
An endpoint that triggers the same scheduling email the UI sends, e.g.:

POST /services/v2/service_types/{service_type_id}/plans/{plan_id}/send_scheduling_emails

with an optional body such as:

{
  "email_template_id": "...",           // optional, falls back to the default
  "plan_person_ids": ["...", "..."],    // optional, defaults to everyone with a
                                        // prepared notification on this plan
  "message": "..."                      // optional, the free-text part
}

The key requirement is that the resulting email is the real scheduling email —
with the Accept/Decline buttons — not a rendered template we send ourselves.

Being able to select the email template in that call matters to us: we have a
campus-specific template that our volunteers recognise, and it's currently only
selectable in the plan's email popup.

Describe alternatives you've considered

• GET /services/v2/email_templates/{id}/render and sending it through our own mail
  host — ruled out in Services - Add Accept or Deny button to email template for volunteers scheduled to serve #1475: the Accept/Decline buttons aren't part of the template,
  and self-sent mail can't carry PCO's response links.
• Creating team members with prepare_notification: false — this only removes the
  penciled-in state so people can see the plan; it doesn't send anything.
• Automatic reminder emails via team_reminders on plan_times (suggested in Services - Add Accept or Deny button to email template for volunteers scheduled to serve #1475
  and Is there a Services endpoint to show scheduled reminder emails? #1347). These do include Accept/Decline buttons and we will use them as a safety
  net, but they only go out up to 7 days before the service. We schedule 3–4 weeks
  ahead, so volunteers can't respond until the last week, and the leader has no time
  left to find a replacement for anyone who declines. The template also can't be
  chosen for reminders.

Additional context
A narrower version would still solve our problem completely: an endpoint that just
sends the outstanding prepared notifications for a given plan, with no template or
body parameters at all (this is essentially #1273). That would let integrations finish
the job they started, and the "choose a template and edit the message" flow could stay
UI-only.

Happy to share more about our setup if it helps you weigh this.

I have..

• Reviewed the documentation found at https://developer.planning.center/docs
• Searched for previous issues asking for this feature request
• Removed all private information from this issue (credentials, tokens, emails, phone numbers, etc.)
• Reviewed my issue for completeness

[github-actions]

Potentially Related Issues

I found some existing issues that may be related to this one. Please check if any of them address your question before waiting for a response:

🟣 #1475 — Services - Add Accept or Deny button to email template for volunteers scheduled to serve (Closed)

Summary: User wanted to send scheduling emails with Accept/Decline buttons via the API. This directly relates to the new issue's core requirement: both need the same scheduling email functionality that includes Accept/Decline buttons, which are currently only available when sent through the Services UI.

Key discussion points:

• Accept/Decline buttons are appended by Services when scheduling emails are sent from the UI and are not part of the email template itself
• The /email_templates/{id}/render endpoint only returns the template content without the Accept/Decline buttons
• User was building a Python script to automate weekly scheduling email reminders for volunteers
• Planning Center staff confirmed there is no supported way to send scheduling emails with Accept/Decline buttons from the API

Resolution: Closed without a solution. Staff suggested using automated reminder emails (set up via team_reminders on plan_times) as an alternative, which do include Accept/Decline buttons and can be configured to send a set number of days before someone is scheduled to serve. However, this doesn't address the core need to trigger scheduling emails on-demand via API.

🟣 #1479 — Services API: apply a template to an existing plan gap left by deprecated importtemplate (Closed)

Summary: This issue was about applying a template to an existing plan via API, which is tangentially related to the new issue's workflow. While the new issue focuses on sending scheduling emails after team members are assigned, this issue addressed the step of populating plans with team members from templates.

Key discussion points:

• The POST /plans/{id}/import_template endpoint was deprecated and returning 404 errors
• POST /service_types/{st}/create_plans works for creating new plans from templates but not for applying templates to existing plans
• User needed to populate existing plans with standing team members, needed positions, and items from a canonical template
• A manual workaround involved reading template resources and POSTing them individually to the plan

Resolution: Resolved by Planning Center staff revealing an existing undocumented endpoint: POST /service_types/{st}/plans/{plan}/import. This endpoint copies team members, needed positions, items, and notes from a source Plan or PlanTemplate into an existing Plan. Accepts parameters for source_id, copy_items, copy_people, copy_notes, team_ids, and additional_target_ids. Requires scheduler permissions (and editor for copying items/notes).

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