Syncing with Google Calendar

Plannie syncs with the calendars your family already uses, so nothing needs entering twice.

Connect a calendar

Calendars connect per person: go to Settings → Family & access, tap the member, then Sync & calendars → Connect a calendar. A browser window opens to sign in with the provider.

• Google Calendar: two-way sync.
• Outlook / Microsoft 365: two-way sync. If a work account blocks the connection, Plannie guides you through a view-only published-calendar fallback.
• Other calendars (ICS feeds, including Apple/iCloud): view-only.

You can connect more than one account per provider, for example a personal and a work Google account for the same member, alongside an Outlook account and a couple of calendar feeds. Each account gets its own card in the list, labelled with its email address, and the account chooser always appears when you connect so you can pick exactly which one to add.

Apple / iCloud calendars

Apple has no direct connection, so an iCloud calendar comes in as a view-only feed. Publish it first, then paste the link:

1. On iPhone or iPad: open the Calendar app, tap Calendars, tap the ⓘ next to the calendar, turn on Public Calendar, and use Share Link… to copy the webcal:// address. On a Mac: right-click the calendar in Calendar, choose Share Calendar…, tick Public Calendar, and copy the link. You can also do this from iCloud.com → Calendar → the share icon next to the calendar.
2. In Plannie, go to Settings → Family & access, tap the member, then Sync & calendars → Connect a calendar → Calendar feed (ICS).
3. Paste the link and add it.

Apple's ready-made holiday calendars (the calendars.icloud.com/holidays/… addresses) are already public. Skip step 1 and paste one of those links straight in at step 3.

Events you add in Apple Calendar appear in Plannie on the next refresh; the feed is view-only, so Plannie never writes back to it. School and club platforms that hand out a subscribe link (lunch menus, training schedules) work the same way.

Choose what shows up

Each connected account has its own card listing its calendars with an on/off toggle. Per calendar you can also choose:

• Color: show events in the member's Plannie color, or keep the calendar's own color (softened to match the app).
• Target: imported events belong to that member, or to Everyone (useful for a shared family calendar).

Switching a calendar on or off takes a moment while Plannie talks to the provider. Switching one on happens straight away; switching one off asks you to confirm first, naming the calendar (Turn off Work?), because every event it brought in is removed from Plannie, and turning it back on later imports them all over again, which can take a while. The switch stays where it is until you tap Turn off. Either way the calendar then shows Importing or Turning off sync next to its name until the change has gone through. A calendar with years of history can take a few minutes to import — the first time, and again on the occasional full refresh the provider asks for — and it keeps going in the background while you carry on. You can change your mind part-way through: switch the calendar off while it's still importing and Plannie stops that import and clears out the events it had already brought in, rather than letting the rest of them land. The clean-up waits for the running import to wind down, so give it a moment before the events disappear.

Hide details from other family members and shared screens

Some calendars are time taken and nothing more to everyone but the person they belong to: a work calendar full of client names, a doctor's appointment. Each calendar you have switched on has an eye button to the left of its switch (in a browser, hovering it says Hide details from other family members and shared screens). Press it and that calendar becomes busy only for everyone except its owner and the people taking part in an event: on a device the whole family uses — one set to a shared screen under Settings → Family & access → Device mode — and on every other family member's own phone or tablet, its events show as plain Busy blocks with the time and the member's color and nothing else. No title, location, notes, guests or attachments, tapping one opens nothing, and nobody else can edit or delete it. Only the person whose calendar it is keeps every detail, so they still see their own day in full — along with anyone who is part of a particular event, on their own phone or tablet: whoever created it, and family members it's assigned to or who are invited to it. So an event you plan for yourself and someone with a busy-only calendar stays fully readable and editable for you, even after it syncs to their calendar.

The same goes for connected apps and AI assistants: one using an API key or an assistant connection sees those events only as Busy and can't change them, and calendar changes in the activity history it reads leave the event names out. The one exception is an assistant the calendar's owner connected themselves: it acts for them, so it sees and can manage their own calendar in full. The only thing kept from it is the name of a deleted event, which stays hidden in its activity history.

The crossed-out eye means busy only; press it again to go back to full details. Shared screens and everyone else's devices pick the change up on their next refresh, and it sticks: switching the calendar off and on again, or reconnecting the account, keeps it. Calendar feeds (ICS, including Apple/iCloud) don't have the option yet.

Sending Plannie events back

Every Google or Outlook calendar you switch on syncs in both directions; there's nothing to set up. Edit an event that came in from one of them and the change lands back on the calendar it came from; delete it in Google or Outlook and it goes from Plannie on the next sync, a cancelled repeating series included. An invitation that's on two members' calendars is the exception: if one of them removes it from their calendar, it leaves only that calendar and stays in Plannie for the other. It goes from Plannie once it's off every connected calendar.

For events you create in Plannie, the "Sync to calendar" field in the event form decides which connected calendars receive a copy. Tick as many as you like, or leave it empty to keep the event in Plannie only.

Default calendar for the profile

So you don't have to pick every time, each member can have a home calendar: Settings → Family & access, tap the member, then Sync & calendars → Default calendar for the profile (the ? next to it explains it in place). Choose any of that member's switched-on Google or Outlook calendars, or None to turn it off.

Assigning that member to an event then selects their calendar in "Sync to calendar" for you. Assign two people who each have one and the event lands on both. The field stays yours to change, so you can add or untick a calendar for a single event, and unassigning someone drops their calendar again. Events created for a member by Plannie Assistant or through the API follow the same default.

When sync falls behind

Google and Outlook tell Plannie the moment something changes, and on top of that Plannie re-checks every connected Google and Outlook account every 15 minutes, so what you see is never more than a quarter of an hour behind, even if a provider’s live updates go quiet. Calendar feeds (ICS, including Apple/iCloud) can’t announce a change and have to be re-read from top to bottom every time, so Plannie refreshes those once an hour rather than pulling the whole file every quarter of an hour. A few Google calendars can’t announce their changes either — Google’s own read-only holiday calendars are the usual case — so Plannie keeps those up to date with the 15-minute check alone. That’s normal rather than a fault, and the account card carries on as usual instead of reporting a sync error.

Each account card shows how fresh it is: synced 4 min ago. If a connection runs into an error, or hasn’t managed a sync for over an hour, the card says Sync stopped working or Sync hasn’t run in a while and offers Sync now. One tap re-syncs your family's connected calendars there and then, and re-establishes the live updates behind them.

A provider being momentarily busy or briefly unavailable doesn’t count as a breakage: Plannie waits a second or two and tries the same calendar again on the spot, a couple of times, following the provider’s own “come back in a moment” hint where it gives one. The card only reports a problem if the calendar is still out of reach after that, and the next 15-minute check picks it up again by itself — so a passing outage at Google or Microsoft usually clears without you doing anything.

Some breakages can’t heal themselves. If the account’s password changed or Plannie's access was withdrawn, the connection has to be made again. Plannie then notifies the household and emails the grown-ups, naming the connection that stopped. While it waits to be reconnected, Plannie stops re-trying that one connection in the background (a sign-in that can no longer work isn’t worth retrying every quarter of an hour), and reconnecting picks the automatic checks back up straight away.

If a calendar needs reconnecting

Plannie shows you the way there with a small warning triangle. It appears when Google or Microsoft has stopped sharing a calendar with Plannie, or when a connection has kept failing for over a day (a passing error that the next sync clears doesn't trigger it). Follow the triangles:

1. The More button and its Settings row (or the Settings gear).
2. Family & access in Settings.
3. The member's row, which says Calendar needs reconnecting.
4. The account card under Sync & calendars: Google stopped sharing this calendar with Plannie. Sign in again to keep it in sync. Tap Reconnect and sign in to the same account again. Your calendars and events stay as they are, and they start syncing again. Sync now can't fix this kind of breakage, so the card offers Reconnect instead.

Good to know

• A calendar can only be synced by one member at a time; Plannie tells you who has it if you try to add it twice.
• Deleting a synced event from any of the calendars it lives on removes it from Plannie too, and if Plannie had copied it to several calendars, those copies go with it. Delete it in Plannie and it leaves your calendar straight away, while the copies on Google or Outlook are removed a moment later in the background — there's nothing to wait on, and if a provider is briefly unreachable Plannie retries on its own.
• Partners who share calendars in Google: connect each Google account to its own member, and leave the other person's calendar switched off; their events already arrive through their own connection. If the same calendar does end up switched on for two members, its events belong to whichever member imported them first; switch it off there and they move across to the other member automatically, rather than disappearing.
• If a feed link won't add, the message tells you what the calendar server said (unreachable, refused, or a web page rather than a calendar file), so you know whether to re-copy the link or check its sharing settings.
• A freshly added feed shows Syncing… while its first import runs. A long calendar with years of history can take a few minutes to come in the first time, and it keeps going in the background while you carry on. If a feed later stops updating (for example its link was unpublished), the feed row says so and offers Retry, which re-syncs it on the spot, plus Fix link if you need to paste a fresh address.
• Repeating events in a feed repeat in Plannie too. A weekly training session or a yearly holiday shows on every date the feed says it should, not just the first one, and any occurrence the feed cancels stays hidden.
• Repeating Google events show up to two years ahead. A series that never ends (a weekly meeting, a fortnightly class) brings its dates in up to two years from today, and Plannie adds the next ones about once a week as that window moves forward, so the series always reaches two years out. One-off events come in whatever their date.
• A calendar feed mirrors its source. Every refresh reads the feed as it currently stands, so an event the feed has stopped publishing leaves your Plannie calendar too. Worth knowing for the rolling feeds school and club platforms hand out: a lunch menu that only ever lists the next fortnight drops each day as it falls out of that window. If a refresh comes back empty or unreadable, Plannie leaves the events it already has alone rather than clearing the calendar.
• Duplicated feed events tidy themselves up. A few platforms — school lunch menus especially — hand out a brand-new identifier for the same event on every refresh, which used to leave a fresh copy of the whole feed behind each time. Plannie recognises those events by their date and title instead, so they update in place; if a feed has already left you with duplicates, the next refresh collapses them back to one of each.
• All-day events keep their dates, both ways. A school day off, a public holiday or a week-long trip covers exactly the days it covers on the other calendar, rather than spilling over onto the morning after, and an all-day event you create in Plannie arrives on the same day in Google or Outlook. Plannie reads those dates in your family's timezone, so if an all-day event ever looks a day out, check Settings → General → Timezone.
• If a connection fails with “You need to be signed in for this”, your session has expired rather than anything being wrong with the calendar. Log in again, then retry the connection.
• Disconnecting asks whether to keep or remove the events it already imported.