Getting Started in the Sermon Mind Dashboard: A Tour for New Admins

At the top of the dashboard home, the Launch Progress card shows six milestones: activate billing, complete your church profile, create starter tags, upload your first sermon, publish your first sermon, and invite your first teammate. The "Next Best Action" tile picks one milestone at a time so you always know what to do next.

You do not have to complete the milestones in order, but most churches that follow the suggested sequence finish setup faster than churches that jump straight to uploads. Treat the progress bar as a soft launch checklist, not a hard requirement.

The left sidebar contains seven destinations. Dashboard is the analytics home. Users is for invites, roles, and removals. Edit Sermons is your review and publishing workspace. Upload Sermon is where new files come in. Tags is for managing topics and series. Church Settings holds branding, visibility, and sermon defaults. Subscription is for Stripe billing and archive imports.

Above those, in a section labeled "Your Church", there is a Sermon Library link that opens the public-facing church homepage. This is the fastest way to see exactly what your members will see, without leaving the admin workspace and having to navigate manually.

Once sermons have been uploaded and members start listening, the metric cards on the dashboard begin to fill in: total sermons, total listens, active users in the last 30 days, average completion percentage, total bookmarks, and total searches. The 30-day bar chart underneath shows daily listening activity for the same window.

Below those, the dashboard surfaces top performing sermons, topic engagement by tag, search insights from real listener queries, scripture insights based on tagged verses, and recent listening activity. These sections are most useful after the first month of regular publishing.

Every admin route except Subscription quietly checks whether uploads are currently allowed (an active trial or paid plan in Stripe). If billing is paused, expired, or has not been activated yet, the workspace will send you to Subscription with a banner explaining why.

This is intentional, not a bug. Restore upload access on the Subscription page, and the rest of the dashboard becomes available again on the next navigation.