Funeral Home Management Software: 4 Key Features You’ll Need

According to research from our friends over at the National Funeral Directors Association, the average NFDA-member funeral home services 113 families per year.

That equates to nearly 10 families per month, almost 3 families per week.

Regardless of your case volume, there are several different components to manage for each unique case. If you’ve committed to modernizing your funeral home, you may be in the market to find the best funeral home management software for your business.

Below are four must-have features that every funeral home should ask about when shopping for funeral home management software.

1) Collaborative Task Dashboard

Regardless of what your job title is in the funeral industry, you wear many hats – mortician, customer support specialist, event coordinator, marketing manager, team lead, and much more.

Sure, your “ole’ reliable” spreadsheets may help you manage things like inventory, hours, guest lists, and even your annual revenue. But by relying on many files in many different places with many different people to manage, you open up the door to human error.

Manage Every Aspect of Your Business

For that reason, the first must-have feature your funeral home management software needs to be a collaborative task dashboard, where you can better manage:

• Daily action items that your team needs to complete
• Required documentation that your families need to sign
• Monthly cases and services that need to planned out
• Projected quarterly revenue that your team is on pace to make

Your Task Dashboard Should Be Easy to Navigate

Don’t just settle for any funeral home management software that offers a digital task dashboard. You need to find an option that has a simple user interface and is easy for your team to navigate.

It’s no surprise that nearly 90% of information and skills that employees learn are forgotten within one year.

The moral of the story? The simpler that the software is to use, the easier it is for your employees to retain the skills required to use it.

Your Task Dashboard Should Allow Families to Collaborate With You

Your task dashboard from your new funeral home management software may be easy for your team to learn and use, but that is only one half of the equation.

You need to find software with a built-in task dashboard that’s also easy for families to use.

Families are required for many different parts of the planning process – documentation, service preferences, obituaries, personal belongings, and much more.

For that reason, double-check that your software of interest provides a dashboard that is user-friendly for both your employees and your families.

2) Simplified Document E-Signing

Official paperwork – for case management, do you still have your families physically sign every document so that you can store it in one of your many filing cabinets?

Turns out, that can be a burden to your business in the long run.

According to research, employees waste 20-30% of their time per week searching for physical documents. And in any business, wasted time equates to wasted money.

By biting the bullet and making the switch to a case management software that can securely store all case documents in the cloud for your team, you can quickly access any document you need to:

• Finalize a service
• Answer family questions
• Refute a family complaint if needed

Yet, here is the larger and more important caveat to the document storage piece: automated e-signing. There are also funeral home management software options that allow you to automatically fill out your forms and with the click of a button, request digital signatures.

By prioritizing a feature like this, you can save everyone time, prevent future headaches, and speed up your cash cycle.

3) Superior Customer Support

Let’s face it – every family is different. You’ll find yourself in situations where families are understanding of your planning process, and then you’ll find yourself in situations where families are incredibly demanding.

For that reason, you are forced to always be on your toes.

When investing in funeral home management software, your team needs a support crew that can help answer questions when they struggle to find the answers for a particular case within the software.

Customer support is a standard of most software nowadays. However, every platform is different:

• Some options provide great customer support, but with a monthly cost
• Other options provide unlimited customer support, but it’s often non-existent

Find a platform that offers unlimited, premium support at no extra cost, and you’ve found yourself a winner.

4) Mobile App That’s Cloud-Based and Secure

Upgrading from pen and paper to funeral home management software is the first step. But let’s think logically – how often do you find yourself wishing you could work from your phone instead of a computer desktop to manage your cases?

Luckily, there are platforms that offer both.

Let’s walk through a scenario. As the last responder, you receive a call from a family at 2 in the morning. Boom. They would like you to send over your GPL along with services you provide, as well as any required documentation so they can begin the planning process on the spot.

Before, you’d scramble to find a pen from your desk, and search for a sticky note or notebook paper to jot down details.

Or, maybe you tried to race to the laptop that you haven’t used in a week and is fresh out of battery. Either way, it’s not the best scenario for you, right?

Give answers to families quicker and be ahead of the curve on any case by investing in case management software that provides you with a mobile app.

That way, instead of:

1. Family Call
2. Drive to Work
3. Find Pen and Paper
4. Jot Details on Sticky Note
5. Compile Documents
6. Send Email

It can now be:

1. Family Call
2. Log in to App on Phone
3. Autofill Documents and Send for Digital Signatures

Funeral Home Management Software Should Prioritize Security

While it is amazing that there are software solutions available to help you collaborate with your team and your families, there also need to be some checks and balances in place.

Before settling on software to move forward with, double-check that you can set roles and permissions within the platform. This will prevent any employees from altering important data on particular cases, and it will also prevent your families from viewing private business data like annual revenue or case annual case volume.

By investing in software that prioritizes and emphasizes security, you’ll be able to keep your data locked down.

Cloud-Based Software Backs Up Your Files For You

Back to the pen and paper conversation – what happens if your funeral home catches ablaze?

Most likely, all of the official case documentation that you’ve stored in your filing cabinets will be lost, and the chances of recovering it are slim.

For that reason, it’s important that you have a backup plan. Instead of printing off double copies of every document, you can now rely on cloud-based software instead.

According to RapidScale, 94% of businesses reported from a study that they experience enhanced or better security after implementing a cloud-based solution.

Cloud-based software is a software program that you can access via the cloud on the internet – although it is still an option for most cloud-based software platforms, you do not have to download an entire application (or ‘app’) to your device to use it.

Instead, you can access cloud-based software from anywhere, with any device to manage your cases for the month.

Simplify Everything With Smarter Funeral Home Management Software

You deserve a solution that you can stick with for years to come. With this guide, you can now feel more confident in the decision that you run with for your funeral home business.

However, don’t end your research. Continue to explore options and see what makes the most sense for you, your team, and your families.

Gather is a great fit for any-size funeral home. Our funeral home management platform scales easily to help you grow your annual case volume, and our team is consistently looking at new ways to help make your life easier.

Take our platform for a quick test drive by scheduling a free demo with us or talk with our enablement team directly at (866) 313-1601. We are confident that you’ll love what you see!