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August 2025
Hello everyone,
We hope you had a wonderful Labor Day and a great end to the summer. Our team has been busy shipping some powerful new features designed to make your job easier. Here are all the product updates and highlights from the second half of summer.
Want us to add a feature or make an adjustment? Email us with your requests to: founders@afterword.com
End of Summer Highlights:
- We launched the Communications Hub.We've rolled out a brand new, centralized place for managing and sending templated emails to families. You can now see existing tracked emails like an inbox, use email aliases, send to custom addresses, and leverage more sophisticated templates for better family communication.
- Security honors: We passed a SOC 2 Type II audit.We underwent a rigorous, 6-months-long audit by an independent firm and passed! Receiving this attestation confirms that our security practices consistently meet the highest industry standards for keeping your and your families' data safe, private, and secure.
- Reports now support Interactive Drill-Downs.You can now click into summary reports to see the detailed, case-level data behind the numbers. This makes it easier to explore your data, answer questions, and get a deeper understanding of your funeral home's operations.
We're excited for what we’ll be releasing in September and can’t wait to share it with you. As always, your feedback is what helps us build a better product—let us know if you have any feedback.
Best,
Effie & Zack
The Afterword Team
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Full List of Updates
These key features are just part of the story. We've made numerous other improvements and fixes across the platform. Let’s dive into the complete list of what we’ve been working on:
Communications
- Advanced Email Templating: We've added more power to email templates, including using email aliases and more dynamic content.
- Notifications: We’re introducing Notifications within Afterword. This allows you to subscribe to specific events or milestones in a case, like when a family completes their Vitals online or makes a payment.
Reporting
- New Tax Report: We've published a new tax report for all customers to simplify end-of-month tax reporting.
- Staff permissions within Reports: Introducedpartial visibility for reports, allowing you to share specific reports with specific people rather than giving all-or-nothing access.
- Report Drill-Downs: Clicking intoSummary reportsallow you to see the detailed, case-level data behind the numbers, making it easier to explore your data.
Case Management & Vitals
- Dynamic Case Sidebar: The sidebar in the case view can now be dynamically configured based on your team’s assigned role or the case’s type, showing only the most relevant information to each user. We’re seeing customers use this feature to show different content for Pre-need cases, trade cases, and trade crematory work.
- Case Trash Bin: We've added a basic trash bin for deleted cases, accessible to super admins, as a safety net for accidental deletions.
- Director Badges: You can now see director badges in the main Cases view for at-a-glance assignments.
- Suffix Support: The system now better handles and displaysname suffixes(Jr., III, etc.) for all individuals.
- Editing Product Quantity: You can now enable the editing of a product's quantity immediately after adding it to a case.
Documents & eSignature
- Faster Bulk Downloads: We've significantly sped up the process for downloading documents in bulk by ~30%.
- Categorical Prefixes on Contracts: For more detailed contracts, you can now add prefixes to line items based on their category (e.g., "Services: Embalming").
- Payment Links in Documents: We added a new function that lets you embed a uniquepayment linkdirectly into a document, such as a contract or statement.
- eSignature Steps to guide families.To make the signing process even simpler and more intuitive, we've introduced a "stepper" that clearly shows families where they are in the process (e.g., Step 1 of 5), reducing confusion and ensuring all required signatures are completed.
Financial Management & Payments
- Credit Card Processing Fees: We’ve re-enabled the ability to add credit card processing fees as a cash advance item and are ensuring the fee is saved with the payment record.
- Discount Accounting: Ensured that when a discount is applied, it correctly reverses the associated accounting categories for accurate bookkeeping.
- Custom Tax Rates: The platform now supports including custom tax rates on individual line items.
Product Catalog & Service Offerings
- Miscellaneous Services: We've added support for "misc services" and the ability to edit their quantity after they've been added to a contract.
- Cart Creation on Packages Screen: You can now begin creating a cart directly from the packages screen for a smoother workflow.
Platform & User Experience (UX)
- Performance Improvements: We made Afterword faster—loading documents and viewing large reports should be noticeably faster.
- Accessibility: Improved the focus states for switches and buttons, making it easier for users to navigate the platform using the tab key.
Online Planner & Family Experience
- Lock Case After Contract: In addition to locking forms after submission, you now have the option to automaticallylock the case from further family editsafter the contract has been signed.
- "Skip Packages" Flow: We've set a minimum wait time for the "skip packages" flow to ensure all data is loaded properly before the family proceeds.
AI & OCR
- Obituary AI Generator: We've added more fields (like service details) to the AI obituary generator for more complete and personalized drafts.
- Photo to case for Pre-need: Our Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tool can now be used to digitize and import data frompre-need case documents.
- Photo to case Confidence Levels: We're working on showing confidence levels for data extracted via OCR and allowing you to set a threshold for what is automatically accepted.
Legal & Compliance
- Terms & Privacy Policy: We've updated our terms and privacy policy to include information about our usage of AI features.
Bug Fixes
Our team has been diligently addressing issues to ensure a stable platform:
- Case Conversion: Fixed a bug where the sidebar was referencing an old case after a case was converted.
- User Presence: Fixed a bug to avoid creating duplicate user sessions.
- Product Category Images: Addressed a bug where a category’s type was being changed when updating its poster image.