Hello everyone,
We’re excited to share that Afterword won the
Innovation Award
at this year’s NFDA Conference for our launch of Grace, the first AI Assistant for funeral homes
. We’re so proud of all that we’ve built in the last year, and we wouldn’t have won without all your feedback.Here’s everything we launched in October, including major design changes today.
Want us to add a feature or make an adjustment? Respond with your requests.
October 2025 Highlights:
- Our AI assistant, Grace.
- We introduced workflows to send your team reminders and suggestions to help keep everyone on track. Examples of suggestions are reminding your team to reach out for an outstanding payment or texting a family when you’ve scanned a decadent into your care.
- We've improved the arrangement ‘Cheat Sheet’ when searching for a contact in Afterword to help explain previous family members you’ve served in the past and the details of those services.
- We’ve made many improvements to our AI Answering service to speed up response times, better parse call details, and show recordings in Afterword.
- New Online Planning Navigation.This updated, more intuitive interface makes it easier for families to navigate online and go between vitals, merchandise selections, and services. We've also improved the experience to allow families to easily log back in from an email and pick up right where they left off in Vitals.
- Mobile v2.0 and Android Support.We’ve updated our Mobile App to be faster and more stable. We also incorporated our Texting capabilities for those who use our Telephony products. Lastly, our Android app is finally in beta testing. If you’d like to access this, please let us know!
- Texting directly from Afterword. Send texts manually or automatically directly from Afterword to keep all communication in one place.
We're already planning for the end of the year. As always, your feedback is invaluable – please keep it coming!
Best,
Effie & Zack
The Afterword Team
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Full List of Updates
These key features are just part of the story for October. 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:
✨ Grace Updates
- Family Reminders.Grace helps remind family members when certain tasks still need to be completed. This can include: completing their online vitals, completing a payment, signing a document.
- Grace Suggestions. Grace makes suggestions to your team to help keep everyone on track. For example, once you’ve set an arrangement date, the system can email your templated “What to Bring to the Arrangement Meeting” email. This can work for pre-arrangement care, day-of-service communication, and aftercare emails.
- New Home Dashboard.In one place, Grace displays all the ongoing tasks and notifications for you. View your recent death calls, see all recent communication sent through Afterword, view services happening today, and browse your unread notifications—all in one place.
📱
Online Planner & Family Experience
- New Navigation:A permanent sidebar or drawer experience shows families exactly what to expect as they navigate through the planning experience.
- Login Flow: Improved the login and "continue planning" flow for families, making it seamless to return to Vitals after receiving an email.
- Obituary Event Fix: Fixed a bug where obituary events (like service times) would still show even after being removed in Afterword.
💬
Communications Hub
- Support for Texting:Use a dedicated phone number to text with your families. All communications automatically show up in the relevant case in Afterword, and all images are organized for you. You never need to share your personal cell with a family again.
- AI Voice Answering:Use our AI Agent to answer and triage your phone calls when you’re unable to answer. The agent handles calls from families, healthcare providers, funeral guests, and anyone else who has general inquiries or leaves messages for your staff.
- Updated Design:Our Communications section looks cleaner and includes Emails, Text Messages, and Phone Calls answered by our AI Voice Agent.
💼 Core Case Management
Financial & Products
- Product-Level Tax Overrides: Added more flexible tax controls, allowing for site-specific zero rates and product-level overrides.
- Manufacturer/SKU on Contracts: You can now add the manufacturer and SKU to contract line items for better itemization.
- Merchandise Naming: Adjusted all merchandise names to include manufacturer and SKU automatically on contracts.
Documents & eSignature
- Multi-Page DOCX Support: eSignature now supports DOCX files that have signature fields on different pages.
- Cleaner Text: Text fields printed on documents will now be automatically trimmed of extra whitespace for a cleaner look.
Integrations (QuickBooks, Shopify, etc.)
- QuickBooks Itemization: We are working on a new method to send more detailed product category breakdowns (e.g., "Sales - Caskets") to QuickBooks.
- Shopify: Made several improvements and fixes to our Shopify integration, including support for re-processing webhooks.
Admin & Configuration
- New Settings UI: We've updated the settings/configuration editor with a new UI, including a navigation sidebar to quickly jump to different sections.
- Whiteboard Permissions: We've split permissions for Cases and Whiteboards for more granular admin control.