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Summer 2025

Hello everyone,
We hope you’re all having a great summer. The team at Afterword was hard at work this June and July, focusing on improving our core products and rolling out our first AI-powered tool for directors. Here are all the product updates and highlights from the summer so far:
Want us to add a feature or make an adjustment? Email us with your requests!
Feature Highlights:
  • Introducing "Grace," our AI Assistant.
    We’re incredibly excited to release the first version of Grace, our AI assistant for funeral homes. Grace does administrative work for you and helps you stay on task. It helps research past cases, transfer your handwritten notes into Afterword, and email standard templates to families. If you’re interested in trying it out this beta feature, please let us know!
  • We launched eSignature Envelope Tracking.
    You can now see if and when families have opened, viewed, or clicked on all eSignature request emails. This helps you know when to follow up and brings more transparency to the arrangement process.
  • Chain of Custody now includes Personal Belongings Tracking.
    We've expanded our Chain of Custody app and desktop view to include the ability to log and track a decedent's personal belongings.
We're already deep into July's developments and look forward to sharing more soon. As always, your feedback is invaluable – please keep it coming!
The Afterword Team
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Full List of Updates - June/early July 2025
We've made numerous other improvements and fixes across the platform, all aimed at making Afterword more powerful and easier for you to use. Let’s dive into the complete list of what we’ve been working on:
Documents & eSignature
We're continually enhancing your document management and electronic signing capabilities:
  • Document Instructions
    : You can now include instructions or guidance to families that appear before eSigning documents. This is helpful if you include third-party documents from a crematorium, cemetery, or municipality that don’t have your logo or name on it.
  • Document Template Variants
    : You can now create different "Variants" of a single document template, which is perfect for handling slight differences (like letterhead versions) without creating entirely new documents.
  • Batch Document Creation
    : You can now save significant time by generating documents for all cases in a report. Early customers are seeing most benefits in printing invoices or annual reminders.
  • Resend eSignature Link
    : We've added the option to easily "Resend" an eSignature link to signers.
  • Hiding Deleted Documents
    : We've improved the logic to correctly hide deleted documents or documents from deleted envelopes.
Chain of Custody
  • Personal Belongings Tracking
    : In addition to the mobile app, you can now view and manage a decedent's personal belongings from the desktop view in Afterword.
Case Management
Improving the core of how you manage case and family information:
  • Locking the Case for Families.
    You can now prevent a family from further edits to a case. This is useful if they’ve submitted an Arrangement Form or finished the Vitals planning experience, and you want to ensure they can’t go back and edit the Vitals.
  • File Manager:
    For funeral homes that want to digitize ALL records related to a Case, we’ve created a File Management solution similar to Dropbox or Google Drive for storing images, slideshows, scans, and other files.
  • Weekend Services Filtering
    : You can now automatically create packages based on whether the services are on the weekend. This is helpful for homes that have different pricing based on the day of the week.
  • Case Duplication Warning
    : To prevent accidental duplicates, we've added a Case Dupe Checker that is now also visible on the First Call page.
  • Case Number Generation
    : We now support more flexible case number generation, such as iterating by month while using a yearly number (
    25-07-001
    ) and allowing for location-specific suffixes.
  • Product Search Improvement
    : You can now search for products by their description, not just their name.
  • New Case Number Options
    : We've added support for new, more flexible case numbering formats.
  • Direct Deposit Option
    : Added "Direct Deposit" as a payment option.
  • Improved Permissions
    : Enhanced our permissions system for more granular control across the Whiteboard and Pricebook. You can now share certain Whiteboards with specific users and groups of users, and you can also give the permission for a user to edit your funeral home prices.
  • Joint Whiteboards
    : If you manage multiple brands or properties with Afterword, you can now view your entire set of cases in a single Whiteboard dashboard.
  • Site-Specific Reviews
    : We've added the ability for Google/Facebook reviews to be site-specific for multi-location funeral homes.
Vital Forms
  • New Contact Role
    : "Estate Trustee" has been added as a standard contact role.
  • Copy From Address
    : The system now allows you to copy an address from any other address on the case (decedent, main contact, place of death, etc), making it easier to duplicate addresses between family members. We’ll be rolling this out over the next week.
  • Automatic Township Information
    : We've started automatically grabbing township information in addition to city and state for more precise location data.
  • "Not Applicable" Fields
    : Added the ability for certain fields to be marked as "N/A" or “Unknown.”
Integrations
  • QuickBooks Export
    : For funeral homes that prefer to import data manually, you can now export case financial data for QuickBooks, using the same field mappings you’ve already set up for live syncing.
  • ASD Integration Updates
    : We've improved the mapping of service event values to ASD service types based on how you use ASD. To prevent errors, the button to sync with ASD is now disabled if all associated services for a case are in the past.
  • Yahrzeit & Hebrew Date Calculator
    : We've added a Yahrzeit date calculator that automatically stores the calculated date on the Case.
Migrations
We performed significant data migration work for new partners including from Crakn, MIS, and PartingPro.
Bug Fixes
Our team has been addressing issues to ensure a stable platform:
  • AI Obituary Writer
    : Fixed a bug where calls to our AI endpoints were returning inconsistent results.
  • Case Conversion:
    Fixed a bug where new pre-need cases were converted to at-need cases incorrectly.
  • Default Views
    : Fix an issue where “Default Views” weren’t being treated as the default view.
  • Shopify Integration
    : Corrected an issue with Shopify webhooks.
  • Duplicate Widget IDs
    : Fixed a bug caused by one of our integration partners related to duplicate widget IDs in forms.