Top 3 payment integrations for funeral homes to save time

May 09, 2024

Imagine this: It’s Friday afternoon, and you have a few loose ends to tie up before calling it a week.

One family paid with a credit card. Another just dropped off a check. Meanwhile, you’re still waiting on life insurance paperwork from a third family.

You’ve got payments coming in from all directions, and each one needs to be processed, recorded, and reported to your accountant.

Sound familiar?

In 2024, we ran a report in Passare and saw that funeral homes accept all types of payments in our software, including:

Checks
Credit cards
Cash
Insurance
ACH wires

At your funeral home, you probably accept most of these payment types, too, which means you need a way to process all of them. That can look like paying a third-party company to process your credit card payments or spending hours each week processing insurance assignments yourself.

With the right payment integrations, you can avoid all this by accepting and processing payments directly into your funeral home software.

Learn the 3 payment integrations every funeral home should be using and how they'll benefit you.

What is a payment integration?

Think of a payment integration like a walkie-talkie between two systems.

Let’s say you’re working a service and coordinating with your team. You press the button, speak into the radio, and your message instantly reaches the other person. No need to run across the building or make a phone call.

A payment integration works the same way. It’s a direct line of communication between your funeral home software and another system, like a credit card processor or insurance assignment company. Instead of manually entering payment details or juggling paperwork, the integration sends that information straight into your software, instantly and accurately.

This kind of connection is made possible through something called an API (Application Programming Interface), which is just a fancy term for the technology that lets two systems “talk” to each other.

>>>>>> Learn more about Public APIs for funeral software.

A payment integration will open the door for you to feed payments and information directly into your funeral home software. Hello, efficiency!

Now that you are up to speed, let’s look at the top 3 types every funeral home should be using.

#1: Credit Card Integration

Research from The Federal Reserve reported that in 2024, 65% of all payments were made with a card. People are more likely to swipe their card than hand over cash for things like groceries, gas, and other regular purchases (Dave Ramsey fans, we'll pause while you freak out for a moment 😆 ).

Based on this data, there's a really good chance that when it comes to paying for a funeral, many families will opt to pay with a card.

However, dealing with high credit card processing fees and spending time manually recording each transaction isn't ideal for you or your funeral home.

With the right credit card integration, you can avoid all this. Passare integrates with Deluxe Merchant Services, allowing funeral homes to process card payments quickly and easily within a single platform.

Here's how the integration works to benefit you and your families:

Families can make full payments or split payments, and view payment history all from Passare's online at-need tool, Planning Center (they can also swipe their card right there at the funeral home if they want!).
Funeral homes get notifications when payments have been made, which seamlessly flow to the Payments & Adjustments page within Passare for easy and accurate reporting.
You can even use Deluxe to process payments for things like monuments, gravesites, and flower shops outside of Passare, meaning you'll be able to handle transactions for every aspect of your business.

Oh, and one last bonus point for this integration - Deluxe offers a flat rate for all cards. Need we say more?

See what Shirley Calahan, Vice President and Owner at Calahan Funeral Home and Cremations, has to say about using this integration:

"We take payments through Passare. When a family comes in, and wants to make a payment, we can easily process it at any of our terminals, swipe the card right there, and it appears in Passare. We can take checks or credit cards and post against the account balance.

We even discontinued our third-party credit card company because we no longer needed them."

#2: Life insurance assignment integration

Whether you handle insurance assignments in-house or send policies off to your funeral funding partner, there's no avoiding the hassle. You still have to get all the correct information and signatures on the paperwork before it can be sent off for verification.

Unless you use a life insurance assignment integration.

When you link your insurance assignment company to your case management software, the whole process is easier and faster. Passare's integration with Claimcheck allows funeral homes to pull information directly from Passare to pre-fill insurance assignments. Plus, the family can sign all the forms in Passare's Planning Center.

See what Joseph Fitzgerald, CEO and CFO at O'Connor Mortuary, said about Passare's integration with Claimcheck:

"Being the Chief Financial Officer of our operation, I can also recommend Passare from the accounting side.

We're using the CLAIMCHECK integration, and that's been a huge plus for us."

>>>>>Want to learn more about the benefits of using an insurance assignment company? Check out this article.

#3: Preneed policy integration

If you use case management software, you know that each time you write a new preneed policy, you have to create a new preneed case in your software by manually entering all the information.

When the policyholder passes away, you have to re-enter all the information into a new at-need case. This process gets repetitive, wastes time, and also leaves room for errors.

Passare's integration with Funeral Directors Life, makes preneed policy payments more efficient from start to finish!

This integration, the first of its kind, makes the process easy by automatically creating a new preneed case in Passare each time you write a new policy with Funeral Directors Life.

Then, information from the policy is used to auto-fill in vital statistics and other information like the death claim amount, so all the details are in Passare.

This saves you from all that unnecessary data entry! And, when it comes time to convert the preneed policy to an at-need policy, you can do so with the click of a few buttons.

Check out what Jordan Seitz, Funeral Director at Washburn McReavy, has to say about this integration:

"We love the Preneed integration with Funeral Directors Life. It's been awesome to use the Funeral Directors Life integration to get our two systems closer and even more automated for better visibility with the preneed side of our business. We do not have to run all over the funeral home to pull a preneed case off the shelf and decipher everything the file contains."

Process all your payments in one place

With everything you have on your to-do list each week, the last thing you need is to be slowed down by processing payments. Payment integrations make accepting all types of payment easier and faster (yes, even life insurance assignments!).

Passare's payment integrations will help you be more efficient and create an easier way to get accurate financial reports. With all your information in one place in Passare, you'll get reports sent straight to your inbox, so you're always up to speed on your business's health.

Check out even more of our financial tools to help you simplify processes and achieve accurate numbers, no matter how busy your schedule gets. → Financials

And there's more where that came from...

Passare has 30+ software integrations to tie your answering service, accounting service, website, memorial printing, and other tools to your case management system. With these, you can make your whole team more productive…and save a whole lot of time.

Get a demo of Passare today to learn more: