In 2023, 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

And others! 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 to accommodate the needs of each family.

And still, after all the time and effort it takes you to process each payment, you have to record every transaction for your accountant, which can get tedious and take up a lot of your time.

With payment integrations, you can avoid all this by accepting and processing payments directly into your funeral home software. In this article, you'll learn the 3 payment integrations every funeral home should be using and how they'll benefit you.

What is a payment integration?

Before exploring the top 3 types of payment integrations, you need to know what a payment integration is and how it works.

Any integration between two software systems allows the systems to talk to one another, which we provide a deeper explanation of in our article, What in the World is a Public API?.

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

Now, let's dive into the 3 types you should be using:

#1: Credit Card Integration

Pew Research reported that in 2022, 41% of U.S. adults said they only use card to pay for things like groceries, gas, and other regular services in a week (Dave Ramsey fans, we'll pause while you freak out for a moment 😆 ).

Based on this data, it's easy to see that more and more consumers are using credit cards over cash. This means 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.

With the right credit card integration, you can avoid all this. Passare integrates with First American Payment Systems so funeral homes can process card payments quickly and easily within one platform. Here's how the integration works to benefit you and your families:

• Families can make payments, 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 for easy and accurate reporting.

• You can even use First American to process payments for things like monuments, gravesites, and flower shops outside of Passare, meaning you'll be able to use it to process payments for every aspect of your business.

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

Listen to 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 process insurance assignments in-house or send policies off to your funeral funding partner, there's no avoiding the hassle of getting all the correct information and signatures on the paperwork before sending it off to get verified.

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 in 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 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, 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 payments faster with integrations

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.

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:

Find this blog helpful? Read these next:

The Power of Website Integrations: 3 Key Benefits Revealed

What in the World is a Public API?

The Easiest Way to Process Insurance Assignments

The Top 3 Things to Consider in a Credit Card Processing Company