By Natalie Chapman, Content Marketer at Passare

Quick summary

Funeral home payment processing involves five common methods, each with different speeds, admin burdens, and levels of family friction. This article shares the tradeoffs of each and how to manage them more efficiently:

• Card payments are immediate and low effort, but only if transactions tie back to the case file automatically.
• ACH and wire transfers are fast for large balances but become mystery deposits without case-level tracking.
• Checks are simple for families but create hours of admin when incoming and outgoing checks lack a digital record.
• Preneed conversions are low-friction for families but high-burden when policy data has to be re-entered manually.
• Insurance assignments are the slowest method, and every manual entry error can lead to a resubmission that adds weeks to processing time.

At your funeral home, you can accept payments in multiple ways, such as card, check, insurance assignments, preneed, or wire transfers.

But accepting payments and actually collecting and tracking them are two different things.

If your funeral home doesn't have a defined process for each payment type, you could spend hours reconciling at the end of each week or month.

With the right technology, you can simplify your payment process so you can offer families a range of payment options, and your team is able to track them with ease.

Here are the five most common payment methods funeral homes handle, the tradeoffs of each, and how to manage them in Passare so money lands in the right place without unnecessary manual work.

#1. What's the best way to process card payments? 

⏩ Transaction speed: Immediate

✏️ Admin burden: Low

💲Family friction: Low

Card payments are the gold standard for speed. Money moves almost instantly, and families love the convenience. In fact, fewer than 10% of Americans use cash as their primary payment method anymore.

But the "low-burden" reputation of credit cards disappears the moment you have to manually match a terminal receipt to a case file. If your card processor doesn't talk to your case management system, you’re just creating more data entry for yourself.

How Passare can help

You can eliminate hours of manual tracking when every card transaction automatically ties back to the case it belongs to. With Passare, payments are processed through our integration with Deluxe credit card processing, so transactions automatically post to the correct case. That way, you can pull revenue reports directly from case data without cross-referencing bank statements.

A bonus? Families can log into Passare's online at-need planning tool, Planning Center, see their remaining balance, and make additional payments online with a card at any time.

#2: What's the best way to process ACH and wire transfers?

⏩ Transaction speed: 1-3 days

✏️ Admin burden: Medium

💲Family friction: Low-Medium

ACH and wire transfers are great for large balances because they’re fast and cost-effective. The problem? They often show up in your bank account as "mystery deposits." Your team then spends hours playing detective to figure out which family sent the money.

How Passare can help

Passare gives you a few ways to track ACH and wire payments, depending on how the payment comes in.

1. Payment integrations: Through our integration with Deluxe, a family's ACH payment is tied to the correct case from the moment it's created. That means no matching or manual entry on your end!
2. Payment links: If your funeral home isn't using the Deluxe integration, you can still link payments to a case automatically by sharing a case-specific payment link with the family. That way when they pay, the balance updates in the case on its own.
3. External wires: For external wires sent directly to your bank account, you can log the payment against the case in Passare manually. From there, the accounting integration takes over, pushing the information to your accounting software automatically. So, while the initial entry is manual for external wires, everything after is handled for you.

#3: What's the best way to process check payments?

⏩ Transaction speed: 3-7 days

✏️ Admin burden: Medium-High

💲Family friction: Low

For families, checks are simple. For funeral directors, they’re an administrative nightmare.

Tracking incoming payments, writing checks to vendors across multiple cases, making deposit runs, and then trying to reconcile it all without a digital record tied to each case is just hours of admin hiding behind a 'low-tech' payment method.

How Passare can help

Passare’s check-writing feature lets you write one check to a vendor and link it across multiple cases. No more cutting five different checks for the same company. You can also log every incoming check digitally, so when it’s time to reconcile, the paper trail is already digitized and tied to the case.

#4. What's the best way to process a preneed policy?

⏩ Transaction speed: Varies

✏️ Admin burden: High (if manual)

💲Family friction: Low

Preneed is a gift for the family, because they’ve already planned ahead. But it can be a tedious task for the funeral home if the conversion is manual.

If you’re re-entering policy data and manually calculating the difference between funded amounts and current price lists, you’re wasting time on a case that was supposed to be "done."

How Passare can help

In Passare, you can cut down on a lot of the manual work that comes with processing a preneed contract. Through the Funeral Directors Life integration, preneed cases and their financial data are already in Passare when the family comes in for at-need. Then all you have to do is convert the case, and the system handles the rest, from comparing funded amounts to current pricing to adjusting for rate changes to reflect your current price list.

#5: What's the best way to process insurance assignments?

⏩ Transaction speed: 2-6 weeks

✏️ Admin burden: High 

💲Family friction: Medium-High

Insurance assignments are the slowest and most labor-intensive payment method. Families often have incomplete policy info, which causes them to have to gather information. Plus, assignment forms require manual entry, and when claims stall, the follow-up is entirely on you.

That means both you and the family have work to do to process insurance assignments.

And although you can't control how fast the insurance company pays, you can control how many errors and resubmissions slow the process down.

How Passare can help

Passare pre-fills your assignment forms by pulling data directly from the case file via our Claimcheck integration. This kills manual entry errors before they happen. You can also track the status of the assignment right inside the case, so you can ditch the sticky notes and spreadsheets.

One system to process every payment efficiently

At the end of the day, you want to offer families a way to pay that's easiest and most convenient for them. But you also want your team to spend their time efficiently, so they spend less time reconciling payments and more time with families.

With the right technology, every payment is captured, tracked, and tied to the case automatically, no matter how a family chooses to pay.

See more about how Passare simplifies payment processing for every method in a demo.

Share the benefits of Passare with the rest of your team!

• For the funeral director → A funeral director's guide to Passare
• For the manager → A manager's guide to Passare
• For the admin → An admin's guide to Passare