By Natalie Chapman, Content Marketer at Passare
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:
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.
⏩ 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.
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.
⏩ 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.
Passare gives you a few ways to track ACH and wire payments, depending on how the payment comes in.
⏩ 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.
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.
⏩ 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."
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.
⏩ 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.
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.
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.