A funeral planning platform Scanlan’s owns.
Replacing the third-party “Build & Price” tool with a planning portal, a director workspace, and a clear path into your management system — built for your families, your staff, and your visibility.
What we’re building, and why
Today, the “Build & Price a Funeral” button on scanlanfuneral.com sends visitors to a tool hosted by an outside company (FuneralTech / Tribute Technology). The moment a family clicks it, Scanlan’s loses all visibility — no record of who used it, what they priced, or how to follow up.
We are replacing it with a platform Scanlan’s owns, with three parts:
- Family planning portal — visitors explore your pricing and build a funeral estimate, then either save it for their own reference or send it to your staff for follow-up.
- Director workspace — your staff picks up submitted estimates, guides families through full arrangements, applies adjustments with proper oversight, and produces accurate final pricing during arrangement conferences.
- Connection to your management system (TMS) — the current situation and your two realistic options are explained in the TMS decision.
Your current website does not change. The new platform lives at its own address — plan.scanlanfuneral.com — and the existing “Build & Price” buttons simply point there instead.
The technology, in plain terms
The cloud service that hosts and runs the application.
WhyFast, reliable, scales automatically with traffic.
The framework the application is built with.
WhyIndustry standard; one codebase covers the public site, family accounts, and staff tools.
The secure database where all estimates, accounts, and records are stored.
WhyEncrypted, automatically backed up, with strict access rules enforced at the data level.
Sends the system’s emails.
WhySign-in links, estimate PDFs, confirmations, follow-ups.
The analytics tool.
WhyShows exactly how visitors use the planning tool — the visibility you’re missing today.
Payment processing.
WhyOnly if you later choose to accept at-need payments online.
What the free tiers actually cover. The $45 base is just Vercel and Supabase — the other services start free and stay free at your volume:
- Resend includes 3,000 emails per month (capped at 100 per day) at no cost. A typical family interaction generates two or three emails — a sign-in link, the estimate PDF, a staff notification — so the free tier covers roughly a thousand family interactions a month. If it’s ever outgrown, the next tier is $20/month for 50,000 emails.
- PostHog includes the first 1 million analytics events per month free, with a year of data history. Past that ceiling, pricing is fractions of a cent per event, not a plan jump.
How families use it
- They land on the planning site and choose a path: Burial, Cremation, or Green Burial (given prominent placement — your Green Burial Council certification is a differentiator).
- A step-by-step builder walks them through services, facilities, and merchandise, with a running total always visible.
- No account is required to start. Everything saves automatically as they go. Requiring sign-up first is how the current tool loses people.
- When ready, they either Save (they enter an email and receive a sign-in link — no password to remember) or Submit to staff (name, phone/email, and best time to call — the same fields your website’s contact form uses today).
- They get a confirmation and a PDF copy of their estimate by email; your staff gets notified.
How your staff uses it
- A dashboard shows new submissions and upcoming arrangement conferences.
- Opening a submission turns it into a working arrangement with staff-only sections the public never sees.
- Any discount or price change requires a written reason and is logged with the director’s name — a clean oversight trail.
- Live conference mode: during an arrangement conference, the family can watch the estimate update on a second screen in real time as the director makes changes. No whiteboard math.
- Finalizing produces the official Statement of Funeral Goods & Services as a PDF, matching your current paper form.
What the system records
- Price lists, with versions. When you publish updated pricing, existing estimates keep the prices they were built with — nothing silently changes under a family.
- Estimates and submissions, including contact preferences.
- Adjustments log — every staff price change, with reason and name.
- Activity log — every step a visitor or staff member takes, which powers your analytics and follow-up.
Privacy and security
- Families never create passwords. They sign in through a link emailed to them.
- Staff sign-in requires a second verification code (two-factor authentication — the same protection banks use).
- Draft estimates are private. Staff can only see an estimate after the family chooses to submit it. Someone quietly exploring cremation prices at 2am has not asked for a phone call — and knowing that is what makes families comfortable submitting at all.
- No Social Security numbers or death-certificate data are ever stored here. That regulated information stays in TMS, where it belongs.
- Abandoned anonymous drafts delete themselves after 90 days.
- Every staff access to family information is logged.
- The system runs with separate test and live environments and automatic backups.
Rules we build around
- FTC Funeral Rule — the federal rule governing how funeral prices must be presented. The platform mirrors your General Price List item for item, and every estimate carries the required wording plus clear “this is an estimate, not a contract” language. (Your counsel reviews the final templates; the system is built to hold whatever wording they require.)
- New Jersey pre-need rules — NJ requires prepaid funeral money to go into regulated trusts. The platform therefore never collects payment for pre-need arrangements. Estimates and submissions only.
What we need from you
The build clock starts once these are in hand — everything below comes from your side. Check items off as you gather them; this page remembers your progress.
The TMS situation — and your two options
Where things stand. TMS (Tribute Management Software) does not offer a public API. An API is the standard “socket” that lets two software systems exchange information automatically — it’s how, for example, your website talks to Google Maps. Tribute does build connections, but only as private partnerships it negotiates itself (for instance, a preneed insurance link with Homesteaders Life announced for 2026). There is no path today for an outside platform like ours to plug in directly. Out of the box, information from the new platform cannot flow into TMS automatically.
There are two realistic ways to change that. This is a business decision, and it is entirely yours to make — both options are laid out plainly below.
Scope of work & timeline
Each phase below is a fixed scope with its own deliverables, an estimated effort in hours, and a plain test for when it’s done. A working day here means 8 focused hours. The clock starts when the items in From you are in hand.
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0
Setup
6–8 hours · up to 1 dayDeliverables:
- Your complete General Price List loaded into the system, versioned from day one
- Every step, option, and price mapping extracted from your current Build & Price wizard
- TMS case-entry screens mapped field by field (feeds Phase 2’s handoff sheet and the Phase 4 options)
- Test and live environments stood up, with automatic backups
Done when: the platform’s catalog matches your GPL and your current wizard, item for item.
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1
Family portal
8 hours · 1 dayDeliverables:
- Burial, Cremation, and Green Burial paths with the step-by-step builder and always-visible running total
- Anonymous autosave, email sign-in links (no passwords), estimate PDFs by email
- Save and submit-to-staff flows, with staff notifications
- Analytics wired end to end; plan.scanlanfuneral.com live and the website’s buttons repointed
Done when: a family can build, save, and submit a real estimate end to end, and you can watch it happen in the analytics.
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2
Director workspace
8 hours · 1 dayDeliverables:
- Staff dashboard: submissions queue and upcoming arrangement conferences
- Arrangement workspace with staff-only sections, live conference mode for second-screen use
- Adjustments log — every price change recorded with reason and director’s name
- Statement of Funeral Goods & Services PDF matching your current form; handoff sheet formatted to TMS’s entry screens; staff two-factor sign-in
Done when: a director runs a real arrangement conference start to finish on the platform and finalizes it to the Statement PDF.
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3
Engagement
8 hours · 1 dayDeliverables:
- Gentle follow-up emails to families who saved an estimate but didn’t submit
- Owner dashboard: traffic, submissions, and estimate values at a glance
Done when: a saved-but-unsubmitted estimate triggers its follow-up automatically, and the dashboard answers “how is the tool doing?” without asking anyone.
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4
TMS connection
Extension: 8–16 hours · 1–2 days · Passare: scoped after evaluationThe one phase that depends on your choice in the TMS decision.
If you choose Option A, the browser extension’s scope (8–16 hours · 1–2 days):
- Field mapping — every field of a finalized arrangement matched to its exact TMS case-entry field, building on the screens mapped in Phase 0.
- The extension itself — installed in Chrome or Edge. A director opens the normal TMS entry form, picks a finalized arrangement from a list, and the form fills itself. Nothing is saved without the director’s review.
- Security — staff sign in to the extension with their platform account (same two-factor rules); information travels encrypted and nothing is stored in the browser itself.
- Change detection — if Tribute alters their entry screens, the extension flags the mismatch and stops rather than filling fields incorrectly; staff type manually until the update ships.
- Private installation — distributed directly to your staff’s browsers, not through the public Chrome store, with an install guide and versioned updates.
- Testing & handoff — a batch of past cases entered side by side against TMS to verify accuracy, then a staff walkthrough.
Quoted as a fixed scope before work begins. If you choose Option B instead, the Passare connection is scoped after your evaluation of the switch (contract review, data migration, obituaries question).
Estimated hours, all together
Assumptions & exclusions. Hours assume the From you items arrive before each phase starts, and cover build, testing, and handoff — not ongoing maintenance, which is quoted separately once the platform is live. The Passare migration itself (if you choose Option B) and any new photography or copywriting beyond the materials you provide are outside this scope.
Phases 1 through 3 deliver their full value no matter what happens with TMS.
The blueprint, on one map
Everything in this document, in one view — the platform at the center-left, what each audience does with it, what sits underneath, and the order it rolls out in.