Spotlight on delivery! Quite literally this month, as we are thrilled to announce the release of our shipping and fulfilment module. This module dovetails into our disposal of remains, supplier ordering and online shop modules, to provide the means for shipping items from each module to your customers. With the shipping and fulfilment module you can:

 •	Create shipments containing "ready to ship" items, including stock products, custom items ordered and received from suppliers and cremated remains.
•	Print packing slips
•	Purchase and print shipping labels from a variety of shipping providers, including Yodel, Royal Mail, Parcel force, Dpd and more with ShipStation.com integration.
•	Track parcel progress with your shipping provider, with automatic completion when items are delivered.
•	Arrange self-delivery using your in-house resources and use our QR code based Delivery Tracking application to track self-deliveries, capture signatures and photograph delivered parcels.
•	Generate mailings when deliveries are complete.
•	Tailor the colours and styles to match your website. 

After a very productive month we are pleased to announce the release of our self-service shop facility, along with a number of other significant developments. 

The self-service shop allows pet crematoria to make stand alone sales of pet memorabilia, urns, figurines and other products.

With the online shop you can: 

•	Enter all your memorial products along with images and descriptions
•	Feed sales into our order processing facilities permitting you to review and order customised items from your suppliers 
•	Track delivery to your customers with order fulfilment 

As with all our self-service features:

•	You can tailor the colours and styles to match your website.
•	You can integrate payments with Stripe. 

Other developments in this release include:

•	The support for Pet Funeral services that contract out to crematoria
•	The ability to turn standard fields on an off in the system
•	Support for custom fields
•	New product automations for arrivals, including conditions based on collection distance 

Today we are pleased to release three features that refine the existing capabilities of the system.

1) Statistics have been added to the Plot and Asset inspection module. You can now report on inspection results and risk levels across your cemeteries, cross comparing multiple categories.

2) The emails for standard notifications can now use custom templates, with an easy to configure section in the system settings to assign a template to each type of notification. Standard notifications include: the Invitation to set up a "My profile" account, the Invoice covering email and the Genealogy purchase emails. Custom templates are maintained in the built in word processor.

3) New automation hooks have been added to the booking system to trigger automation events when bookings are created or amended. Coupled with the existing "Send a Document" automation action, this enables the system to generate email confirmations for new bookings and updated bookings, which a very high degree of flexibility over recipients, email contents, conditional actions and follow on automation. 

Following the same tune as our last post, we are pleased to announce that all of our manuals and our context sensitive help are written and live. The help covers all aspects of the bereavement services system, including burial and cremation administration, risk assessment and finance.

Our online help makes use of the Datawing Knowledge Base engine, which was written some 14 years ago when the service was known as CliqueCloud. The knowledge base can be embedded into websites and invoked to show context sensitive help.

Every organisation that uses Life Events has access to the Datawing Help Desk and Knowledge Base engine to help them better serve their internal and external customers. A forth-coming project is to integrate the Help Desk facility more closely with Life Events to provide an integrated Comments and Complaints facility with links to individual events. 

At the start of the Life Events project I created a project chart containing all the essential features I wanted in the system. At the end of the chart was a development labelled "Azure Active Directory authentication". The project chart has evolved over time, with many many additions before and after this development and bit by bit each feature has turned green marking it as completed. 

So, here we are 2 ½ years later and I am pleased to announce that "Entra" authentication, as it is now known, has turned green. Also turning green today is the "map overlays" feature, which allows grave spaces on maps to be coloured based on various categories, such as grave type, remaining space, risk assessment status, and many more.

Today is therefore a momentous occasion because that original plan for the software is complete. But, this doesn't mean the software is completely finished! We have a spectacular vision for the future of Life Events and we are only part of the way there. There's another 14 months' worth of exciting developments in the pipeline already and a road map stretching many more years into the future.


 

Today we released the standard accounting reports for Life Events promised in our new years news post. This includes:

•	Comprehensive cash banking facilities
•	Nominal analysis report
•	Sales day book report

The cash banking facilities include:

•	The generation of banking batches
•	The production of banking slips / cash reconciliation statements
•	Nominal analysis of cash
•	Facilities to search for batches
•	The ability to undo the last batch in case of mistake 

To celebrate this new year, we are pleased to announce the release of new features for our finance and accounting module, including:

•	Batch payment entry, for sundry payments
•	Cash receipting + printing
•	Payment allocation and deallocation
•	Refunds and refund payment processing for card payments
•	Payment exports, e.g. to Sage 200
•	Cash customer invoicing / receipting
•	and Bulk price update for your products

These features round off the functional aspects of our finance and accounting module. In the coming weeks we will be releasing standard accounting reports, including nominal analysis, banking reports, sales statistics, etc..


 

To celebrate the start of advent, we are very excited to announce the release of our biggest group of modules to date: Integrated document signing, automation and background mail merge facilities.

Document signing allows you to:

•	Create template forms and covering emails in the integrated word processor. 
•	Send fillable forms to multiple recipients for signing.
•	Track signing status, including whether a form has been viewed or signed by an individual
•	Automatically chase individuals who have not signed using configurable automation and customised emails.
•	Signers can draw or upload their signatures for insertion into relevant places in your forms
•	Automatically distribute signed documents with a customised covering email.
•	Create a finalised and protected PDF document with the signer details embedded in the document and QR code links to the original and signed documents on our servers.  
•	View an audit log of viewing and signing history.
•	Automate onward events following signing, such as progressing work orders to the next stage.

Automation allows you to:

•	Configure actions that take place automatically when specific events happen in the database. 
•	Add conditions so that automations only happen under certain circumstances
•	Invoke any number of actions, including sending documents, sending completed forms, setting flags, updating database fields and more, when an automation executes.

Background mail merge allows you to:

•	Send documents without user interaction, usually in response to automation
•	Print documents in the background if there is no email address to send the PDF version to. 

After a busy three months of development we are delighted to announce the release of our Memorial and Asset Risk Assessment module. This is initially being released for our bereavement services business model. 

The risk assessment module allows you to:

•	Plan and carry out risk assessment of headstone and leased memorial assets using any mobile device.
•	Work off line with no internet connection and synchronise when connection is restored
•	Locate inspection batches and individual inspections on an interactive map
•	Upload photographs during inspections
•	Set up different questions and answers, infringements, follow up actions and workflow for each type of asset
•	Set up custom follow-up letters and chasing letters for owners and masons
•	Progress and track the progress of failed assessments, including generating works orders, letters and progressing actions.

We also made the following improvements to existing modules:

•	Pet tracking now allows the tracking of individual storage / rack spaces
•	We have added bulk plot creation, which allows new plot / memorial / storage schemes to be generated. 
•	Document / image storage has been extended to every part of the system
•	Exporting has been extended to all search screens and reports with the addition of export to Excel
•	Audit logging now allows users to drill down through changes from any record and recall data as it was on a particular date.
•	Mail merge / Emailing now stores copies of documents as PDF's attached to the customer and originating record.
•	Individual mail merge previews can be edited before printing / emailing allowing uses to make minor changes to text to better suit the recipient. Amendments are reflected in the PDF stored to the customer and originating record.
•	During the finalisation of statutory bereavement events (burials and cremations) a snapshot of the customer name and address at the time of the event is now sealed into the record. A similar snapshot occurs during transfer of grave ownership. 

We are very excited to announce the release of our Pet notification, Mobile pet tracking and Back office tracking facilities for Pet Bereavement Services.

1) The Pet notification facility allows your vets to tell your service about animals that need collecting. 

•	Vets enter the details of the animal along with owner details
•	Multiple animals can be registered at the same time
•	Vet can add animals "on hold" to allow your service to know about animals that are red-bagged
•	Vets can then print off QR code based identification stickers or slips to attach to the animal's container
•	Vets can pass data automatically to the pet notification facility from their practice management system via custom integrations

2) The Mobile pet tracking facility allows your staff to easily track movement of an animal while on the move including whether the animal is on hold, in transit, arrived, in various departments in your crematorium or removed. 

•	Select a tracking status and an optional location
•	Scan QR Code identification labels and verify the animals details to update the status of animals
•	Synchronise status changes with the main database
•	Work off line with no internet connection and synchronise when connection is restored

3) The Back office pet tracking allows staff in various departments to make sure the animal's whereabouts is always known and pre-requisites for cremation are completed.

•	Check animals in and out of storage
•	Link checklist items to different products (e.g. Fur clipping requires a check list item confirming it has been taken) 
•	Easily link animals to cremation events using QR code scanning
•	Prevent cremation events from being finalised until all pre-requisites are complete
•	Produce identification labels for cremated remains and track the cremated remains removal / disposal