Our Halloween release is here and it's a bit of a shocker! 

As administration systems head towards self-service, we have listened to our users, who have said, "this is not what our vets want!".  

Many vets don't have the time to deal with logins and typing information into computer systems. They just want to scrawl the information on a paper form, give it to the crematorium and be done with it. While this doesn't fit with the ideal of a paperless process, sometimes you have to go with the flow...

With this in mind we are pleased to announce the release of our AI powered form capture facility. With this facility you can:

•	Take a photograph of a manually filled application form, or upload a scanned image.

•	Initiate form capture in a single click

•	Review captured information and merge in with any existing data

•	Use captured customer details to search for existing customers or create a new customer as required.

Form capture uses OCR to extract form information in any language. It then uses AI to marry up the captured data with our data model and your lookups to create a near perfect record in about 30 - 40 seconds. 

Our pre-Halloween release brings lots of exciting advancements to our finance processing facilities, including:

•	New invoicing and debt chasing facilities. 

Allow chasing letters to be sent and tracked and long standing debt to be referred to debt collectors.

•	Pay an invoice by an email link

Allow invoices to be paid by a convenient link in the email. You can customise the contents of the email in the built-in word processor.

•	Reversal processing

Easily reverse invoices charges by picking and clicking. A new reversal is created and perfectly allocated to the original charges and original payment allowing the original payment to be completely or partially refunded over the counter or by your payment provider.

•	Automatic reverse for common events, like cancellation of orders

The system will automatically generate reverse charges for orders and events when cancellation occurs, allowing you to generate a credit invoice and refund associated payments.

•	Auto generation of cancellation fees

Set up cancellation products and automate them. Add conditions based on event type, how many hours in advance the cancellation has occurred and many other parameters. 

•	A new Payments received report

Report on payments received, unallocated payments, allocated payments, receipted and unreceipted payments. 

•	A new Product sales analysis report with gross margin / markup figures

Analyse product sales over a period of time and see quantities, net/tax/gross values, margin and markup. 

Other improvements to the system include:

•	Queued cremation processing for pet cremations. 

Cremation events can be added to a processing queue, rather than being booked to occur at a specific time. This is a better match to the way pet crematoria work in practice. 

Two significant developments have been released this week for Life Events.

•	Trusted user amendment of Events
•	Digital preliminary form processing

Trusted user amendment of Events allows your funeral directors or other trusted users to:

•	View full details of events, including deceased and applicant details
•	Move, cancel and rebook bookings
•	Upload supporting documents
•	Select service options and choices
•	Review appointments
•	View documents received, including any forms that need signing
•	Carry out document signing
•	Review communication from the service  

Digital preliminary form processing is a particularly exciting development. We have utilised and refined our document signing and automation systems to create a fully digital preliminary form.

With the digital preliminary form you can:

•	Define fields on the form, which populate with existing data from the system and capture missing data from the signer.
•	Send the form to the applicant alone or applicant and funeral director for completion and signing
•	Use automation to send out the preliminary automatically form when a new booking is made
•	Use automation to scrape data captured on the form into the database
•	Use automation to complete corresponding checklist items
•	Use automation to send out subsequent forms on completion. 

Today we are pleased to announce the release of eWitness support for our document signing module. This advancement means that our Contract Enquiries and Transfers module can handle deed style transfer documents.

eWitness support allows each document signatory to nominate a witness. The witness is sent a link, which takes them to the same document on their device. Through a hand shaking protocol the system ensures that the witness and signatory are together and that there is a clear line of sight between them.

Witnesses are required to provide the legally required information including; their name, address, occupation and signature. Document templates can have merge fields or input fields defined for each of these allowing you to produce professional looking documents close in likeness to your original paper based forms.

The details of each witness are added to the signed document and the document audit log. 

Keeping the pace up on new features, we are pleased to announce the release of our Contract Renewals self-service module.

With this module you can:

•	Send renewal letters to your customers containing a two part secure renewal code
•	Enable your customers to authenticate using the two part secure renewal code, select their renewal option and pay for their renewal.
•	Alternatively, enable your customers to renew contracts from their "My Profile" page
•	Automatically send a receipt to your customer when payment is made

As with all our self-service features:

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

To reflect the advancement in Life Events over the last year, we have updated our website. The new content and layout gives a much better picture of all the amazing things that Life Events can do as a world class, industry leading, product. 

The most impressive part of the new website is the range of our self-service facilities, which we are pretty sure is second to none. 

Today we are pleased to announce the release of one of our most ambitious modules: The Contract Enquiries and Transfers module. 

This module enables the effective and consistent tracking and management of Deed of grant transfers, purchases, surrenders and name / address changes. It includes self-service enquiries for the general public, back office processing and integration with our document signing module.

With this module you can be assured that correct due process will be followed for every transfer with a full record of all documents produced and checks made.

Self-service enquiries:

•	Self-service enquiries can be logged though an intuitive interface for the general public. 
•	Configure the types of enquiries that can be taken, including support for transfers, purchases, surrenders and name / address changes
•	Allows the public to upload supporting documents

Back office facilities:

•	Allows the manual creation of enquiries
•	Process multiple contracts through a single enquiry (provided the parties are the same)
•	Enforces the validation of all details entered through the public interface, including plot references, contracts and customers before processing can continue
•	Allows the back entry of plots and contracts from legacy registers with auto filling of details already provided.
•	Record the details of the documents checked (including identity checks, address checks and name change checks)
•	Generates paperwork for Statutory Declaration, Form of Renunciation, Form of Assignment, Form of Assent, etc. and links to the Life Events document signing module to allow these documents to be signed digitally.
•	Intelligently identifies which paperwork is needed and which parties should go on each document, including support for mixed methods (Form of probate + Form of Surrender + Form of Assent) 
•	Automatically completes document checks and sends confirmation emails when documents are signed digitally.
•	Book and track appointments for a family to attend a meeting in the office to discuss the transfer
•	On completion of checks and forms the system automatically updates ownership records to show the new owner details and dates of changes made, maintaining a record of the previous ownership
•	Allows you to generate new title deeds certificate and associated correspondence for the new owner
•	Raise charges and invoices.
•	Configure workflow automation, including completion emails and chasing emails
•	Merge duplicate customer records as part of the process 

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.