By Alan Creedy
George had done everything right.
He was the second-generation owner of a respected funeral home, and like a lot of careful business owners, he had a plan.
His will was current. His attorney had a copy. His wife knew where the insurance policies were and which banker to call. Years earlier, he had even sat down with a consultant and filled out an emergency continuity plan — the kind that tells a family where the documents are and who to turn to. It sat in the safe, just in case.
The “just in case” came on a Tuesday. George died suddenly, with no warning, at 61.
In the first week, his daughter Sarah — who stepped in to keep the doors open — found that the plan worked beautifully, right up to the moment it didn’t. She knew which bank held the operating account. What she didn’t have was the login to actually see it online. She knew the firm used a case management system to track every family it was serving. She couldn’t get into it. The bookkeeper had left months earlier, and George had taken over the books himself while he searched for a replacement. He had set a new password on the accounting software — and it lived only in his head.
None of this was in the safe. None of it could be. The continuity plan George filled out was built for a paper world, and George died in a digital one.
Sarah eventually untangled most of it — with weeks of phone calls, notarized death certificates, account-recovery forms, and more than a little money paid to lawyers and IT help — to say nothing of the anxiety it caused. But for a critical stretch, the business her father spent his life building was effectively locked out from the inside. And it was entirely preventable.
(George and Sarah are illustrations, not real people — but every detail of their week is something that has happened to real funeral homes.)
Why This Happens to Good Owners
For years, the standing advice to every funeral home owner — regardless of age or health — has been to leave behind a written emergency continuity plan. Where the bank accounts are. Where the insurance policies live. Who the trusted advisors are. What an owner would want done with the business if he or she weren’t there to say so. That single document has spared families enormous pain.
But as we moved into the digital age, it has carried a hole in it. A big one.
Funeral homes now use dozens of tools, and every one of them requires a password: online banking, bookkeeping and payroll software, the case management system, the electronic death registration portal, the company website and the domain it sits on, business email, social media pages, vendor ordering accounts, the alarm system, cloud storage. The list goes on. When the owner is the only one who holds those keys, the most complete paper plan in the world can still leave a successor locked out of the very tools needed to operate.
Knowing where the bank account is doesn’t help if no one can log in to it. Knowing the website address doesn’t help if no one can reach the registrar. In an electronic age, access is everything — and access is exactly what dies with an owner when it is never written down.
An Important Side Note
Funeral directors tend to be trusting (sometimes too trusting). It is common, if not the norm, for owners to entrust critical information to key employees and never give it another thought. This is not a sin and, in fact, should be encouraged (assuming the trust is merited).
But an owner who fails to be the ultimate “Keeper-of-the-Keys” is asking for trouble. He or she should always have administrator status on all software, including company email. You can have multiple administrators, but you need to be one of them in the event of unexpected and unanticipated events. To state it more directly: Under no circumstances should you allow yourself to be in a position to be locked out of your own software.
The Fix: A Digital Access Addendum
The answer is a companion to the continuity plan — a simple Digital Access and Password Inventory. It walks an owner through every category of login a funeral home depends on and provides a place to record it, organized so a successor can find what is needed under pressure:
- The “master key” — the password manager and how to unlock it, which usually opens everything else.
- Financial and accounting systems — banking, bookkeeping, payroll, card processing.
- Funeral operations software — case management, EDRS / eDeath, cremation tracking, pre-need and trust portals.
- Website and domain — including the registrar, the piece most owners forget and the easiest to lose forever.
- Email, social media, vendor portals, security systems, and the quiet auto-renewals that break when no one is watching.
Just as important, it does not ask an owner to scatter passwords across a page. The smartest, safest way to use it is to record where each password lives — in a password manager, a sealed envelope, an attorney’s file — rather than the password itself. (For those who prefer to write the passwords down, the form allows it, with clear instructions to keep the document under lock.) Either way, it finally closes the gap between “we know where everything is” and “we can actually get to it.”
It’s Yours, Free
The Digital Access and Password Inventory is available as a free download at Creedy & Co. There is no charge and no catch — every funeral home owner should have one, the same way every owner should have a continuity plan.
Download it free at: https://funeralhomeconsulting.org/ or https://jandcadvisors.com/
Print it. Fill it out. Tell one trusted person where it lives. Then update it once a year — the way an owner would update anything that protects the people who will someday be left in charge.
George did almost everything right. The one thing he missed wasn’t his fault — the world simply changed faster than the planning did. This is how a funeral home catches up.
Alan Creedy is a former certified public accountant and a subject-matter expert in funeral service. Through Creedy & Co., he advises funeral home owners on succession, valuation, and business continuity. Visit his website.
