Everlight: the system Scanlan’s runs on.

What changes, and why now

The first blueprint replaced one thing: the third-party “Build & Price” tool. It stopped at the edge of Tribute Management Software, and it said so plainly — regulated information stayed in TMS, where we believed it had to stay.

You have since asked whether Scanlan’s could own the whole system. We went and checked. The answer is yes, and the reason is in what we found.

Everlight is that system. It is one platform covering the full arc of a case:

1. The family’s side — planning, estimates, obituaries, events, and the years of contact that come before and after a death.
2. The director’s side — first call, removal, arrangement conference, vital statistics, services, disposition, and the paperwork each stage produces.
3. The back office — price lists, adjustments with oversight, invoicing, cash advances, and the accounting handoff.

Everything in the first blueprint remains, unchanged and still first in line. Everlight is not a different project — it is the rest of the same one.

TMS is not holding what we thought it was holding

The original blueprint assumed death certificates were the one thing locked inside TMS — regulated, state-controlled, and out of reach. That assumption was worth checking before anyone spent money on it, so we checked it against the State of New Jersey’s own documentation.

What this means

When a death certificate is filed in New Jersey, your director is typing it into the state’s website using their own license credentials. TMS is not filing anything. It never was. Whatever management software Scanlan’s runs, that work happens the same way.

So there is no function inside TMS that Scanlan’s is prevented from owning. The question was never whether it is permitted — it is simply a question of what gets built, and in what order.

It also points to the single largest daily time saving available to you, which nobody has yet proposed: gather the death certificate information once, during the arrangement conference, and have it fill the state’s form for the director to review and submit. That is Stage 3.

One record, from the first call to the last anniversary

Scanlan’s currently runs on two systems that do not speak. A family’s estimate is built in FuneralTech’s tool. The case is managed in TMS. Between them sits a person retyping the same information. That gap is not a minor annoyance — it is the defect the whole platform is designed around.

Everlight treats them as what they actually are: an estimate and a case are the same record at different stages of its life. A family pricing a cremation at midnight and a director finalising that same funeral three days later are looking at one record, not two.

Why this matters more than any single feature

Because one record carries the whole arc, information is entered once and used everywhere. The name a family types into the planning portal at midnight is the same name on the Statement, on the death certificate form, on the obituary, on the prayer cards, and on the thank-you note four months later. Nobody retypes it, and nobody mistypes it on the fourth attempt.

What each person actually does

Families

1. They arrive with no account required. Burial, cremation, or green burial — your Green Burial Council certification given the prominence it deserves. Everything saves as they go. Requiring a sign-up first is how the current tool loses people.
2. They save or send. Saving means an email and a sign-in link — no password to invent or forget. Sending means it reaches your staff with their name, phone, and best time to call.
3. They are cared for afterwards. Obituaries, service details, event invitations, and grief support all come from the same place, addressed to the same person, without anyone rebuilding a mailing list.

Directors, at the funeral home

1. A dashboard of what needs attention — new submissions, today’s conferences, cases waiting on a certificate or a signature.
2. The arrangement conference on screen. The family can watch the estimate update on a second screen in real time as choices are made. No whiteboard arithmetic, no surprises at the end.
3. Every adjustment is accountable. A discount or price change requires a written reason and is recorded with the director’s name — a clean oversight trail, automatically.
4. Vital statistics gathered once. The information the death certificate needs is collected during the conference, while the family is present and can answer. It is then ready for the state’s form rather than being chased down two days later.
5. Finalising produces the paperwork. The Statement of Funeral Goods & Services, matching your current form, plus the invoice and any cash advances recorded against the case.

Directors, in the field

1. First call from anywhere. A removal can be logged from a phone at a hospital, a nursing home, or a family’s kitchen.
2. Chain of custody with signatures. Each transfer is recorded with who released, who received, and when — the record you want to have and never expect to need.
3. Vehicles and staff assigned against the service schedule, so two funerals never quietly claim the same hearse.

The technology, in plain terms

The foundation from the first blueprint carries over unchanged. What is added is what a system of record needs and a planning portal does not.

For comparison, management software for a funeral home of Scanlan’s size is typically several hundred dollars a month, and that figure does not fall as you add locations or staff. The running cost above is the whole platform, not a per-seat licence.

What changes when the records live here

The first blueprint could make a simple promise: no Social Security numbers, no death certificate data — that information stayed in TMS. Everlight cannot make that promise, because holding those records is the entire point. So the protections have to be stronger, and stated plainly.

How information is protected

• Families never create passwords. They sign in through a link emailed to them.
• Staff sign-in requires a second verification code — the same two-factor protection banks use.
• Draft estimates are private. Staff can only see an estimate once a family chooses to send it. Someone quietly comparing cremation prices at 2am has not asked for a phone call, and knowing that is what makes families comfortable using it at all.
• Sensitive identifiers are encrypted individually, beyond the encryption already applied to the database as a whole.
• Permissions are enforced at the data, not the screen. Roles run from owner through admin, director, and staff; the database itself refuses a request outside a person’s role.
• Every access to family information is recorded — who, what, and when — in a log that can be added to but never quietly edited.
• Abandoned anonymous drafts delete themselves after 90 days.
• Families control their email. Every automated message carries an unsubscribe link, and admins can stop or adjust sends by group or by individual.
• Separate test and live environments, so nothing is ever tried out on real families.

Backups, and getting your data back

Once Everlight holds the only copy of a case, backups stop being a technical detail and become an obligation. The platform runs continuous backups with point-in-time recovery, plus a scheduled independent copy held separately from the hosting account — so a backup survives even the unlikely loss of the provider account itself. New Jersey’s record retention requirements for funeral records are what set how far back that history must reach, and we will size it to them.

Rules we build around

• FTC Funeral Rule — 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 be held in regulated trusts. Everlight records pre-need arrangements; it does not take pre-need payments. That remains true unless and until Stage 7 is scoped with counsel involved from the start.
• Vital records — death certificates are filed by a licensed director, in the state’s system, under their own credentials. Everlight prepares the information and fills the form. It does not file, and it does not pretend to.
• Privacy and accessibility — iubenda maintains the privacy policy and cookie consent; the UserWay widget matches your current site.

What is entering the industry, and what it actually solves

A wave of AI-branded products is arriving in funeral service, and more will be on the floor at the October show. We looked closely at one of them — eterni, by myagentworks llc of West Orange, NJ — because it is the one your manager was introduced to, and because it is a fair representative of the category.

It is a genuinely decent product in a narrow band. It does 24/7 AI call answering in 30-plus languages, a CRM, a case dashboard, and removal fleet dispatch with live tracking and signature capture. Several ideas in it are good enough that we have folded them into this blueprint — faith-aware intake protocols, an overnight call briefing each morning, and signatures captured at each stage of custody.

What it does not do

We checked its product, pricing, security, and FAQ pages. There is no mention anywhere of death certificates, vital statistics, price lists, arrangement conferences, the Statement of Funeral Goods & Services, invoicing, accounting, pre-need, obituaries, or any connection to TMS, CRäKN, SRS, or Passare.

The decisive point is the last two rows. A funeral home running eterni still needs TMS underneath it. So it is not a replacement for anything Scanlan’s currently pays for — it is an additional $600 to $1,200 every month, on top of the TMS licence, indefinitely. Over three years that is roughly $44,000 spent without owning anything or retiring a single existing cost.

Worth knowing as you evaluate the category: the company was founded in 2025 and its domain registered in August of that year. It names no customers, no team members, and its public pages still carry placeholder contact details. That is not a reason to dismiss it — every company starts somewhere — but routing your first calls through a new vendor’s AI is a decision about the single highest-stakes moment in your business, and it deserves the same scrutiny you would give a new director.

We can now tell you the answer to the first one for every vendor on that floor: your director still types into EDRS. No funeral software files death certificates in New Jersey, because the state does not permit software to file them. Any vendor claiming otherwise is worth a careful follow-up question.

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.

• A complete price sheet — your current General Price List with every item, package, and price.
• Access to your current Build & Price wizard (the funeralmatters.com builder) — we extract every step, option, and price mapping directly from it, so nothing families see today is missed.
• A copy of your Statement of Funeral Goods & Services — the finalised PDF is built to match your current form exactly.
• An hour or two with a director, walking through a real first call — from the phone ringing to the removal to the conference. We have mapped how funeral homes generally work; we need to know how Scanlan’s works. This shapes Stage 2 more than any document could.
• Your answer on working without signal — how much of the field work must keep functioning in a hospital basement or a rural cemetery. The one answer that changes how the platform is built rather than adding to it.
• Access to your website — the hosting and content management accounts for scanlanfuneral.com, for Stage 4. Also worth confirming: what is contractually required to move off FuneralTech, and what notice period applies.
• DNS access — the account where your domain is managed, to activate the new addresses at launch.
• An introduction to your attorney — for the two questions we have flagged: whether a formal privacy agreement is required given the information hospitals and hospices pass to you, and what New Jersey’s trust rules will require of Stage 7.
• Brand assets — logo files, colours, and any photography for the platform. Already in hand.

Two further items become relevant at Stage 5 and beyond, and are listed here only so nothing arrives as a surprise: your vehicle and staff roster for scheduling, and your bookkeeper’s QuickBooks setup for the accounting handoff.