funerGest – …my own 2 cents.

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In 2010 I was forced to assist a family business. The deal was a little bizarre for what I was used to, say… it was a funeral home. I took the opportunity in the company’s free time to scan all small business to improve and optimize flow; Since they still worked with paper forms, a lot of photocopied documentation and a lot of archived paper.

Without much time to devote to development by then, the goal would be to choose a fast development platform (RAD) that could create and add features as I needed. Also how users were prone to technophobia would have to be a soft transition, keeping workflow that would be familiar to them and even some forms and how they were used to see the data presented. No less, I chosen to develop in Filemaker Pro. A database with good support for interface and layouts, robust, compatible both MAC and Windows, as well it can be used in iPad or iPhone (Filemaker GO) working on network and/or via VPN.

The emergence of this application was due to the need to replace the maximum of paper and manual labor, such as writing a lot of repeated information in various forms, because when contracting a service there is a lot of bureaucracy involved on all the process. So I started to replicate some of existing paper forms that where used to collect client data. The first 5 tabs are those groups of data.

This is an actual version in use (currently 2023). Some less important features where left undone hoping to continue development later. Since I left the company in 2014 I stoped the developing. Is has an old look and dull design, It was a bit common style back then, also big fonts intent to more relaxed use, remember this users where a bit technophobic. There was intention to keep developing and update/implement new features, such as direct reading of the Portuguese Citizen Card, among others… but no idea when to start.

Many data validation are made to ensure that certain required field are filled. Some of these required fields are conditional from other fields as well. Address field use a lookup table from a database with Portugal addresses and zip codes, so that only with the zip code it pre-fills the complete address.

There are other tabs like one for documentation, service and client history/interactions as well payment history/interactions.

Thee is tab *documents* where can be generated pre-filled letters, custom forms and official ones, requisitions etc… Also in the same tab, we have the *digitalized documents* area. It is an archive where we can upload scanned documentation relative to the service in run. We have the option to typify the document and add a description, thus facilitating the search in the future.

Some generated documents: for example oficial Social Security ones and a oficial cemetery form.

The app was growing with features as we needed. Mainly dynamic for the area of documents to be generate because the regular new documents that appear on this service, or some others needs that be updated.

A home area was added where we can choose between funeral service or a transfer service (corps transfer), also this area are displayed important info of services with debt payments, which is very common in this business. The app can record/history financial info about the payments that are input in the last tab “$“. Sorry, new window where opening on primary screen.