Halcyon’s efficiency tools are designed to save you time by eliminating redundancies and the need for multiple programs’ various business tools. Here we will briefly discuss some of our tools and how they can benefit you, your staff, and your business.
Our Notes tool lets you keep case specific notes stored in one easily viewed location, allowing staff to quickly access any necessary case notes. We also give you the ability to notify them immediately of the note if needed (via text, email, or even both)!
Want to notify a family of something? No problem. You can also send a message to anyone outside of your Halcyon organization and can even have a standard message generated to fit any scenario. We’ll store everything in one convenient area for your assigned Halcyon staff to review or add to as needed.
Set up Auto Tasks in Halcyon so when a case is added or a triggering event occurs, your list(s) of to-do’s are automatically pushed out to staff with any required due dates assigned.
Halcyon also lets you set up as many Custom Statuses for your cases as you’d like, letting you organize your case load with as much specificity as you desire.
As with all aspects of Halcyon, our interface and helpful tools are designed to flow seamlessly with your natural business processes. Our easy to use software is intuitive and robust, freeing up your time to spend with what really matters – your families and communities.
Read Halcyon’s April 2023 newsletter at the link below! In this issue, we discuss a new feature of Halcyon’s Trade Partner Portal, benefits of utilizing our credit card partner, and an upcoming upgrade.
This year during Women’s History Month, The National Funeral Director’s Association has launched a new annual award – The “Inspiration Award” – to acknowledge an exceptional female or non-binary individual in the funeral service or related field. The 2023 Inspiration Award will be conferred at the Professional Women’s Conference in May.
Halcyon is proud to be a woman founded and woman owned company. Since forming in 2002, we are grateful to have witnessed just some of the diverse impacts that women in the funeral service industry have made. We look forward to learning more of current and future inspiring women/non-binary people in our field!
Do you know someone that is pushing the funeral service and industry forward? Nominate them today! More information about the first annual NFDA Inspiration Award can be found on their website following this link. Nominations are due on March 31st.
Read Halcyon’s March 2023 newsletter at the link below! In this issue, we discuss our new calendar features and the power of maintaining your discount reasons.
Halcyon is excited to be attending the upcoming convention in person! Come see us at booth 2225. We want to see customers and prospects and show what plans we have coming up. Here is a free pass to the exhibit hall if you need it.
With decades of experience in the funeral and cremation industry, we understand how tough it is to manage all the details, and we believe that every aspect of your software should be as simple and seamless as possible.
We also know that our software only provides value if your staff can use it effectively in their day-to-day roles — and if it lightens their workload. No concern is too small to us. We always pledge to continue innovating and improving our platform to make sure it serves you — and your team — in the most beneficial way possible.
“We are very excited to be bringing this new tool to our customers to help them run their operations more efficiently and seamlessly at no additional cost to them,” says Sara Gard, President of Halcyon.
With this integration, arrangers now can view, select, customize, and order Matthews Aurora™ products from within our Halcyon software. And even better: All pricing information is kept up to date automatically, so funeral directors never have to worry about sharing an incorrect cost with a family.
Here’s how this integration will work for clients on the Halcyon platform:
This eliminates the need to log into multiple websites to finish completing an order — or to go through the trouble of calling or faxing another company to place an order.
“This avoids the situation of making a promise you can’t keep to a family when they’re selecting products. You’re able to see the costs and availability of any product in real time instead of having to reach back out to a family later because you’ve told them the wrong price or something was out of stock,” Gard says.
At Halcyon, we are motivated by listening to our clients and learning what their biggest pain points are with all of the processes that happen every day at their businesses — and creating solutions for these issues.
Greg Rollings, the President and CEO of Rollings Funeral Service, says several of his funeral homes have been using this integration for the past few months.
“It makes the selection and ordering process seamless and has surpassed my expectations,” Rollings says.
“We continue to focus on delivering the finest digital merchandising tools that help our funeral home clients educate families about our products and simplify families’ selection experience. This integration with Halcyon is a great advantage to our joint customers,” says Marty Strohofer, VP of Marketing and Product Development at Matthews Aurora™.
Halcyon allows for terms to be setup so that late fees can be applied and then disabled on selected cases. Many funeral homes are against having late fees but the terms setup drives other helpful tools available even without late fees. Halcyon also allows for the Case/Purchases’ Balance Due Date to be automatically defined and for the terms text that is on the Statement of Goods and Services (aka contract) to be customized. See this help article for more information about setting up terms: https://halcyondcms.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360033256751-Late-Fees-and-Terms
Notes and Tasks as Organizational Tools
Notes and tasks are organizational tools that you can utilize to help you keep track of all of the moving parts and different pieces of information associated with a case. Notes and tasks for each case will show up on their Case Overview tab. You can maintain notes and tasks here, including printing them or marking tasks as completed. For convenience, you can add a note from any screen in the system using the blue “Add Note” button on the bottom right of the screen, next to the “Add Case” button. You’ll even see an option to send this note as a message to staff members who have their messaging preferences set up (see the Staff Maintenance help article for more information about messaging preferences).
If you find yourself using tasks often, you may be interested in setting up the Tasks Widget on the Dashboard to monitor them or creating Default Tasks. Default tasks are tasks that will be generated automatically with new cases- you can assign them based on either case type or service type.
Default Tasks
Default tasks are tasks that will be generated automatically with new cases- you can assign them based on either case type or service type.
Just like any task, you have the option to assign default tasks to employees. You can also assign a due date for the task either before or after the case’s Date of Death, Date Services Provided, or Case Date. If you have a default task set up, the task will appear on the Case Overview tab for any new cases that have been created with either that case or service type.
If you’re using default tasks, you may want to consider enabling the Tasks widget for your Dashboard. This is a handy tool to help you keep track of all tasks- it can also be filtered to view overdue/incomplete/all tasks, or anyone’s tasks/tasks that are just assigned to you.
Forms Availability
There are multiple places in your system where you can set forms up to run. There is a main forms menu and there is a section called “Frequently Used Forms” on the right hand side of each Case Overview tab. If you perform trade work, you will also be able to make forms available on your Partner Portal for partners to run. If you have Arrangement Assistant, you can set up forms to run from there as well.
You can maintain which forms are available in your system and where they are from the Forms Maintenance option under your Setup menu.
If you want a form to be available to your partner portal then select the checkbox within that column and then go to Admin/Partner Portal Access to make that form available to whichever of you partners you want to have access.
Select Maintain Forms button. And then select which forms you want to be available for this partner.
I web conference with many funeral homes and I can tell that many of you need to overhaul your internet connection. Funeral home owners tend to take their computing infrastructure for granted. That is only natural because their focus is needed to serve their families. But your operation depends on the internet more than you might think and now might be to take a look and see if the operation can be more efficient.
A growing number of business applications and appliances require access to the internet. Think about your experience. On your business network right now there are computers, printers, phones, tablets, televisions, watches, cameras and thermostats. Your crematorium’s controller is probably on your local network. It is expected that the average person has 6.5 devices connected to the internet and in 10 years the average person is expected to have 15 connected devices! All these devices are clogging the arteries of your local network.
An increasing number of services are also now internet-based, including banking, website, email, funeral home management software and cremation management software. Halcyon is 100% web-based (aka cloud-based). There are many tremendous benefits to web-based software.
Because you don’t install anything your IT labor costs are lowered. You don’t have to maintain local servers or worry about how a computer’s update will affect your software working.
It is always available. It is true that your internet service could go down right in the middle of an arrangement conference but you have a great backup internet provider – your smartphone!
Data backups happen for you. This lowers your backup costs but still mitigates data loss.
It is more secure. This may seem counterintuitive. But that local server of yours is most likely way behind on security patches and is extremely vulnerable to all kinds of cyber threats.
Any decent, truly web-based software uses technologies that make your user experience just as fast or even faster than previous software that you installed locally. For example, there should be very little delay when you interact with your management system. If your management system is slow then either you are using a poor system or your network, specifically your router, could be the problem.
You might be thinking, “but we put in a wireless router”. How long ago was that? There is an Economic Law that says that telecommunication networks double bandwidth every 18 months. This law is driven by demand. Fortunately wireless routers have improved dramatically in speed, bandwidth and in coverage.
Basic Networking Components
You pay someone to bring you internet service. This is your internet service provider (ISP). It is probably a cable company or a telephone company. ISPs are not all the same. Their ability to provide you fast, reliable internet connection is largely based on the wiring methods that company has available from their source all the way to your location. I am not going to dig deep into these but here are just a few factors to consider for your ISP:
Look for speed. Your provider will offer different packages at different price points. The more devices there are that need to access the network the more speed you will need.
Look for reliability. Your ISP may not be measuring this and you may have to rely on anecdotal evidence or consumer reviews.
Generally speaking cable is much faster and more reliable than plain old telephone wiring (aka POTS).
Make sure your modem and router can handle the speed you are paying the ISP to provide.
Modem means modulator/demodulator. It changes data transfers from one form of electrical pulse to another. Think of it as a transformer between the ISP and the router.
The router is the central device of your local network. It is not unusual to have a modem and router built into the same device. If your modem and router are separate, then the router is wired to the modem. Devices can be either wired to the router or it can be a wireless router. The wireless router is what gives your location a Wi-Fi network for your devices to connect. I am going to focus on wireless routers.
The drawback to Wi-Fi is coverage- the signal only goes so far. The solution for that used to be to buy a wireless extender. Unfortunately with an extender you had to re-log into a different Wi-Fi network when you moved from the main Wi-Fi broadcast to the extender. Most devices don’t handle that very seamlessly.
Mesh networks are the standard now. With a mesh network you will place access points throughout your business. The access points interact with each other and your devices then see this as one huge, Wi-Fi network. Need more coverage, buy another access point. You should invest a few hundred dollars in a mesh network if you haven’t already. Which brand? Here are some things to look for
Make sure that the access points do not degrade the speed from the master. One system I know of has slow speeds on their access points so that the ISP maximum is never met.
Look for the latest standard (Wi-Fi 6 as of the time this was written).
Although this isn’t your typical blog post, we wanted to acknowledge the great work our friends at MKJ Marketing did for us. We could not be more pleased.
You may be wondering why we did not build our own site. Well, we are certainly capable of creating a site that is on the web, but our expertise is in funeral home and crematory management solutions and not making a great looking site with a stellar marketing message and top-notch SEO. Frankly, our developers are a bunch of engineers and our site would be a series of perfectly aligned boxes preferably of equal size – not that there is anything wrong with that, especially for things like your pantry or your living room furniture layout.
Actually we did create our very first website about 20 years ago and it was a series of perfectly aligned boxes. If you dig hard enough you might be able find a cached version deep in the bowels of the internet. … but please don’t.
Frequently when prospective customers see a demonstration of Halcyon they end up selecting our management software to help manage their business. We hear things like “Where have you been?” or “I’ve been looking for software like this for years”. We have been around almost 20 years! Clearly we were not doing enough to promote ourselves so we engaged the experts at MKJ Marketing to handle our marketing message and website upgrade.
We stayed focused on what we do best which is to continue to add new features and enhancements to our funeral home and crematory management solutions and give you fantastic, responsive technical support when you need it.
If you are an existing customer, we thank you for trusting us. If you are in the market for a management solution, please give us a call or sign up for a demo. We would love to show you how Halcyon can help!
