5 time savers for the Funeral Celebrant

As a Funeral Celebrant we invest as much time as our families need when we meet them to discuss the funeral service. The fees we charge as a Funeral Celebrant, however, are not very high and so we must work as efficiently as possible otherwise, you may end up earning less than the minimum wage.

Here are 5 time saving hacks to ensure that we work efficiently:

1. Have 3 different script folders. One to hold a selection of funeral poems with female pronouns, one to hold funeral poems with male pronouns and then an empty script folder which you will fill and empty with your funeral service scripts. This will save you time shuffling papers for next-of-kin meetings and funeral services.

2. When working with a next-of-kin who may be younger in age and less familiar with how funeral services are put together, offer to email them in advance of your meeting a blank order of service , a list of information which is useful when writing a eulogy and perhaps even an edited selection of funeral poems for them to look at in advance. This can make your face-to-face meeting more efficient, and they will appreciate feeling less clueless in your meeting.

3. Once you have written a range of different funeral services, each with a very different welcome and closing words because of the lives you were celebrating, go back and anonymise the old scripts and name them with descriptors that help you to identify the type of person they were and the welcome and closing words that they are ideal for. E.g. family man & grandad, female woman with dementia etc. This will help you to re-use scripts sensitively and appropriately. You will still make many personalised changes to each welcome and closing words and every eulogy will be unique, but it is more time efficient than starting every script with a blank screen.

4. When creating invoices or receipts for different Funeral Directors, set up in advance a different template for each Funeral Director you work with and then save them in different folders and save subsequent receipts/invoices in these folders. You need only then to change the dates, the names of the deceased and the funeral locations. You can then easily save it and then print it as a PDF. The PDF invoice or receipt is then easily emailed to the Funeral Director.

5. Lastly, we all hate doing our annual self-assessment tax return. It can take you longer to remember and find details if you do all your calculations in one block of time at the end of the tax year, and it can also feel extremely stressful. So set up a spreadsheet which you routinely update every week so that when it comes to the end of the tax year. The job is already done for you.

If you enrol on “Become a Funeral Celebrant from Scratch” you will get lots of time saving documents and templates that you can edit to also save you time. Forms to help you keep organised and efficient, a large selection of funeral poems to get you started, example words of welcome, prayers, readings and closing words. You will also get spreadsheet templates for invoice/receipts and that all important income and expenditure spreadsheet to help you with your tax return.

Feel free to get in touch to find out more.