Cemetery accounting and perpetual care

Ask a cemetery board what takes the most time and almost nobody says the burial records. They say the money: chasing a balance from four years ago, working out what the perpetual care fund is actually holding, and assembling the yearly figures the week before the meeting.

The awkwardness is that the money and the ground are the same information viewed twice. A plot sale is a row in the ledger and a change on the map. A balance owed is attached to a person who is attached to a lot. Keep them in two places and every question needs two lookups and a reconciliation, which is why the annual report takes a week.

What a cemetery's books have to hold

• Plot sales. What was sold, to whom, for how much, when, and against which plot on the map.
• Unpaid balances. Treated as accounting rather than as a note in the margin — who owes what, since when, and against which sale.
• Dues and donations. Annual dues where the association charges them, memorial gifts, and money raised at events.
• Perpetual care. The fund, what has gone into it, what it earns, and what may be spent from it. In many states this is restricted and reportable, and it is the item boards are least comfortable explaining.
• Expenses. Mowing, fuel, the fence, stone repairs, insurance, and whatever the storm did in March.

Perpetual care is the one to get right

Perpetual care money is usually held under conditions: a portion of every plot sale goes in, the principal is not to be spent, and the income maintains the cemetery. Several states set the percentage and require reporting on the fund.

Two practical failures are common in small associations, and neither involves anyone doing anything dishonest. The first is that the fund exists in a bank account but nowhere in the records, so the amount that should have gone in from each sale was never tracked and cannot now be reconstructed. The second is that principal and income were never separated, so nobody can say what may be spent.

Both are much easier to prevent than to repair. If the percentage is recorded against each plot sale as it happens, the fund reconciles itself and the annual figure is a report rather than an investigation.

The two numbers boards ask for and rarely have

In practice a board meeting comes down to two questions, and both are hard when the money and the map live apart:

• How many graves have we got left to sell? This is a map question with a money answer attached, and it decides how long the association can fund itself.
• What are we owed? Not the total in the bank — the total outstanding, by person, with how long it has been outstanding.

An association that can answer both in a minute is an association that can plan. Most cannot, and it is rarely for want of care.

Does a cemetery need accounting software?

A small association usually does not need a general ledger package, and QuickBooks does not know what a plot is. What it needs is for the money to be recorded against the thing the money was about — the plot, the sale, the person — so that the yearly report is a printout rather than a reconstruction. That is a different job from bookkeeping, and it is why cemetery accounting tends to end up in a spreadsheet beside whatever else the association uses.

Where Sexton fits

Sexton keeps the association’s books in the same place as the plots: sales, dues, donations, unpaid balances, perpetual care and the yearly ledger, all attached to the plots and people they belong to. Because they are not in separate systems, “how many graves are left” is a number you read off the map, and the outstanding-balances list is a list rather than an afternoon.

The annual report comes out of it as a letter-size document for the minute book — there is a fuller account of what belongs in one in the cemetery annual report. The demonstration has the ledger loaded with sample figures, and what Sexton does covers the rest of what it holds.