Your records stay on your own computer

Nearly every cemetery program sold today keeps your records on somebody else’s server. You sign in through a browser, the records live in a data centre, and the arrangement works well right up until the day it does not — the internet is out, the account is locked, the person who set it up has left and nobody knows the password, or the company changes hands.

Sexton works the other way round. The program installs on the association’s computer and the records are a file on that computer’s disk. That single decision is what makes everything below true.

What that means in practice

• No account, no password to lose. There is no sign-in page. The person at the keyboard opens a program, the way they open anything else on that machine.
• It works with the internet unplugged. A township hall with unreliable service, an office with no service at all, a laptop taken out to the cemetery — all of it works, because nothing has to be fetched from anywhere.
• Nobody else is holding your register. Your interments, your deed holders, your balances, and the names and dates of people’s families are on your machine and not in anyone else’s system.
• The records outlive the software. Every record can be written out to plain spreadsheet files at any time. Those files open in Excel with or without Sexton installed.

Getting your records back out, any time

This is the part worth testing before you trust any program, including this one. In Sexton the export is a screen, not a support request: you choose what to write out and you get plain spreadsheet files — interments, plot ownership, deeds, balances, the ledger. They open in Excel, in Numbers, in Google Sheets, in anything that reads a spreadsheet.

That screen stays reachable whether the licence is current or lapsed. If the association ever stopped renewing, the register would stop opening until it was renewed, and the export would still be there. The records are yours in the ordinary sense of the word: you can pick them up and walk away with them, and they are readable without asking anyone’s permission.

The question to ask any cemetery software vendor

Boards are right to ask what happens to the records if the company selling the software stops selling it. It is the correct question and most vendors answer it badly, because for a hosted product the honest answer is that your records are in their building and getting them out is a request you have to make and they have to honour.

Here the answer does not depend on me being reachable. The records are already on your computer, in your building, and they can already be written out to spreadsheet files that need no software of mine to read. Whatever happens to me, the association still has its register, its deed holders and its interments, in a form the next volunteer can open.

There is a second layer to that, and it is worth knowing about. A licence issued online makes a brief signed status check about once a day and carries on working for up to thirty days without a connection. But an office that stays completely offline is issued a different kind of licence: Sexton shows a machine code, we send back a licence file made for that computer, and that licence never checks in at all. It is not waiting on a server, mine or anyone else’s. Any association can ask for one.

And for completeness, because a careful board will ask it anyway: if I ever stopped selling Sexton, issuing one of those non-checking licence files to every cemetery on the books would be the last thing I did. It costs me nothing to promise and it means the answer does not rest on anybody’s goodwill, including mine.

Ask the same question of anyone else you are considering. It is a fair question and the answer tells you a great deal.

Backups are still your job, and they are easy

Records on your own computer are records on one computer, and a computer can fail. Sexton writes an automatic local backup, and your organization shares two computers across all its cemeteries, so the office desktop and a second computer can both hold the register. Beyond that, the export files are small enough to email to yourself or drop on a flash drive kept somewhere other than the office — which is the same discipline the paper records always needed, and rather easier.

There is more on this in what happens if the computer dies.

What you give up, said plainly

Records on one machine are not records available everywhere at once. Sexton is the office’s register, meant for the one or two people who keep it, with two computers shared across the organization’s cemeteries. If your board’s requirement is that six trustees in six houses all edit the same record on the same evening, that is a different shape of product and worth saying out loud before you buy anything.

For the great majority of small associations, churches and townships, the register lives on one desk and the trade is a good one: no subscription to a service, no account, no dependence on a connection, and a record that stays in the association’s hands.

“It’s going to save me so much time, and everything is far better organized than it was. What I like best is that it’s all right there on the plot map — I click a plot and I can see the interment, the deed, and everything else about it at once. I keep our events in it too, each one with how many people came.”

Where Sexton fits

Sexton keeps the plot map, the deed holders, the interments, the balances and the perpetual care fund on the association’s own computer. $750 a year includes your first cemetery, plus $50 a year for each additional cemetery your organization owns, with no setup fee and no charge per person. The demonstration runs in your browser with sample records so you can see the whole thing before deciding, the features page lists everything it keeps, and the pricing page has the full pricing details.