Getting your existing records in

This is the practical objection that kills more purchases than price does, and it deserves a straight answer, because the answer depends entirely on what you are starting from.

If your records are already in a spreadsheet

This is the easy case and it is more common than people expect — somebody, at some point, usually typed the register into Excel. Sexton takes that file directly: you drop in the spreadsheet, match its columns to Sexton’s fields, and confirm the count before anything is saved. Your column called “Surname” becomes the surname; your column called “Lot” becomes the lot. Nothing is guessed at and nothing is written until you have seen how many rows are about to come across.

There is no fee for this and no waiting on anyone. It is a screen in the program, not a service you buy.

If your records are on paper

Somebody has to type them. There is no honest way around that, and any vendor who says otherwise is either charging you for the typing or planning to photograph the pages and call that a record.

What makes it manageable is doing it in the right order rather than all at once:

1. Photograph everything first. Before a single entry is typed. An afternoon with a phone means the originals can fall apart later without costing you anything.
2. Type the plot map first, not the burials. Sections, rows, and graves per row. This is the skeleton, it is fast, and everything else hangs off it.
3. Then the plot owners. Ownership is what the association gets asked about and what it can be held to. It is also usually better recorded than the burials.
4. Then the interments, working backwards from the present. Recent burials are the ones families ask about, and the oldest entries are the slowest to read.
5. Type what you know and mark what you do not. A record that says “section known, grave not recorded” is worth far more than a blank, and far more than a guess.

Spread over a winter, at an hour or two a week, a few thousand entries is an ordinary job for one determined volunteer. Several small associations have done it with two people and a pot of coffee on Sunday afternoons.

If your records are in an old program

Almost every program of the last thirty years can write out a CSV or an Excel file, including DOS-era and Access-based ones, and that file is what Sexton imports. If you can get it out, it can come in. If you cannot work out how to get it out, send me what you have and I will look at it.

Laying out the cemetery

The map does not need a surveyor. You tell Sexton the sections and how many rows and graves are in each, and it draws them; then you nudge the shape where the ground disagrees with the arithmetic, because it always does somewhere. It takes an afternoon. There is no mapping project, no per-acre fee and nobody coming out to the property.

This is worth pausing on if you are comparing options, because mapping is where cemetery software bills tend to be largest and least expected.

What it costs to bring records in

Nothing. There is no setup fee, no import fee and no charge for the mapping. Cemeteries joining at this stage also get a half-day of setup — over a call or worked through by email — and their existing records imported for them.

What to do about the gaps

Every cemetery has them, and moving to a program is when they become visible, which is uncomfortable and useful in equal measure. Do not let the gaps hold up the move. Get in what you have, mark the unknowns as unknown, and treat the list of gaps as a job for the years ahead — a family enquiry or an afternoon walking the sections with a clipboard will close them one at a time. Every one you close is closed permanently, which was never true of the binder.

Where Sexton fits

The import screen, the column matching and the count-before-you-commit are all in the demonstration. If you would rather just send me your spreadsheet and ask whether it will work, that is quicker than reading about it: get in touch and I will tell you what I see. What Sexton does covers the rest of the program.