Expression Guest Registry comes from a funeral stationery house. FuneralGuestbook.app is software. Expression has been on the App Store since 2012 and publishes no price. What each one does well for a funeral home.
FuneralScreen's guest registry sits inside their signage system. FuneralGuestbook.app runs offline. A comparison of what each does well, quoted from both vendors.
The Digital Guestbook prices about $185 per case. FuneralGuestbook.app runs $79 a month flat. The crossover is about 4 services a year. The full table, with both sides weighed fairly.
Guestmate prices per device. We price by services a year. At 1 iPad Guestmate is $4 cheaper, from 2 on we are, and paid yearly we are cheaper at 1 too. Both figures come from each company's own site.
"Make it shorter" is the wrong fix. The strongest evidence says judge on content, not length — and most of what you're asking is already in your files.
No wifi, a flat battery, a guest who signs and walks off. What actually happens to those signatures — and the question worth asking any vendor.
Around 50 people sign the guestbook at a typical service. Your staff turns the names and mailing addresses guests leave into printed Avery labels or a spreadsheet in one export — no retyping anyone's handwriting.
Federal law makes a funeral home keep two documents for one year each. Ohio says five years, Texas says two, Florida says "until we come look" — and every one of those clocks attaches to price lists, contracts, and preneed money. None of them reaches the funeral guestbook.
The ADA's Title III regulation says "funeral parlor" exactly once — and that one mention reaches the signing table. What the law actually requires of a funeral guestbook stand is cheaper than most owners fear, and the dimensions worth hitting are published.
You don't have to. A name alone is a complete entry. What the address and phone columns are for, who can read what you write, and a plain way to decide what to give.
Every funeral produces a book of names in their own hands. Then the funeral ends, and the book goes somewhere — a drawer, an eBay lot, an archive, a flood. Nobody decides which.
August 30 is National Grief Awareness Day. 5 concrete ways a funeral home can mark it: a resource post that includes the 988 line, a lobby display, an hour of staff training. Nothing sold, nothing collected, and every organization named is free or close to it.
The model behind "closure" was retired by grief science in 1996. What replaced it — continuing bonds — changes what a funeral home should say, design, and offer after the service.
For email, federal law says yes — CAN-SPAM has no permission step, just six rules. For texting the same list, the answer flips to a signature you don't have. The asymmetry every aftercare plan should be built on.
A memorial service has no expiry date. What the guidance actually says, why the timing numbers you'll find online disagree with each other, and the two practical things that really set the date.
The average pre-need buyer is 73.6. The only record of the room full of them is the guestbook — and the lawful pipeline is aftercare, not a call list.
Write the name, tell one small true story, sign two honest sentences. What actually comforts grieving families is clearer than your nerves suggest.
Five digital funeral guestbook systems priced side by side, every figure from the vendor's own pages, August 2026 — including where we're the wrong choice.
Your families need a mailing address to send acknowledgments. Your funeral home needs one to stay in touch. The guest book that was supposed to capture it usually holds a name and a city.
A QR code on the memorial folder costs almost nothing to print and lasts forever. The page it opens lasts exactly as long as someone keeps it alive, and 38% of the web pages that existed in 2013 were gone 10 years later. A working guide for your funeral home.
The FTC's Funeral Rule itemizes embalming, hearses, and limousines — and never once mentions the guestbook. What that silence means for how you price the line, and the one purchase pattern that comes with a required disclosure.
Five privacy questions families actually ask — answered from the platforms' own terms, the regulators' alerts, and the research.
Where it stands, how it charges, how it connects, who helps — the whole rig from $660, and the five mistakes that cause most failures.
Federal rules require hospices to offer bereavement support for a year after a death. No rule covers the funeral home — and the data on what that silence costs is getting hard to ignore.
Paper closes the record at the hour the family's work begins. What the week after looks like when it stays open.
Paper earns real wins — ritual, outage-proof, vendor-free. Digital owns the week after the service. The dimension-by-dimension scorecard.
From "free with a catch" to $349/mo — the price map, the models behind it, and the numbers that aren't always on the page.
Visibility gets families to your door. The guestbook is where the relationship with everyone who walked through it either begins — or evaporates.
A mailer reaches a household that has moved on. The minutes right after a service reach one that hasn't.
Generic form apps put the burden on your staff. The 3 things a purpose-built funeral guestbook gets right.
A thank-you, a resource, an anniversary note. The small touches that turn one service into the call a family makes next time.
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