Why We Partner Up With Chronicle, Cemetery Management Software

Chronicle exists because a man could not find a grave. Matthew Borowski went looking for a loved one, hit the same wall thousands of families hit every week, and built a mapping platform in response. That was 2016, in Melbourne.

Our cemetery branch started from the other side of the same wall. Families kept telling cemetery clients they had given up before they ever reached the office, because the website gave them nothing to act on. One problem, two halves. Chronicle took the records and the map. We took the front door.

The two systems every cemetery runs

Ask any cemetery manager what keeps the place operating and you get one answer about the register and another about the phone. The register holds interments, plot ownership, deeds and section maps. The phone carries everyone who cannot get at that register on their own.

Chronicle handles the first. Cloud based, survey grade plot mapping, records tied to the exact grave, work orders, certificates, reporting. Councils, private operators, religious and communal grounds, veterans cemeteries and multi site portfolios all run on it.

We handle the second. The pages a stranger lands on at ten at night, the words that answer them, the phone number they can tap, the search that takes them to a plot.

Why we send records work to somebody else

We could sell you a records solution. Plenty of web agencies do, usually as a database plugin bolted into WordPress, and it goes wrong in the same way every time.

A burial register is a legal document that has to outlive the committee, the software company and the agency that built it. Handing that to a general purpose plugin means your permissions, backups and audit trail depend on something nobody designed for burial data. When the trustee who set it up steps down, the register sits inside a website nobody knows how to open.

Chronicle does nothing but this, and has since 2016. We would rather point you there and spend our hours on the part we are good at.

Where Chronicle stops and we start

Chronicle gives you a public access portal so anyone can search your records and find a plot. That covers the records question completely. It does not cover the rest of what a cemetery needs to say.

Question a visitor has	Answered by
Where is my grandmother buried	Chronicle
How do I walk to the plot from the gate	Chronicle
What does a plot cost and what is included	Your website
Are you open on the holiday weekend	Your website
What memorials are allowed in Section C	Your website
Can we scatter ashes here	Your website
Who do I speak to about existing interment rights	Your website
Why should we choose this cemetery at all	Your website

Four of those eight questions fill a small office's voicemail. Putting them on the site cuts routine calls faster than any other change we make.

Three ways we connect the two

Linked search

Your site carries a clear route into your Chronicle public map, styled so families never feel handed off to a stranger. Quickest to set up, and the usual choice for smaller cemeteries.

Embedded search

The search sits on a page on your own domain. Your header and footer stay in place, visitors stay with you, and the whole thing holds together on a phone.

Static extract

For closed grounds and heritage sites where the register no longer changes, we publish a searchable listing built from an export. No live connection to maintain.

We choose with you during planning, based on how often your data moves and who updates it.

What this pairing costs a small cemetery

Chronicle runs tiers from a free starting point for small grounds up to full mapping and public access. You deal with them directly on that.

Our side you pay once. Studio September builds cemetery websites without subscription contracts, because a volunteer committee should never lose its own homepage to a lapsed direct debit or a treasurer's change of bank.

• 10cemetery sites built
• 3continents served
• 1dedicated cemetery branch
• 0subscription contracts

We are a full service web design agency in Edinburgh with one branch that does nothing but cemetery work. Ten builds across Australia, the UK and the United States is not a large number, and we lead with it anyway. Depth in this sector beats volume in any other.

For volunteer trustees

If you run a rural cemetery with a committee of four and no budget line for IT, the split matters more, not less. Software protects the register when the secretary retires. The website answers the public when nobody is in the office. Neither asks a volunteer to become a technician, and neither leaves you dependent on one person's laptop.

Start with whichever half is failing you now. If families cannot find graves, start with records. If the phone rings all day with questions you have answered a hundred times, start with the website.