What Does a Resident Trainee Do All Day Now That the Agent Types the Obituary and Fills the VA Forms?

Ask yourself honestly what you hired your last resident trainee to do. Not what the job description said — what they did between eight and six. If the true answer is data entry, obituary typing, chasing permits and driving to the county for certified copies, then the job you posted no longer exists, and the person you hire in September is going to expect something else.

66 percent are using it. About 70 percent say their people cannot use it well.

Those are the two numbers that define staffing in this trade right now. US small-business adoption of AI reached 66 percent this year, up from 55 percent a year earlier, and roughly seven in ten owners say their staff need more training to actually get value from it. In funeral service that gap is wider than average, because the workforce skews experienced, the licensing path is long, and the systems — Passare, SRS Continuum, Osiris, Halcyon, CRäKN, your state's EDRS, the cemetery's PlotBox — were never designed to be taught to anyone in a week.

The bottleneck moved. It is no longer whether the tools can draft an obituary or reconcile a cash advance ledger. They can. It is whether your 24-year-old resident trainee and your 58-year-old office manager know which parts of the output to distrust.

In 2026, training a new funeral home hire means teaching them to check work they did not do — to read a drafted death certificate entry, a drafted obituary and a drafted claim packet against the family's own information sheet, and to know which four documents no software may ever prepare unsupervised.

Which three roles on the org chart change shape first?

The resident trainee or apprentice. In most states this is a one- to two-year supervised licence path after an ABFSE-accredited mortuary science programme and the National Board Exam. Historically the first six months were typing: entering demographics, transcribing obituaries, filling in VA forms, requesting copies. That work is now drafted overnight. The trainee's first six months become verification, aftercare calls and standing in the back of arrangement conferences — which is, incidentally, what actually produces a licensed director.

The office manager or accounts clerk. Their day was reconciliation: matching the cemetery's opening and closing invoice, the clergy honorarium, the newspaper charge and the certified copy fees against the Statement of Funeral Goods and Services Selected, then chasing what did not match. The matching is now done before they arrive. The chasing, the phone relationships and the judgement about which family gets a payment plan are not.

The family service or preneed counselor. This one gains rather than loses. Time that went into paperwork after each appointment goes back into appointments, and the follow-up sequence with families who took a brochure home in March finally happens. What does not change is the conversation itself, because nobody has ever bought a preneed contract from a screen.

What does week one look like now?

Here is a week-one plan that works in a firm doing 200 to 400 calls. Day one is not the software. Day one is a printed do-not-delegate list, signed, on the wall of the arrangement office.

flowchart TD
  A["Day 1 resident trainee starts"] --> B["Shadow a full arrangement conference"]
  A --> C["Key two EDRS entries entirely by hand"]
  A --> D["Read and sign the do-not-delegate list"]
  B --> E["Check drafted obituary against the family sheet"]
  C --> E
  D --> F["Signs nothing until a licensee reviews it"]
  E --> G["Week 2 trainee owns the 7 a.m. queue review"]
  F --> G

The two hand-keyed EDRS entries matter more than anything else in that chart. A trainee who has never filled in a death certificate by hand cannot tell you why the drafted one is wrong. They will not notice that the informant's relationship is stated as "daughter" when she is the stepdaughter, or that the place of death is the hospice residence rather than the hospital, or that the decedent's usual occupation was entered from an obituary rather than from the family. Teach the manual version first. Then let them check the drafted version. That order is not negotiable.

What stops being a job requirement

Typing speed. Familiarity with your particular case management system, which used to be six weeks of onboarding and is now largely irrelevant because the trainee describes what they need in plain English. Knowing which fax number the county registrar prefers. Knowing which of the three newspapers wants copy by three o'clock and which one will take it until five. Being the only person who remembers how the Wilbert order form works.

What replaces those on the job posting: the composure to sit through a removal from a residence where the family is in the room; a clean record for the state board's background check; the discipline to check drafted work rather than approve it; and enough numeracy to catch a $235 discrepancy between the cemetery invoice and the itemised statement. You are hiring for temperament and verification, not clerical throughput. Say so in the advertisement — the candidates who suit this read it as respect.

What the training costs and when it pays back

Illustration with stated assumptions. Assume one trainee at $44,000 loaded, currently spending 18 hours a week on entry, transcription and chasing. Assume trained use of an overnight-and-drafting setup takes that to 6 hours a week of verification. Assume the firm was about to add a 25-hour-a-week office assistant at $23,000 loaded and now does not.

The honest caveat: the $23,000 only counts if you genuinely were about to hire. If you were not, the real return is the 576 hours, and the question becomes whether those hours go into aftercare calls and preneed follow-up that produce revenue, or evaporate. Decide in advance where they go and put it on the trainee's weekly sheet, or they will evaporate.

The do-not-delegate list, written down and signed

Every firm needs one page. Ours would read: no software prepares or submits the cremation authorization; no software signs the funeral director's portion of the death certificate, and EDRS credentials stay with the licensee they were issued to; no software identifies remains or handles any part of the identification viewing; no software makes the call to a family about a delay, a mistake, or a cost increase; no software quotes a preneed price guarantee; and nothing automated touches a medical examiner case until the release is in hand.

Add the ones your state board will ask about. Several states require the licensed director's personal involvement at specific points in the arrangement, and your board's rules on supervision of a resident trainee do not bend because a machine did the typing. Also keep OSHA training exactly where it is: formaldehyde exposure under 29 CFR 1910.1048 and bloodborne pathogens training are hands-on, annual, and not a video a trainee watches at their own pace.

Frequently asked questions

Will I need fewer licensed directors?

Not in a firm your size. Calls per director is limited by services on the calendar, removals at three in the morning, and how many families one person can sit with in a week before their judgement goes. What changes is how much of a director's week is clerical. Firms are using that to stop the 60-hour weeks, not to cut heads.

My office manager has been here 22 years and will not touch this. What do I do?

Do not start her on drafting. Start her on the morning queue — a short list of exceptions someone else's software prepared overnight, which she reviews and corrects. That is the same job she has always done, arriving in a different order. The people who refuse the blank-page version usually accept the checking version within a fortnight.

What do I actually teach in the first hour?

Three things. Where the drafted work comes from and which family document it was built from. How to reject and correct, not just approve. And the do-not-delegate list, read aloud, signed, and posted. An hour is enough for all three.

Does any of this count toward licensure or continuing education?

Not by itself. Your state board sets the continuing education requirement and the trainee's supervised hours, and none of that changes because of software. What does change is what the trainee spends those supervised hours doing — and a trainee who spent a year verifying rather than typing sits their first arrangement conference far better prepared.

The Monday version of this: write the do-not-delegate list yourself, one page, before you buy anything. Then pick the single task your newest hire hates most — usually obituary transcription or the VA paperwork — and change only that one, in draft form, for a month.

One role worth thinking about separately is whoever answers the phone, because it is the one job in the building where a person is needed at 2 a.m. and unaffordable at 2 a.m. CallSphere builds AI voice and chat agents that answer funeral home lines and web chat 24/7, take first-call details in the order your on-call director needs them, and book arrangement conferences — which lets you hire trainees for the work that actually makes a director.