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CMA Funeral Order Compliance and Standard Price List Update

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Following on from the statement from the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), who conducted a review into transparent pricing across the UK’s Funeral Industry, we were confident we had the solutions to support Funeral Directors in full compliance of the findings of the CMA report. These solutions, including eFD’s pricing structure platform, email functionality, enhanced reporting and funeral job sub types had already been fully implemented and were already being regularly used by our clients prior to the December 2020 announcement. 

Upon release of the Competition and Markets Authority’s Funerals Market Investigation Order, our small but dedicated team created a plan of action to further enhance eFD to support funeral directors, with highlights detailed in the timeline below. 

For more information on how eFD you can make sure your funeral business is compliant with the CMA Funeral Order, contact us for a demo or sign up to trial our free eFD Lite.

Phase I – implemented from 25th August 2021

CMA Funeral Products

  • 7 new products as defined by the CMA are automatically available, the name and description being templated from the CMA Standardised Price List. 
  • Each business using eFD can update the system with their own nominal codes and prices.

The 7 CMA Funeral Products are as follows:

  1. Care – Care of the deceased person before the funeral. 
  2. Collection – Collecting and transporting the deceased person from the place of death (normally within 15 miles of the Funeral Director’s premises) into the Funeral Director’s care. 
  3. Coffin – Provision of a suitable coffin. 
  4. Hearse – Provision of a hearse or other appropriate vehicle to take the deceased person directly to the agreed cemetery or crematorium (normally within 20 miles of the Funeral Director’s premises) at a date and time agreed between the Customer and Funeral Director. 
  5. Professional arrangements – Taking care of all necessary legal and administrative arrangements. 
  6. Transportation – Transportation of the deceased person to a cemetery or crematorium at a date and time determined by the Funeral Director and clearly explained to the Customer.
  7. Viewing – Facilitating family and friends to visit the deceased by appointment with the Funeral Director.

CMA Funeral job sub types 

  • 2 new job sub types, both the ‘CMA Attended’ and ‘CMA Unattended’ are automatically available to Users with non-editable, auto fees displayed as defined by the CMA.
  • When a CMA job sub type is selected, the tab selection available is limited to the services required for that case as defined by the CMA. 
  • Tabs such as ‘Donations’ are not available as they would automatically be for standard job types.
  • The ‘Sales’ tab will be limited to prevent other fees being added, disbursements will be able to be added as normal.
  • For a CMA job type, a warning message is displayed to notify the user as to why the tab selection is different compared to other job sub types. 
  • A new function to identify job sub types such as ‘Attended’ or ‘Unattended’ has been implemented to assist with any reporting requirements. 
Example of a CMA Funeral job sub type

Phase II – implemented from 13th September 2021

CMA Reporting 

  • Enhancements have been made to the existing reports section, which now also provide a summary following the CMA’s suggested format.
  • A prompt has been built in to remind each Funeral Director to submit their reporting to the CMA. 
  • A new ‘Admin Area’ has been designed to enable Funeral Directors in emailing their reports to the CMA directly from eFD. 
  • An audit of report submission detailing information on the Users, dates, and times. 
Example of CMA report

Phase III – what’s currently being developed

An open API  (completed December 2021)

  • Our open API has been enhanced to include price and product information, giving you the ability to seamlessly update pricing and product information directly to your website from eFD. No more manual uploads! 

Deceased person condition 

  • We are enhancing our ‘Deceased person’ tab to allow the condition to be audited and recorded within eFD. Giving you the ability to record the condition of the deceased person daily via eFD. 

Deceased person location 

  • We are enhancing our ‘Deceased person location’ function to prevent a User manually changing the location, giving you a little more time back! (Don’t worry, there will be an option for an Admin Users to override if needed). 
  • We are adding an audit trail to the ‘Deceased person location’ to our email and correspondence lookup fields to enable you to notify your Client of the Deceased person’s location at any given time.