Funeral Casework
Yes. Oak Technology publishes £5.00 per record plus VAT for Evolution FMS, which is £6.00 inclusive, with no setup fee and no ongoing support fee. What it never publishes is what a record is.
£6.00 a funeral and £12.00 a funeral are both consistent with everything Oak says, so the missing definition is worth more than the number.
Oak publishes the number and never defines the noun
The pricing sentence sits on the Information page at funeralsoftware.co.uk. In full, it says Oak provides "low-cost, powerful and efficient software with a simple pricing model. There are no setup fees or on-going support fees as everything is included" for "£5.00 per record + VAT (£6.00)".
Rate read from www.funeralsoftware.co.uk/information(opens in a new tab), last verified on 12 August 2026.
There is no adjacent sentence, footnote, FAQ, table or worked example anywhere on the site that says what a record is, when it is counted, or whether one funeral consumes one or more. There is no per-user, per-branch or per-seat component published either, and no minimum, no tier and no annual floor.
The accounting integrations - Xero, QuickBooks and Sage 50 - are advertised as free rather than as paid modules, and funeral notice publishing to the firm's own website ships as a free WordPress plugin. The "everything is included" claim is about the software, and it holds on the software. Training is priced separately on the same page. Remote training is free. On-site training is £420 plus VAT plus expenses.
Oak defines a record nowhere a buyer would look
Not in the pricing sentence, not on the free trial page, not in the trial enquiry form, not across the five-article knowledge base, and not in Oak Technology's own terms and conditions, which do not mention Evolution FMS at all. There is no Capterra, GetApp, G2, SourceForge or Slashdot listing to fall back on either.
Two of those absences carry more than the rest. The Companion App listings on the App Store and Google Play speak of "funeral", "person" and "tasks", and never use the word record at all. And the trial enquiry form asks for name, company, email, phone, address and referrer, with no volume question - not funerals a year, not records, not branches, not users. A per-record vendor that never asks volume at the enquiry stage is not scoping a quote from it, which is informative and still not a definition.
Two signals lean towards one record per funeral, and neither settles it
Oak's own vocabulary is singular around the funeral. The site describes covering "the entire funeral process from the initial point of contact through to producing documents", storing and retrieving funeral information, and scanning to identify "a person, personal belongings, coffin, cremated remains or donations related to a particular funeral". Nothing public separates a care-of-the-deceased object from an arrangement object the way Funeral Manager's published rate card does.
The second signal is rhetorical. The price sentence exists to make a simplicity claim - no setup fee, no support fee, everything included, one price - and a unit that multiplies per funeral would undercut the sentence it sits in.
Against both - marketing tone is not a billing rule, "record" is the vocabulary of a database first built in 1993 and could name any row Oak chooses to count, and no source states the rule either way. Even at one record per funeral, nothing published says whether a record is counted on creation or completion, or whether pre-need plans, cancelled arrangements and sundry orders consume one.
Ask before you sign. The question is whether a funeral where you take the deceased into your care and then arrange the service consumes one record or two.
Oak's contract terms describe a subscription, not a meter
Oak Technology's published terms bill cloud services "per calendar month, in advance (usually for a 12 month period)", with a £35 administration charge and interest at 2 per cent per 30 days on late payment.
Billing in advance sits awkwardly with counting records after the fact, and that tension is unresolved rather than explained, because Evolution FMS is not named in those terms at all. So it is not established that the product is sold under them. What can be said is that the shape Oak's parent company documents - monthly in advance on a twelve-month commitment - is a different commercial shape from metering, and a buyer should establish which one the contract in front of them uses.
The wristband printer is the largest year-one cost
Evolution FMS's chain-of-custody feature runs on QR wristbands scanned in the Companion App, and Oak sells the hardware to produce them at list prices.
The consumables are trivial at 20p a wristband. The printer is not. At 100 funerals a year, £499 plus VAT is roughly ten months of licence fees, taken up front, before the feature works at all. Oak notes it can help a firm print QR codes on a label printer it already owns, so the purchase is not compulsory.
What Evolution FMS comes to at five volumes, on both readings
Inclusive of VAT at the published £6.00, hardware excluded.
The left-hand column is the cheapest published price in the UK market by a distance. The right-hand column at £12.00 a funeral sits above Funeral Manager's £11.70 and above eFD Premium's £10, and below only eFD Enterprise at £15. Both columns come from the same published sentence.
What Funeral Casework will charge
Cases will be bought in prepaid packs rather than metered monthly. One credit will cover one funeral, credits will never expire, a month with no funerals will cost nothing, and users will be unlimited at every pack size.
Because packs combine, the year's total is what matters - 100 cases will be £850, 200 will be £1,500, 250 will be £1,925, 500 will be £3,850 and 1,000 will be £6,500. No VAT will be added to those prices, and 3 cases will be free on signup with no card.
If a record is a funeral, Evolution FMS at £6.00 undercuts the pack ladder at every volume in that table. What differs is what the two are. Evolution FMS is a Windows application with an intranet or hosted deployment, Word templates distributed as installed files, a diary outsourced to Outlook or Google, and a client portal mentioned once on the home page and described nowhere. Funeral Casework will be a browser product. The family will enter the deceased's details themselves through a link with no account, every outstanding wait will carry the days it has been open, and the price list will be held in the structure the CMA requires, so the published list and the priced estimate will be one object.
A firm that wants the lowest published unit price in the UK market, and telephone-first support from a family firm that has sold into this trade since 1993, has a clear answer already. The rest of the field is in what UK funeral director software costs.