Your cemetery promises forever. Your software vendor can't.
Burial records, maps and deeds belong in a system you own outright. I build cemetery record and mapping systems that keep running whether or not any software company, mine included, is still around.
Where the records actually live.
Cemeteries make the longest promise in any business. Perpetual care funds are set up to look after the grounds for generations. But the records of who is buried where, who owns which lot, and which spaces are still for sale often sit in a vendor's cloud, on a subscription that can change price, change owners or shut down.
You pay every year to keep seeing records that are yours. Stop paying and your access, and sometimes your data, goes with it.
Cemetery software keeps consolidating. In October 2025 PlotBox bought MIS, Batesville's funeral and cemetery management system. When a product changes hands, its customers find out later what that means for them.
A cemetery plans in centuries. Most software companies don't last twenty years. The records have to outlive the vendor.
The lot card already solved this once.
Every cemetery office knows the lot card. One card per lot, and at the heart of it a drawn map of the lot itself: the lot outline, the outline of each grave space, and the interment dates and burial details written into the spaces they belong to. Around the drawing sit the owner and the deed. Some of these cards are a hundred years old and still in daily use. They've outlasted every software system that tried to replace them, because anyone can read a card and no company can switch it off.
Azimuth Works is defining the Open Lot Card, an open standard that carries everything on the card, the drawn map included, into a digital form any system can read. Your records move between vendors without a conversion project. And if anything ever happens, every card can be printed back onto paper.
Records you own.
I move a cemetery's records and maps out of proprietary systems and onto open, standard infrastructure that you control. Same daily work for your staff.
- Your records
- Your lot cards, drawn lot maps included, along with burials, deeds and inventory, in a database you own. Readable by any competent technician in fifty years, and printable back onto paper any day.
- Your map
- Every section, lot and niche mapped, so staff and families can find a grave and sales can see what is available.
- Your code
- Everything I build is handed over: the software, the data and the instructions. You hold the keys.
- Your costs
- You pay for the work once. Ongoing support is there if you want it, never required.
Every engagement ends with you able to replace me with anyone else who knows the tools. If you can't, I haven't finished.
A large Minneapolis cemetery
- Legacy GIS moved onto an open stack the cemetery owns, with staff editing lots and sections directly.
- A public-facing grounds map, with labels and paths drawn from staff knowledge of the site.
- A niche sales view for the columbarium, drawn as the granite wall it is. Asked for in the morning, shipped the same afternoon.
An azimuth is a heading you hold.
The one Azimuth Works holds points away from software that gets worse and more expensive the more you depend on it, the slow decay people have started calling enshittification. It points toward infrastructure as permanent as digital things can be: open, owned and boring.
Open formats, on servers you control. Nothing held hostage.
Every line I write for you is yours, in your own repository.
Good infrastructure needs less of its architect every month it runs.
Andy Harvey
I'm a GIS architect with eighteen years of building spatial data infrastructure, a Master's degree and the GISP credential. I've led three enterprise migrations off proprietary GIS, and built the national points-of-interest layer behind a tourism analytics product line.
Azimuth Works is my practice, based in south Minneapolis. The bearing in the logo is my latitude, 44.926 degrees north, a place I love and don't intend to leave. When you hire Azimuth Works, you get me, start to finish.
Tell me how your records are kept today.
Spreadsheets, a vendor system, paper ledgers, a mix of all three. A half-hour conversation is enough to tell whether there's a better way, and what it would take.