Funeral Home / Death-Care Acquisition & SBA Underwriting Financial Model

Description
Most funeral-home templates are startup or operating forecasts, and most brokers headline the revenue. But a funeral home earns on the revenue PER CALL, and the secular rise of cremation (US ~63% in 2025, heading toward ~82% by 2045) quietly compresses it. This 5-year, SBA-lender-ready model reads a single-location death-care business the way a disciplined buyer and a bank do.

• Call-volume & service-mix engine: at-need calls times a blended revenue per call across three service types (traditional burial, cremation-with-service, direct cremation), each at its own price. The blended revenue per call, not the headline top line, is the number.
• The dilution the call count hides: direct cremation can be ~25% of calls but only ~10% of revenue. The model isolates it so you see the mix shift a rising cremation rate forces, and stresses an accelerated shift in the down-case.
• The honesty a broker's sheet skips: the owner is usually a licensed funeral director / embalmer, so a buyer must hire one (~$95k); bad debt is booked explicitly; and pre-need is treated as future pipeline, not current cash. So the true DSCR (1.36x) sits next to the naive broker DSCR (1.89x).
• The down-case that matters: an accelerated cremation shift (mix +8 points toward direct, volume -4%) drops DSCR to 0.88x, below the 1.25x floor, because overhead is fixed. The 4.20x full-service coverage is the cushion.
• SBA 7(a) capital stack with a seller-note standby lever, the DSCR gate, real-estate own-vs-lease, and a 5-year cash-on-cash and equity multiple (no IRR, deliberately).
  
  

Ten Excel sheets (Google-Sheets-safe, no macros), a 23-page PDF guide, three firm profiles (Burial-Traditional / Balanced Community / Cremation-Forward), and a sourced benchmarks sheet. Educational planning tool, not financial, legal, tax or investment advice.