Every other AncestorPress product serves people researching their own family. This one serves people researching someone else’s, for a fee — and that is a genuinely different job, because the deliverable is not a tree. It is a professional engagement: an agreed scope, hours accounted for, evidence of what was searched, and a report a client will read and pay for.

The problem it addresses is scope and trust. Professional research runs on estimates against open-ended work, and the two failures are both expensive: work done beyond an unagreed scope, and a client who cannot see what they got.

Your practice’s records stay in your own database, on your own site, rather than in a subscription you rent.

Built by AncestorPress – tools for family history, built to last.

Who It Is For

AP Casework Manager is being built for:

• Freelance genealogists running a practice single-handed
• Small consultancies of roughly one to five researchers
• Researchers currently running casework out of a spreadsheet and an inbox

The problems it is meant to answer are familiar ones: over-running the estimate and absorbing it; not being able to evidence the hours spent finding nothing, when finding nothing is half the job; a client who keeps emailing to ask where things are; and case notes and client correspondence living in two different places.

What It Will Do

The engagement itself is the object the plugin manages, from first enquiry to closed case:

• Intake — a client and an enquiry, captured in a structured form rather than an email thread
• Plan — a research plan and quote against a defined question
• Agree — an explicit scope sign-off, recorded before the hours start
• Work — a research log that includes negative searches, accumulating as evidence of effort
• Deliver — the report and its artefacts, held with the case
• Show — a gated, read-mostly client area on your own site, so a client can see progress without email round-trips

Scope sign-off and the research log are the two that matter commercially, and both are first-class objects rather than notes — documented as a matter of course instead of reconstructed under pressure.

What It Is Not

It is not a generic CRM, an invoicing engine, an e-signature platform, or a booking system. Payments, accounting and bookings are recorded and linked, never rebuilt.

It is also deliberately standalone. It does not bundle the shared AncestorPress family-data core and owns its own tables: it is a practice-management tool, not tree data. A practitioner may well run the research and archive plugins alongside it for the research itself, with this one managing the commercial relationship around them — but the products stay separable.

How it will be sold

AP Casework Manager will be a paid product with no free tier. That is deliberate: it is a professional tool bought with business money against a business problem, and unlike the rest of the suite it shares no data substrate that a free tier would need to protect.

It will be distributed through ancestorpress.com rather than the WordPress.org plugin directory.

Pricing and tiers have not been set. One rule is already fixed: feature-gating only, never usage caps — there will be no limit on the number of clients, cases or log entries. A cap on how many clients a practice may have would be a tax on its success.

Where it fits

AP Casework Manager sits alongside the rest of the AncestorPress suite by adjacency rather than dependency. The research and archive plugins do the genealogical work; this one manages the client relationship around it. Keeping them separable is the point — a professional practice should be able to adopt one without the other.

Interested?

This product is at an early stage and the scope above is still being tested against how practices actually work. If you run a genealogy practice and any of it is wrong, or missing something you could not do without, we would genuinely rather hear it now than after it is built. Get in touch.