AP Casework Manager

AP Casework Manager runs the client side of a genealogy practice on your own WordPress site. It is built for freelance genealogists and small research practices: every piece of client work is an engagement, from the first enquiry to the day it closes, and everything about it stays in your own database.

The free edition handles the start of every job – the enquiry, the client, and the structured intake that tells you what the client actually wants and already knows.

What the free edition does

• Enquiries and engagements. Record each piece of work and move it from Enquiry to Scoping to Closed. Every change is recorded with the date, who made it and any note.
• Clients. Contact details, your private notes, and the date the client gave permission to hold their information – recorded automatically when they send their intake form.
• A genealogy intake form, sent as a private link. No account and no password for the client. The form asks what a genealogist needs to know: who the client is and their consent; what they want to find out, in their own words; the people involved (name, other spellings, birth, death, marriages, religion, military service, occupation); what they already hold (a tree, certificates, photographs, DNA results, earlier research); where they have already looked, so you never charge them for a search they have done themselves; and their budget, timescale and how they like to hear from you.
• Save and finish later. Clients can come back to the form until they send it. Sending it records their consent, moves the engagement to Scoping, and emails you – the email carries no client details, only a link to read them on your own site.
• An optional PIN on any link, for clients who want the extra step. Repeated wrong PINs are slowed down.
• Secure uploads. Clients can send certificates, photographs, GEDCOM files and documents. Each file is checked by its content, not just its name, stored outside your media library under a long random name, and handed out only through the plugin, to you. The plugin also checks that your web server refuses direct requests for these files, and tells you how to fix it if it does not.
• Your branding. Your practice name, logo, accent colour and footer on the client pages. The client pages use their own styling and never load your theme, so a theme update cannot break a form a client is part-way through.
• A Help button on every Casework screen. The AncestorPress Support Copilot answers questions about using the plugin, from documentation matched to your version. It is optional, read-only, and sends nothing about your clients – see External services below.
• Privacy tools. Download everything held about a client as one file, anonymise a client while keeping your business record of the work, and handle requests by email address through WordPress’s own Tools > Export Personal Data and Erase Personal Data. Closed engagements are kept for a period you choose (six years unless you change it) and can then be deleted permanently – never automatically. Suggested text for your privacy policy is added to Settings > Privacy.

The free edition is not a trial: there is no limit on clients or engagements, and nothing stops working after a time.

AP Casework Manager Pro

AP Casework Manager Pro carries every engagement on from the intake to delivery:

• A research plan and quote your client agrees to by typing their name – frozen exactly as agreed – with changes of scope agreed the same way.
• A private client page with progress updates, the research log (searches that found nothing included, written as work done), hours used, and a link to your invoice.
• Reports written in the plugin, with PDF export in your own fonts, colours and letterhead.
• GEDCOM deliverables with a living-people checklist, and family-share links that show relatives only what you choose.
• A set number of questions after delivery, consultation offers, and follow-on engagements.
• AI first drafts of a research plan built from your own methods, through the AI service you connect to WordPress – and a disclosure statement for every report.

External services

Freemius

Purpose: optional account connection, licence administration, checkout for the Pro edition and usage diagnostics, provided by Freemius, Inc. This free package is updated from WordPress.org.

When: only if you opt in, connect or manage an account or licence, use checkout, or consent to diagnostics. If you skip the opt-in, everything in the free edition still works.

Data: the site address, the administrator email you provide, plugin and WordPress versions and licence identifiers; usage diagnostics only with consent. No client, engagement, intake answer or file is ever sent.

Terms: https://freemius.com/terms/
Privacy: https://freemius.com/privacy/

AncestorPress Support Service

Purpose: the optional Help assistant, the AncestorPress Support Copilot, answers questions about using the plugin. Where an AI provider is connected in WordPress (Settings > Connectors), that provider answers first, at your own cost, and the AncestorPress Support Service, provided by Black and White Trading Ltd, supplies the matching documentation; if that provider cannot answer and the site is connected to the service, the assistant automatically falls back to the service. Where none is connected, the service answers a few questions a month itself, free. The assistant is read-only.

When: nothing is sent until an administrator opens the assistant and accepts its privacy notice. The acceptance is recorded with who gave it and when, and can be withdrawn on the Casework > Support screen.

Answered by your own AI provider: your question and chat history go only to that provider. The service is asked only for documentation, and receives the site address, the plugin and its version, the admin screen, and any Freemius installation ID or support token – never your question.

Answered by the service (no AI provider connected, or your AI provider’s answer failed – in either case only when the site is connected through the Freemius opt-in or a support token on the Casework > Support screen): the question and up to 20 recent chat messages; the site address and any Freemius installation ID or support token, to authorise the request; this plugin’s version, the versions of other active plugins whose folders begin “ap-” or “ancp-“, the admin screen, and your database schema revision, how long you keep closed engagements, your upload size limit, whether your upload folder is closed to the web, and how many clients, engagements, intake forms and files you have – never their contents. Your clients’ information itself is never sent: no name, contact detail, intake answer, note or file leaves your site, only the counts. The free plan answers a limited number of questions a month.

Tickets: with a licence or support token, only when you open the ticket form and click “Create ticket” does the plugin also send the conversation, the details above, the question category, the contact email you enter (pre-filled with your WordPress account email) and the first and last name from your WordPress profile; these are kept as a support ticket. On the free plan no ticket form is offered, so none of this is sent, and help from a person is on the WordPress.org support forum.

Retention: questions are not stored, and the conversation stays in your browser until you leave the page. Authorisation checks are cached for up to 12 hours; rate-limit and free-plan counters are kept against a hash of your host name (monthly counts for about 40 days); daily usage counters with no site identifier are kept for up to 180 days. Please do not paste details of living people into a question.

Terms: https://ancestorpress.com/terms/
Privacy: https://ancestorpress.com/privacy-policy/

Credits

• Freemius WordPress SDK – GPLv3; release 2.13.4 with a small local PHP 8 fix (marked 2.13.5), described in vendor/freemius/BWD-PATCH-NOTES.md.
• The Pro edition also bundles dompdf (LGPL-2.1) with php-font-lib (LGPL-2.1-or-later), php-svg-lib (LGPL-3.0-or-later), masterminds/html5 and sabberworm/php-css-parser (both MIT), the DejaVu fonts (Bitstream Vera licence) and the Libre Baskerville font (SIL Open Font Licence 1.1). Each keeps its own licence file.