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Product Updates
Product Updates
Product Update - December 2025
David Simpson
December 1, 2025
Ho ho ho. Christmas is coming and the snow is falling behind the Beacon timeout warning. Here's a fine selection of improvements to enjoy alongside your preferred indulgent festive treat (I'm a mince pie man, myself).
Cyber Essentials is a government-backed certification designed by the National Cyber Security Centre (a branch of GCHQ no less) that sets a standard for cyber security for all organisations. Cyber Essentials Plus is the highest level of this certification. It includes an audit, which involves vulnerability scanning and testing of a random sample of our systems to confirm that the security controls are correctly implemented.
Following our audit earlier this week, I'm really delighted that we have passed with flying colours and Beacon is now Cyber Essentials Plus certified.
Cyber Essentials Plus sits alongside our ISO 27001:2022 certification which we completed earlier this year. With the old ISO 27001:2013 certification expiring last month, it's never been this important to make sure that your providers have got their security ducks in a row.
Keeping your data secure is the most important thing that we do at Beacon. Earlier in the year I wrote about a data breach at another organisation in which "details of how to gain entry into the homes of 890 people who were receiving care at home" were stolen. It's situations like this that demonstrate the importance of security, and following good security practices.
We've also recently written about 8 things you can do today to improve the security position at your charity. It's well worth a read!
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We've made a small change to how people sign in with the Beacon portal. We'll now send a one-time passcode along with the login link, which the user needs to enter in order to start their portal session. Some users have reported their portal sessions ending early and this update makes sessions more stable and more secure.
When you hover over a user's avatar (or their initials if they haven't uploaded a picture) we'll now show a handy tooltip to remind you who they are. Now you don't have to remember everyone's faces or initials!
We've added a new filter condition to make it easier to find only records which do not meet certain criteria. Best thought of as the opposite of "is any of", this filter condition should enable you to simplify some of your existing filters where you've had to exclude things one by one.
Exporting data from your Beacon account can often be an integral part of reporting or data transfer between platforms. Whilst you can run exports directly from your Beacon account, if you're creating advanced automations you can use our API to programatically trigger an export and download the resulting file.
Combined with an automation platform like Zapier, you can now send regular exports via email, or set up backups to anywhere you need them. You can read more about how to export via the API in this guide article.
We've been working hard behind the scenes to speed up some of Beacon's systems. Although you won't notice any changes, we've introduced a new Gift Aid system which is showing 50x speed improvements for larger customers, and we've completely rearchitected how rollup fields are calculated. The engineering team are still hard at work optimising how Beacon processes big jobs behind the scenes.
Connect with fellow Beacon customers, share ideas, get tips, and discover best practices.
You can find the group here and we'd love to welcome you in.
Please note that this group is exclusively for Beacon customers.
We're working on a new system for tracking and managing consent for all of your People records. We're expecting to have this ready for you early in 2026!
Merry Christmas, Beacon fans. I think you're going to enjoy what we've got planned in 2026!
