Product Update: October 2021

       Here's your monthly roundup of the latest solid gold features from the Beacon product team.
     

       Improved smart fields
     

We've improved how smart fields work.  You'll now see some helpful updates to the text including 'pills' for field variables, different colours to make your formulas easier to read, and matching bracket highlighting.

You'll also see a preview of your smart field so you can quickly check the value that the current record would have when the smart field was computed.

Smart fields can now be passed to other smart fields, which is every bit as weird as it is cool!

       Xero integration
     

We've released our fully-functional all-singing all-dancing Xero integration this week.  It's so exciting it has its own blog post here.

You can now export your payments from Beacon directly into Xero as account transactions. Reconciling your payments from Beacon with Xero is now an absolute breeze.

       Lockable payments
     

Premium customers can now lock payment records in Beacon.  Locked payment records cannot be updated by imports or forms and can only be unlocked by Beacon admins. This is useful if your finance team wants to ensure that payments in Beacon that have been reconciled with a finance system cannot change.

You can find out more about locking payments here.

       Import improvements
     

We've made a lot of improvements to how imports work recently.  Our customer success team use the same import tools that are available to you, so when we make improvements to make onboarding new customers easier, everyone benefits!

       Splitting addresses on import
     

You can now map whole addresses to an 'Address (full)' field.  Beacon will then do its best to split up the address into its various parts (Address line 1, city, county, post code). This only works for UK addresses.

       Advanced imports (Two-step removed imports)
     

There's now an 'Advanced' option for import mappings.  You can use this to access more import options to import deeper related records.  For example, you can now import a membership, a member organisation, and that organisation's primary contact all from the same spreadsheet.  Importing power-user paradise.

       Import excel date serials
     

If your excel spreadsheet has given you a date as a date serial, you can now import that directly into Beacon.

       All the cool cats are on Beacon Facebook Chat...
     

Beacon customers are invited to join our private Facebook Group. It's a place to exchange ideas, tips, and best practices.

You can find the group here and we'd love to welcome you in.

The group is only available to Beacon customers.

       Up next...
     

Next, we're working on more improvements to our import system, upgrading how dates are handled in smart fields, and upgrading how timelines work.