Introducing: Relationships

There is now a more useful way to store relationships between people in Beacon. We've made it really easy to store different kinds of relationships and to see those relationships on a person's record.

We've built a brand new system for handling relationships between people. You can create any type of relationship, whether it's the same between both people (friend, spouse, colleague) or different for each person (parent/child, sponsor/sponsee, manager/team member).

In Beacon, relationships can exist between people, and also between people and organisations.

Lets take a quick look at the key new features for storing relationships in Beacon:

1. Creating relationships

If you head over to a Person record, you'll see a brand new tab called 'Relationships'. This tab appears on all People records.

This tab shows all of the relationships for this person record. From here you can add new relationships or update existing relationships. If you click on a relationship, Beacon will send you to the record of the person you've just clicked on.

Some relationships can expire. These relationships can have an expiry date which will show alongside them. This is really handy if you want to keep track of an organisation's former trustees, for example.

2. Organising your relationships with relationship cards

Just like in the Details section, relationships are organised with cards. Admins can use Customisation Mode to create cards for specific relationship types, and move these cards around so that the relationships that are important to you are front and centre.

3. Creating and updating relationship types

You'll find a new setting page for 'Relationships' under the 'Settings' tab in your Beacon sidebar. Only Beacon admins can create and update relationship settings. From the Relationships settings page you can see a list of existing relationship types that we've already created for you.

From this page you can also create brand new relationship types.

4. This is just the beginning - we've still got plenty to build!

At Beacon we like to make small, frequent updates to our systems. It's important to get new features into your hands as quickly as possible so that you can play with them and give us your feedback! There are lots of things that we still need to build in order to make our relationships feature as powerful as we want it to be. For example, we'll be adding the following features soon:

• Filters for relationships
• Imports (right now, you can't import relationships)
• Exports (you can't export them either!)
• Bulk create/update
• Forms (you can't collect relationships via forms yet)

5. Find out more

You can find out more in our article in the Beacon guide. The new relationships features are live and ready for you to try out right now!

Got questions for us? Fire off an email to david@beaconcrm.org or click the chat button in the bottom right corner of your Beacon dashboard.