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Introducing timeline: a history of your data

Chris Houghton
February 25, 2018

At Beacon our mission is to make working with data simple. We want to take the complex mess of data that lives in lots of different places, and bring it all into one secure place where it's easy to work with.

One of the challenges with existing database systems is that they store information as it is today, not as it was last week, or last year.

While current data is often all you need for day-to-day work, sometimes you'll want to know about a change made by a colleague who's currently on holiday, or revisit your notes from a meeting you had with a major donor 6 months ago.

With the upcoming GDPR, this information is no longer just a nice to have. Particularly focused on marketing, you need to be able to prove that the people you're marketing to have opted-in, and when they did.

With the new timeline feature, Beacon automatically logs every single change made to a record made by you, any of your colleagues, and even changes made by third-party apps like MailChimp:

Timeline example

You can also log a notes or activities (e.g. phone call, meeting, inducation) to any kind of record - so you can keep a log of your personal interactions too.

This is just the first step! In the coming weeks we'll be rolling out a number of other integrations like Gmail, Stripe and SurveyMonkey - all of which will flow nicely into the timeline. Our goal is to give you a full picture of every single interaction you've had with someone - no matter where it happened.