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Product Updates
Product Updates
Product Update: June 2019
David Simpson
June 1, 2019
This month's biggest release is our new workflows system.
Although in its infancy (we've released workflows into Beta testing), the workflows feature will allow you to automate time consuming tasks and build your own helpful automations within Beacon.
You can build a workflow to alert you when a donor donates over £100, and to specifically alert the Head of Fundraising when a donor donates over £500. Soon you'll be able to use workflows to send your team a summary of your key metrics every morning, alert you when the 100th person has signed up for an event, or to send you an email if your iZettle's battery is running low. Integrations just allow you to connect to other systems. Automation allows you to actually do things with them.
You can read more about automation workflows here.
At Beacon it's really important to us to always be at the cutting edge of technology, whether that's our infrastructure, user interface, or responding to emerging trends in the charity space.
It's clear that contactless donations are here to stay and now you can seamlessly integrate your contactless payments with Beacon. For starters we are providing support for the two systems we think are the best on the market right now: iZettle and Square
This means that you can now start taking contactless donations in minutes with these devices. Simply buy a card reader, connect your account to Beacon, and you can see your donations flowing into Beacon.
You can see how easy it is to get started with iZettle here.
While we were researching available contactless payments solutions we've built up a good knowledge of what is currently available. We'll be publishing an ebook soon that gives an overview of contactless donation systems - watch this space!
As more and more customers migrate away from their clunky, outdated CRMs we're seeing the need to make importing data from messy sources is more important than ever.
We've released "virtual columns" to add even more power to Beacon's import templates. You can now create additional columns in your import template that are treated as if they are in the CSV you're uploading. This means you can build composite IDs for records made up of several values from different columns, you can map the same column to multiple fields, and you can modify the data in a column however you like. A virtual column can take an excel formula as its input - so the possibilities really are limitless!
Stay tuned for the release of smart merging of records, Braintree payment support, improved searching, and more snappy UX improvements coming very soon!
See you next month!
