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Product Updates
Product Updates
Product Update - March 2025
David Simpson
March 19, 2025
We're really excited to introduce a great new feature for Beacon Ultimate customers. With Beacon Data Warehouse you can directly access the database infrastructure that powers Beacon. This means you can do things like write SQL queries to retrieve the data that you need from Beacon, and connect your favourite BI tools like Power BI, Tableau, Metabase, and Google Data Studio.
What's really clever here is that by providing access to the data warehouse that's already powering Beacon (it's built on top of Google BigQuery) you get access to a system that is not only blazing fast, but is updated in real time from your Beacon account. That's pretty nifty.
If you're interested in finding out more about the Beacon Data Warehouse then please get in touch, we'd love to show you how it works!
We've added the ability to split fees on payments in Beacon. When you split a payment, you can now split the fees on that payment by the same percentage.
If you choose not to split the fees, we will add all the fees to the first payment, and leave the fees fields on the other payments empty.
In Xero you can expect this behaviour:
It's worth noting that introducing this feature can create duplicates of fees on your Xero line items in some rare circumstances. If you spot any of these, you can safely delete them.
There's now a really quick and handy way to duplicate a record in Beacon. Super useful for Events, Campaigns, and Tasks, but it works with all record types! You'll find a new button in the top right of every record which will let you make a copy.
A special shout-out to all of the customers who requested this handy little feature - glad we could make your lives a bit easier!
You can use Fundraise Up’s amazing online giving tools to boost donations and personalise the giving experience for every donor. Fundraise Up is a great solution for Beacon customers who want to go beyond what Beacon’s donation forms offer - for example, check out Edinburgh Dog and Cat Home’s donation page.
Beacon’s integration with Fundraise Up means that all your valuable data around donations and donors will be imported directly into your database almost instantly. So, you can rest assured that your data is reliable and up-to-date, with zero manual input.
You can find out more about our Fundraise Up integration in Beacon's blog post, and Fundraise Up's blog post.
Just like with Stripe payments, you can now easily import payments from GoCardless that were made outside of Beacon. Perhaps you've received a written mandate via post, or have set up a Direct Debit over the phone. Now that data can flow automatically into Beacon just like direct debits from Beacon forms. Instructions for how to set this up are in this guide article.
This week we've successfully completed the first stage of our ISO 27001 audit. Stage two is scheduled for the start of June so we should have a shiny certificate to share with you shortly!
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.
Next, we're almost ready to release Record Access, which will give you more fine-grained control over which Beacon records your users can access.
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