In Beacon, there's lots of quick and easy ways to find the records you want - whether you're working with a supporter database of 500 or 5 million records.
Searching for records
You can search through any type of record using the search feature in the top right of the record list page.
Your list will now only show records with an exact match for your search, from many field types including
Name
Email
Location
Short text
Long text
Currency
Number
URL
Point to another record fields
It will even search those fields on linked records (e.g. email address for a payer when searching payments).
You can use % (the percent symbol) as a wildcard character when searching. For example, if you're not sure if someone is 'David Simpson' or 'Dave Simpson' you could search for Dav% Simpson which would return both results!
Tip: Searching is super useful, but a blunt tool! For finding specific data in specific fields, or to find a list of records that match your criteria, use filters instead.
Filtering records
You can filter any kind of record in your Beacon database easily. For some helpful examples of filtering, check out our guide article.
Click the filter icon in the top right, and you'll see a drawer appear.
You can choose any of the fields in the list - and set up conditions to filter your records on:
Your records list will auto-update every time you change your filter conditions.
Note: By default, only records that match all conditions will show in the updated list.
OR filters
If you'd like to include filter conditions that could be one of multiple options, you can use Beacon's OR filters
To switch between AND and OR filters, you can simply click the button between filters.
If you'd like to combine both AND and OR filters, you create create individual filter groups by clicking the '+ Add filter group' button. You're able to change the operator between filters within a group, as well as the different filter groups!
Saving your filters
Filtering is great, but it's pretty laborious to enter the same filter conditions every time, right? That's why we made it possible to save your filters! The set of records that is returned by your filter conditions is called a view.
After you've finished building your filters, click Save View at the bottom of the filter drawer. You can then choose a name for this view, and decide whether you'd like other members of your team to be able to use it too:
After saving, you'll see your new view appears in the saved filters list. Now you can come back to it whenever you like!
Check out more information on views here.