Sometimes you'll want to create a number of records for a given list of other records in Beacon. What a confusing sentence.
Here's a couple of tangible examples:
For a list of 100 people, create 100 event attendees (add 100 people to an event so you can send them invites)
For a list of 20 payments, create 20 tasks (e.g. to acknowledge manually via a phone call)
Beacon is pretty flexible, so this works with any kind of record - even custom record types.
Creating related records in bulk
You can create related records for any record type, but in this example, let's create event attendees for a list of people. Specifically, we want to invite these people to a certain event - so we need to create event attendees to add them to the event.
Go to a list of records that you'd like to create related records for. E.g. "people"
Select the people rows that you'd like to add to the event
Click the three dots in the top left, and then click Create related records
As we're creating Event attendees, select that from the dropdown. We can also set additional data that should be set for each new record created:
Click create. Within a few seconds, all of your event attendees will be created!
Frequently asked questions
What is the "link field"?
Records in Beacon "link" or "point" to each other. This is one of the fundamental Beacon concepts about the way data is stored. See the point to another record section of our field reference docs.
For example:
Payments point to people via the "donor" and "fundraiser" fields
Event attendees point to people via the "person" field
People point to organisations via the "organisation" field
When creating related records in bulk, the pointing field will be set for each row you've selected. This is how you can bulk associate people with an event, for example.