Note: Locking payments is available on our Premium, and Ultimate plans, with the Finance element.
Beacon makes it easy to keep a fixed record of your payment history with locked payments. Once locked, payments cannot be changed.
Need to make a change to a payment that's been locked? You'll need to unlock it first.
In this article:
How locked payments work
Payments can be locked or unlocked. By default, only admins can lock and unlock payments.
You can give non-admins the ability to lock and unlock payments with roles & permissions.
Once payments are locked:
No one can change them
Smart & rollup fields stored on the payments will not be recalculated automatically
You'll see a handy locked icon on payments that have been locked:
Locking payments
When viewing any payment record, you can lock it by clicking the lock icon in the top-right of the page:
Once locked, none of the fields will be editable:
Unlocking payments
Once a payment is locked, you can unlock it again if you need to make changes:
Locking payments in bulk
It's also possible to lock (and unlock) payments in bulk! When viewing a list of payments, you'll see lock and unlock options available:
Filtering
When viewing a list of payments, you can filter based on lock information:
Considerations for locked payments
While locked records is at its core a very simple feature, there's a few things to bear in mind:
Smart & rollup fields
Smart fields and rollup fields on a locked record will not automatically recalculate when related records change, or when the formula itself is changed.
This is particularly important in the context of rules-based smart fields, which are useful for automatically allocating "income streams" to payments.
Gift Aid
Locked payments will still be added & removed from Gift Aid claims automatically:
Practically speaking, this will only ever happen when person or Gift Aid declaration details are changed - as the payment itself is locked!
Payout allocation
Locked payments will still automatically get allocated to payouts:
Refunds
When a payment is refunded in Stripe or GoCardless, Beacon automatically sets the Amount refunded field. Again - this will still get set automatically on locked records when refunds occur.
Imports
If you're importing payments, and using deduplication rules to update existing payment records that are locked, then those payments will not be updated.
Frequently asked questions
Is it possible to lock record types other than payments?
Not currently. If this would be useful to you, let us know!