You decide what Beacon writes back into your tools.
The engine reads everything you connect. What it is allowed to write back is a separate decision, tool by tool and system by system — and your accounting and billing are never in it.
Inform
Beacon reads your tools and writes to none of them. It reports what it finds.
Prepare
Beacon prepares the change — the cleaned record, the corrected field — and holds it for a person.
Autopilot
Beacon writes the change into the tool, inside your guardrails, and tells you it did.
The difference is how far the work has already got.
You are in charge at all three. What changes is whether Beacon is describing the change, holding it ready, or writing it.
One job, drawn three times. The lane is the same length at every level — what moves is the point where it reaches you.
What the engine holds →Six places it may write. One it never will.
An engine that only reads leaves the mess where it found it. These are the tools Beacon can put right, each one a separate switch, and the one boundary that is not a setting.
Each one is a separate switch, revoked in one click in the tool it came from. CRM writing is its own decision — plenty of companies turn record cleaning on long before they turn campaigns on.
A number is only as good as the record underneath it.
Most of what makes revenue reporting wrong is not the maths. It is two records for the same customer, a stage nobody moved, an invoice that never met the account it belongs to. Beacon can see all three from the engine. Letting it fix them is what turns a clean number into a clean company.
Illustrative. The engine already knows these are the same company, the same deal and the same month — writing back is what closes the gap between knowing and fixing.
How much to trust each figure →And how much it decides, system by system.
Move any system to any level and watch what changes. Open a system to see every function it covers, and where each one is capped.
hours of human work a week, across the whole company
moves a week Beacon completes without anyone
exceptions a week that stop and ask for a person
Illustrative, at a company the size of the one used across this site. Your own numbers appear here once billing is connected.
Some things never reach level three. That is deliberate.
Turning a system all the way up does not turn everything in it all the way up. A handful of functions are capped in the product, not in your settings, and no amount of trust unlocks them.
The pale track is where each one would go if a setting could take it there. Nothing does — these are capped in the product, and they read the same on your first day and your thousandth.
Nobody starts at the top. Almost nobody stays at the bottom.
The pattern is the same at every company: turn up the systems where the work is obvious and reversible, and leave the ones with a customer or a signature at the end of them.
The three presets in the panel above, drawn. Month one proves the numbers; month three turns up the reversible work you have watched for eight weeks; month six leaves you the calls that were always yours.
Every level is reversible, and the record survives the change.
Drop a system back a level and it takes effect on the next move, not retroactively. Everything Beacon did while it was one level higher stays sealed exactly as it stood, with the setting it was running under attached.
You can always answer the question “who decided this, and under what rule?” — including for the moves that ran at a level you have since turned down.
Start at Inform. Nobody stays there.
Every customer sets this differently, and every one of them changes it. Start free and set it wherever you’re comfortable.