Creating and updating records
By default every submission creates a new Beacon record. On a public form that means the same person filling the form in twice leaves you with two records to merge later.
Update Existing Records avoids that. With it on, the plugin asks Beacon to find a matching record first and update it, only creating a new one if nothing matches. Beacon calls this an upsert.
Turning it on
- On the form's Integrations → Beacon tab, turn on Update Existing Records.
- Choose a Match On field.
- Make sure that same field is mapped in Field Mapping.
That last step matters. Beacon needs the value in the submission itself to know what to search for, so if the match field is not mapped, nothing is sent and the failure is logged against the submission.
Choosing a match field
Email is the usual choice for people. It is the field most likely to be present, and most likely to be unique.
Whatever you choose, it needs to be genuinely unique in your database. If two records share the value, Beacon picks one, and it may not be the one you expected.
If you are importing from another system and have a legacy ID stored on each record, that is a better match field than email, because a person's email address can change while their legacy ID cannot.
Check for existing duplicates first
Upserting into a database that already contains duplicates does not clean them up. It just updates whichever record Beacon matches, which can make the duplication harder to spot. Deduplicate first if you can.
What gets overwritten
Only the fields you map are sent, and empty values are skipped. So a mapped field left blank on the form will not blank out a value already in Beacon.
A mapped field that does have a value will overwrite what is there. That is usually what you want, but it is worth thinking about for fields your team maintains by hand. If a staff member has carefully set someone's Type and your form maps Type to a fixed value, the form wins every time.
If in doubt, map fewer fields.
Create-only, deliberately
Leaving Update Existing Records off is the right call when each submission genuinely is a separate thing: an event registration, a donation, a support case, an order. In those cases you want a new record every time, and matching would actively lose data.