Candid Beacon documentation
Candid Beacon turns a question you keep answering by hand - “do you have capacity?” - into a page you can send. This section is how it works, what it publishes, and what it deliberately does not.
What it is
You record the work you have taken on. Candid Beacon works out how booked that makes you over the next few weeks, and publishes the answer as a page anyone can read without an account: a percentage, a status, and the date you are next free.
The status is one of three, and the boundaries are the same for everybody:
| Status | True Load |
|---|---|
| Available | Under 50% |
| Busy | 50% to 79% |
| Full | 80% and over |
Time off is separate: a Beacon can also be Away, which is a state rather than a percentage. How True Load is worked out sets out the arithmetic in full.
It is published, not live
This is the thing most worth understanding before anything else.
Your Beacon shows the last figure you published, not a live read of your account. Nothing reaches it until a snapshot is written - by you pressing Update Beacon, or by one of the automation switches doing it on your behalf. Drafts, half-typed jobs and work you are still deciding about are simply not there.
Work you have marked tentative is excluded from every published figure, unconditionally, however your own dashboard is set up. What clients see is your confirmed workload and nothing else.
What is public, and what is not
There are three public surfaces, and all three read the same published snapshot, so none of them can reveal more than the others: the Beacon page, the embeddable badge, and the share card used for link previews.
What they carry:
- Your published percentage and status, or an away state and a return date.
- The next opening date, when there is one.
- How recently the figure changed.
- Anything you typed yourself - a bio, testimonials, a call-to-action button, a banner.
What they never carry:
- Client names, job titles, notes or dates of individual pieces of work.
- Hours, day counts or any raw number behind the percentage.
- Your waitlist, or anything about the people on it.
- Your email address, including on mail sent on your behalf.
Where to start
- New here? Publish your first Beacon is the two steps between signing up and having something to send.
- Setting up your capacity? Working hours is what the percentage is measured against.
- Building against it? The public surface is the complete list of what a third party can fetch.
One note on wording
Candid Beacon calls a piece of work a job, and these pages use that word throughout. You can rename it - to “project”, “brief”, or anything else - in Work setup, under Terminology. If you have, your screens will say your word where these pages say “job”. Everything else is the same.