Republish on a schedule
Four switches that publish your Beacon for you, and one window you can hold updates inside. All five are off by default, and an account that touches none of them behaves exactly as it always did.
The four switches
They live in Work setup → Automation, under “Automatic Beacon updates”. Each one says when a fresh figure should be published without you asking:
- When you add a job.
- When you change one.
- When you delete one.
- Once a day, if anything has changed.
The first three fire on the thing you just did. The fourth is a nightly recompute that catches everything else - a job whose due date passed, a time-off block starting, a horizon sliding forward.
It recomputes; it never sets a status
This is worth being precise about, because “schedule my Beacon” usually means something Candid Beacon deliberately will not do.
There is no way to schedule a status. You cannot tell it to say Available on Monday. The status is derived from your computed load, on every path that writes it, so publishing “Available” while booked at 120% is not something the product can be made to do.
What the daily switch does instead is recompute and republish - so if a job finishes on Friday, the engine already knows Monday is freer and your Beacon says so without you opening the app. That is the honest version of the same wish.
An unchanged Beacon is not republished
The nightly pass compares what it computed against what is already published - your status, your percentage and your next opening date - and writes nothing when all three match.
That is not an optimisation. Rewriting an identical snapshot would move the timestamp behind your freshness marker, so an account whose situation had not moved in six weeks would be advertising “updated 2 hours ago” to visitors - exactly the overstatement that marker exists to prevent, caused by this feature. It would also permanently silence your own stale warning.
So switching the daily update on does not make your Beacon look fresher than it is. If your work genuinely has not changed, the marker keeps ageing.
One exception worth knowing: if your planning horizon is not a whole number of weeks, your percentage genuinely does move most nights as the window slides, so your Beacon really will republish most nights. That is a true change rather than a false one - but if the noise bothers you, a whole number of weeks is flat. See Set your working hours.
What it will not do
| It refuses to | Because |
|---|---|
| Publish your first Beacon | A background job must never make an account public that has never published. The first one is always yours to press. |
| Publish while sample data is present | Example load must never reach a client by any route. |
| Publish for an account with the switch off | Off is off. An account that has not opted in is not even looked at. |
Quiet hours
Quiet hours is a window - two whole hours in your timezone - during which an edit does not immediately republish. It exists for the 2am reorganisation: you do not want a client refreshing your Beacon mid-shuffle.
Four things about it:
- It needs the daily update switched on. The daily pass is the only thing that publishes a held change, so the window is refused without it - and switching the daily update off clears the window with it. There is no configuration in which a change is held and never published.
- It holds edits, not the nightly pass. The scheduled recompute runs regardless. Subjecting it to the window is what would let a Beacon never republish at all.
- Crossing midnight is normal. 22:00 to 07:00 is the case it was written for.
- An all-day window cannot be set. A window that starts and ends at the same hour is refused, so every legal window leaves at least one hour uncovered.
A held change tells you it is held
When the window holds an update, your dashboard says so, and offers you the way out:
Your latest change is waiting for quiet hours to end at 07:00. Publish it now
Update Beacon is never gated by the window. It is your own deliberate action, so there is no state in which you are stuck waiting. The notice disappears as soon as anything publishes - scheduled, event-driven or pressed by you.