> ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.harboros.co/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Beacon > Ask questions about your book in plain English. Beacon answers from your real contracts and deals — never from guesswork. Beacon is the part of HarborOS you can ask questions. You type a question the way you'd ask a colleague — "what's renewing in the next 60 days?", "how did ARR change last quarter?", "show me everything for Acme" — and Beacon answers in plain language, with the numbers. What makes it useful for finance work, rather than a novelty, is where the answers come from. Beacon never answers from memory or from a general guess. Every figure it gives you comes from a live lookup against your own contracts and deals at the moment you ask. If the data isn't there, it tells you plainly instead of filling the gap. ## How it answers When you ask something, Beacon chooses from a small set of read-only lookups over your data, runs them, and writes its answer from what comes back. It can't invent a customer, an ARR figure, or a date — if a number appears in the answer, it came from a record. The lookups cover the questions finance teams actually ask: * Search your contracts by customer, status, or whether they auto-renew. * List what's renewing or expiring inside a window you choose. * Pull portfolio totals — contract count, total and average ARR, how many auto-renew, how many expire soon. * Open the full extracted detail on a single contract. * Project ARR forward up to 24 months. * Build an ARR bridge between two dates, broken into new, expansion, contraction, and churn. The forecast and the bridge aren't Beacon's own estimates. They're worked out by the same rules the rest of HarborOS uses — from your contract term dates, your renewal links, and the renewal judgment you've set — and they produce the same result every time. A contract counts as churn in a bridge only when you've marked it churn, or its term ended well past its grace period with nothing renewing it forward; a contract still inside its grace period is treated as pending renewal, not churn. ## Charts and board slides When a picture carries the answer better than a sentence, Beacon can draw it instead of only describing it — ARR over time, a renewal timeline, customer concentration, an ARR waterfall, a forecast with best- and worst-case bands, or a board-ready KPI slide. The chart is built from the same numbers Beacon just looked up; it isn't drawn separately from the answer. ## What Beacon won't do Beacon reads; it never writes. It can't change ARR, mark a renewal, promote a deal, or edit a contract. Every judgment that moves your numbers still happens where you make it — in Renewals, in Pipeline, on the contract itself. Beacon helps you find and understand the numbers; it never becomes the thing that sets them. ## It only sees your data Beacon runs as you. It can read only what your HarborOS account can already read — your organization's contracts and deals, and nothing from anyone else's. It's also careful with the contents of your documents. A contract PDF can contain any text at all, so Beacon treats everything inside your documents strictly as information to report — never as instructions to act on. Wording buried in an uploaded file can't redirect what Beacon does. Each answer is kept with its conversation, along with a record of the lookups Beacon ran to produce it. The Contracts, Renewals, and Pipeline data Beacon reads from. The rules behind Beacon's forecast and ARR bridge.