Custom fields — track what your business actually cares about

Every land and housing business tracks something the standard fields don't cover — road frontage, HOA dues, septic vs sewer, which auction a lot came from, who referred the seller. Rather than burying it in the notes box where nothing can filter on it, add a custom field.

They live at Settings → Custom fields. Available on Starter and above.

Four places to put a field

Pick which record type the field belongs to — they're kept separate on purpose, so a buyer's card isn't cluttered with seller-only fields:

• Buyer — what you need to match inventory to a buyer.
• Seller — context about the person or their situation.
• Other — vendors, title companies, attorneys.
• Property — attributes of the land or house itself.

Five field types

• Text — a short line.
• Long text — a paragraph.
• Number — sorts and compares numerically.
• Date
• Dropdown — you supply the options, comma-separated.

Where they show up

Once created, a custom field behaves like a built-in one: it appears on the record's detail card, can be added as a column and a filter on its tab, comes through on CSV import, and rides along in exports.

Design them so they stay useful

• Add fields you'll filter or decide on, not everything you could possibly record. If you'd never search by it, notes are the right home.
• Name them for what they are ("Road frontage (ft)"), not for where they came from ("Field 3", "From spreadsheet").
• Put the unit in the name. "Road frontage" invites feet, metres and "about 200" in the same column.
• Start with three or four. Fifteen fields nobody fills in are worse than four that are always current — an empty field silently breaks every filter built on it.

What's next

To bring existing data in, see the import section of The CRM. To act on a custom field automatically, note that dropdowns and text fields make good conditions in Automations.