Custom Fields

With custom fields you can store arbitrary business data on customer accounts and invoices. That data can then be displayed on the invoice presented to your customer.

Custom fields have many uses. Here's just a few scenarios where custom fields can help:

You can add a new custom field by going to Settings → Custom Fields → New Custom Field.

These object types support custom fields:

Once you have created a custom field you can begin using it immediately. When creating or editing data (i.e. customers and invoices) in the application you will see form elements for the custom fields you have added.

If you have enabled customer visibility on your custom field, then customers will see it in the customer portal and on documents. Not every object supports displaying custom field values to a customer. This feature is primarily reserved for custom fields on customers, invoices and line items. Any non-empty, customer-visible custom field will be displayed on the invoice presented to your customer. If the custom field is empty on the invoice then it will inherit its value from the customer account.

These object types can display a custom field to customers when enabled:

When browsing customers, invoices, estimates, subscriptions, and payments inside of the dashboard you can filter the results by custom field values. This setting is available within the Filter menu. Any results return will exactly match the filter you have built.

Custom fields enhance your reporting by making additional filtering and grouping options available.

You can filter reports to only include invoices that exactly match a custom field value. Want to see how a specific region or department is performing?

Any of the invoice reports can be grouped by custom field values using the Group By option. The custom field must have been set up with a pre-defined list of choices in order to support grouping. This might be useful for building a sales by rep report.

Custom field values can be set when importing customers and invoices.

In certain circumstances custom field values will be inherited from related objects. For example, you could have a "Sales Rep" field that is used across customers, invoices, and payments. This section documents all scenarios where custom fields can be inherited. Custom fields are matched across object types, such as from a customer to an invoice, using the custom field ID and not the name.

If a custom field is deleted then the previously entered values will NOT be deleted. The underlying data will be maintained in the object metadata regardless of whether the custom field exists.