What are ClickUp Custom Fields? | 5 Custom Fields You NEED

Do you want to see how much time your team spent working in a particular work category or service? Maybe with that, you want to see just how profitable that work category or service line is to your business. Or maybe you want to create a nice view or dashboard for your account managers to see project progress across all of their clients. Or maybe you just want to create a nice, nifty solution like a CRM inside of ClickUp. Custom fields are what make all of this possible. Custom fields, when you actually keep them nice and tidy, can help you unlock the visibility and reporting capabilities that you're looking for in a project management system. And they're also what's going to help you build some pretty nifty and fancy solutions like a CRM inside of ClickUp. In this video, I'm going to be walking you through the what in the why to custom fields and showing you a few custom fields I'd recommend you build in your workspace today. Let's get started. So I'm going to click up here and talk about what custom fields are and really why you should use and leverage them. So, first of all, custom fields are essentially a way for you to add structured data to all of your tasks inside of ClickUp. They're really what's going to allow you to add the extra level of detail or data to your task that's going to help you create views, dashboards, and custom solutions like a CRM inside of ClickUp. So that's why you need to have some strategy and purpose behind all of your custom fields, because again, that's going to be what gives you the visibility into certain things. So whether you're trying to create a view for your account managers, your project managers, your leadership, or just individual contributors on certain projects, you want to make sure that you have good custom fields, because that's what's going to give you that visibility. Because, as you can imagine and ClickUp, once you get going and running inside of the system, you're going to have thousands and thousands of tasks in there. You want to make sure you have those custom fields that allow you to create specific views for specific people to just make their lives in their jobs way easier inside of the system. So in terms of what custom fields look like and sort of where they're located inside of your ClickUp workspace, I'll start with that and I'll sort of jump into the why. So you kind of know what you're going to be able to get out of these custom fields in the future. So really, anywhere you go, if you're brand new to ClickUp. Maybe you don't have all these spaces and things set up already, maybe you don't have a ton of tasks, but essentially your custom fields are going to look like this. So they're going to be columns within a view so they can be shown different ways based off the view that you're looking at. But if I'm in a basic list view like I am right now, we'll see. I have a bunch of custom fields listed out just like this. In addition, if I wanted to go add a new one, I go add a new column. And this allows me to add either ClickUp fields that are already inside of my workspace or build a new custom field that I want to leverage inside of all of my tasks here so I can come here to add a new column. As you'll see, we have a bunch of different options for these fields, dropdowns, which is a common one that we use a lot. You have text fields, text area, date, progress all the way down to website. So you kind of see how flexible and how much you can build click up to the way you want it based off of all these custom fields. But again, if you start building these all willy nilly and you have thousands of custom fields in your workspace, it's kind of hard to maintain all of those. So a lot of data will get lost. A lot of people don't know what custom fields are supposed to use on certain tasks. So again, make sure you have some strategy and direction going in before you start building out these custom fields, because each of them should have a purpose for why you're using it and why you're building into the system. In addition, you'll see an ability for me to use an existing field if I have one in a different location I want to bring into this location. I can do that, which I'll talk about more in just a few moments. But as you'll see here, a lot of different options. And that's why you can really build a lot of amazing things inside of ClickUp to help you be more productive and efficient. In addition, as you'll see here, the show hide. So I have the ability for my in this particular view for me to show certain custom fields as well as hide them. In addition, I can use ClickUp native fields that are already in here and I can show and hide those as well. The one thing to note with this, and this is where new users get a little bit worried and panic a bit. And this is why it could be a bit confusing from the start here is I have the ability, as you can see here, to show or hide fields as I talked about. If I go and hide this, so I have my Deliver role custom field right here. I can either hide it by clicking on this. As you can see, it's checked so I can hide it like that. Or if I still had it shown, which will make it shown again. I could also come here and hide this column there as well. So when people do that, they think that they just deleted that custom field and then all those values are gone. But don't worry, that's not the case. If I come to this task, you'll be able to see all those custom fields there as well. So as I can see, the Deliver role is still labeled right there. And then these are all the custom fields that I am using within this task here as well. So as you'll see all of our options, it shows you a little icon of what type of custom field it is. So as we can see drop down, we have a progress bar that's a drop down. And then we also have this AI summary here as well. And then this one is a checkbox there. So you'll have the custom fields that are filled out. And then there's also the ability for you to hide the three empty fields if they're not filled out there. But again, your custom fields, if you're building them in the ClickUp, you probably want them filled out. So this is always a good reminder to make sure that those fields get filled out. Because if we're trying to create a view or something like that in the future, this needs to be applied. I need to have the client labeled for this to actually get populated into a view or a dashboard like that. So we'll just label that client A for right now. So from there you'll also notice if I come back here again, I can come back and show the Deliver role again if I wanted to. As you can see, all the data is still there. Account manager. And if I go to the task, it'll be labeled Account Manager there as well. So just take note of that. Don't get worried. If you were to come here and you were to remove from from the list, that would actually remove this custom field and you're going to lose your data on that. So just be careful. That's why it's in red. You can go ahead and hide the column if you don't want to see it in this particular view. But if you go and remove it from the list, you are going to Lose that data for that custom field. Okay, so now that we've discussed sort of the what, I want to go into the why so that you kind of know why you should use these custom fields. So custom fields are important because as I mentioned, they're going to be what creates sort of views and dashboards and and custom solutions in the future. So for starters, one that's very common within sort of client services, if you're an agency, you'll have your account managers who have a book of business. So maybe they're in charge of three, four or five or however so many clients and they want to be able to create a view where they're just seeing the work across those clients. So again, this is why you need a good ClickUp hierarchy in here as well, because this is also going to play with your custom fields. I'll go over a little bit of the hierarchy and where custom fields live in just a moment. But in this, if I wanted to, I could create an account manager view just like this for let's say our account manager is Steve and he wants to see work just across his three different clients that he's in charge of. So as you can see, he's in charge of Fruit Farms, Dun Mifflin, Michael Scott Paper Company and he doesn't really care about these other clients right now. He just wants a view that shows him work across those three clients. He's not caring about anything else. He just wants to make sure he's aware of the progress of all of these projects that are going on for these clients. He wants to see sort of the status, how much time has been tracked, sort of our burn rates, things like that. So he's able to create a view like this. In addition, this could be turned into a dashboard as well because I can use these custom fields the same way I do in this particular view here. But as you can see, I'm using custom fields like a client. As we talked about earlier, the client custom field allows me here to then group all of the tasks for those particular clients like this. So Shruit Farms again, all the work that's in this folder gets that Shrut Farms custom field applied to it. And now I'm just seeing work for Shruit Farms here, Dunn and Mifflin the same thing. And then Michael Scott Paper Co. Similar there as well. So that's the first part of those fields. And then in addition, I can also filter where only I'm only seeing tasks where the account manager is Steve here. So I could also create one for John or Mary. And if you have other account managers, you can do that as well. But as you can see, this is a way for me to create one view for Steve to come to so that he doesn't have to go to all these folders and find those tasks. He can funnel all of that up into one view, making his life way easier, making the system a bit more simpler for him to find what he's looking for. In addition, I could take those custom fields, I can group by them, I can use them as filters, but I can also use them as columns here. So as you can see, we have a progress bar, which is a field. If I were to come over here and add a new column, you can see progress right there. Which there's either an auto one or there's a manual one. You could choose what you want, but the progress one that is automatic here allows me to basically just say, hey, whenever a subtask is complete, you'll start to fill out that progress bar. So as you can see, we have a bunch of subtasks completed here and that's why it's starting to fill up that progress bar, making it much easier for him to see how far along we are on a particular project or deliverable. In addition, we can also use a summary, which this is actually using AI to kind of grab all the comments, grab everything that's in these tasks, and just pull it out into this summary right here. So as you can see, there's no updates in the last seven days, but if there were, we'd be able to see that information right here. So again, using custom fields to give them data to sort of see summary and progress right there. In addition, I can use that as filters and groupings for this view for Steve. In addition, another great example of this, and really why we use it, is because you can also create something like an assignee view. So essentially what this is is I have a deliver role custom field that's built into all of my tasks here inside of ClickUp, we leverage a process library for that. I'll go over that later in this video. We also have other videos on that, which I'll link in the description below. As we'll see, we have our delivery role. All of the tasks that are for my strategist, I can group together. As we can see, we're grouping by the deliver role. I'm not using any filters here, I'm just building it to a certain location, but I can use that strategist, this deliver role. As we'll see, we have Strategist, project manager, copywriter, so on and so forth. I can take that. And now if these were not assigned or maybe I have to reassign them to someone else, I can grab all of those tasks in that grouping just like that. As you can see, I was able to just hover over right here and then grab all the tasks for the strategist and then I can use my multi select toolbar for me to go and assign this to a certain person. So if I want to unassign it and reassign it, I can do that. But. But again, this deliverable custom field will make it way easier for me to assign work in bulk once I deploy it from a ClickUp template. So that's another great use case for that. In addition, a deliverable custom field will also help me make smarter hiring decisions in the future because I can kind of see based off of the deliver role, how much work do we have for the strategist, for the project manager, for the copywriter? So I'm able to create something like a workload view right here to sort of see all that, to know, hey, we have a ton of work for a copywriter, but we only have one copywriter on our team. The copywriter work is over 40 hours a week. Maybe we need to bring on someone part time or full time to help us fill that role for other projects. So as you can see here, this is kind of a great way to make those smart hiring decisions by building and getting this data based off of those deliverable custom fields applied to all of our tasks as well. So there's a lot more that goes into that. So you're going to need things like time estimates and really start to use your workload views here inside of ClickUp. But that's another great use case for this as well. In addition, lastly, something like this, which this is actually a external dashboard in Power BI that we pull out ClickUp data and apply financial data here as well to kind of create a nice profitability reports as well as utilization reports that you can then bring back into ClickUp. But the same thing could happen with a native ClickUp dashboard. But as you can see here, if I have a custom field labeled work category or service line, whatever it may be, I'm able to kind of come here and look at all of my clients and that's going to be the client custom field as we talked about earlier. And then I'm able to utilize a work category custom field that allows me to say, hey, that particular task, that deliverable or project was for design or email marketing or software development. And I'm able to take that and all the time that's tracked against those tasks that has that field applied to it will then kind of give me more granular data to start to see, okay, how profitable is this specific service line or this work category? Should we continue with it or should we get rid of it? So I'm able to get that good data here again by leveraging a work category or service line custom field, as you can see here. So we have website management, development, software development, email marketing. I'm starting to see sort of the time and the costs associated with each of those service lines because I have that custom field applied to all those tasks. Again, to get good data out of the system, we need to put good data into the system. So you need to make sure you have the right custom fields and you also need to make sure that your team is filling out those custom fields. So there's a lot that goes into that process. And I would always recommend you have some sort of ClickUp champion or someone that's in charge of managing the system to make sure that those custom fields are all filled out there as well. And then after this, lastly, as I mentioned before, a CRM or some sort of custom solution like this is where you can also use custom fields. So as you can see, if I come in here into my CRM, I have deals, companies and contacts. Those are my lists for the CRM. And as we'll see if I come here, these are kind of not necessarily actionable tasks inside of ClickUp, these are more records and these are all associated with all the deals that we have across our organization here, across our business. As you'll see, we have Laverne's Pies, Poor Richards through Farms, and then I can use custom fields in a sort of a different way. So now I'm not using it as much for higher level reporting. I'm using it to sort of add that extra level of detail or data onto these tasks. So now I can come here and create sort of a central source of truth for all of my deals and accounts. And I can use custom fields to be labeled status. The services that we're servicing this client with, the health scores, these are going to be internal health scores, objectives, billing, start date, end dates, length, so on and so forth. There's a lot of different custom fields I can put in here. As we come here to this task, you'll see all the ones that I have applied to it, things like mps, we can bring those Scores into ClickUp objectives, length of our engagements, as I mentioned, health scores, liver leads, so on and so forth. So a lot of different options of different custom fields I could put in here to get that extra level of detail or data that I need to build out something like a CRM here inside of ClickUp. So it's super helpful, super useful to build these inside of ClickUp. Okay, so now before I jump into the custom fields I'd recommend that you use, although we've gone over some of those already, I want to talk about where custom fields live and some things you need to know about their location. And this is why I always recommend that you have a strategy with especially the hierarchy. Your hierarchy is going to be very, very important. Without a correct hierarchy, this is all going to be very difficult. So in terms of the ClickUp hierarchy that I would recommend we have a video on that on our channel that again I'll put in the description below. Also put it up in the top right so you can click right to that if you're not familiar with the ClickUp hierarchy. But in summary, the hierarchy is going to go like this. So you'll have your workspace which is essentially going to be your organization or business that's kind of represented by the everything level right here. Essentially this is a way for you to see all of your work across your ClickUp workspace. From there you then have spaces. And the way that I like to use spaces are essentially going to be for our teams within our organization or those higher level departments. As you can see here, I have a growth team, our delivery team and our operations team. Within those spaces we then have folders and, and your folders for our growth or for your spaces. Your teams here will essentially be sort of those smaller departments within that team. So as we can see here, growth, we have marketing and sales, those are two folders. And then marketing is then broken up into lists. So you have spaces, folders and then list. These lists are basically representing work categories or sort of service lines, however you want to look at that. So we have website content and email within our marketing folder. In our sales, we then have prospecting and deals. So it's just kind of a way to categorize your work and make sure that every task has a home and should be put in there. Because again, this is going to make it easier to apply custom fields via automations as well as just categorize our work for time tracking and things like that. It'll be a little bit different if you're in client services or you are an agency, you'll have a delivery space which is for your client services. These folders will be a bit different than everything else because these folders will be represented by clients. So we'll have shrut farms as our folder here, and then that folder will have list in it. And we typically represent these lists by projects or retainers are basically how you build your clients. It'll be easy to group all those tasks together within those lists like that. Now, to give you an example of sort of where custom fields live and why it's super important to build these in your hierarchy. Because custom fields can live at any level in the hierarchy. So they can live at the workspace, which I don't recommend they live at the workspace because if you have a custom field that lives at the workspace, essentially that means that custom field is living on every task inside of ClickUp. So it might not make much sense right now if you only have one space or maybe two spaces and it's all just active work in your system. But if you think about once you start building solutions like a CRM here inside of ClickUp, we don't want to have these custom fields here being applied to all of the tasks that are in my operations delivery of growth spaces. So I don't need to have a health score on all these tasks in here. Same thing with delivery. I don't need to have the deliver role on all of my CRM tasks there as well. So we want to make sure that our custom fields are just at the space level. You can have a custom field that lives at multiple spaces, so it can live in the delivery, can live in the operation space, and it can live in the growth space. That means it'll be the same custom field, the values will be the same, and I can use it to group together tasks in a dashboard as well as a view at the everything level. But I don't want to have custom fields living at the workload level. Now, with a custom field manager, you are able to move tasks or custom fields back down to certain locations. Before, you couldn't do that without the custom field manager. So that is very helpful inside of ClickUp. But again, don't recommend having any custom fields at the workspace level. It just makes it a little bit more difficult. It won't be as flexible in the future, so just leave them here at the space level at maximum. In addition, custom fields can live at the space level, they can live at the folder level and the list level. Essentially what that means is if I have a custom field that lives at the space level here. So a custom field living at gross space means I can use it in the marketing folder as well as the sales folder, as well as any of these lists. If a custom field lives at the folder level here with marketing, it means I can use it in this list, this list, and this list, but I won't be able to use it at any of these. In addition, if it lives just at the list level, just the website, that means I can only use that custom field at the website list. I won't be able to use it in content or email. So as you can see, it can be a bit daunting because custom fields can live at any level in the hierarchy. That's why I recommend having strategy, having a direction for all these custom fields, because a lot of them will probably end up living here at the space level. So you can use it across the whole space. All right, so now to give you a good example of what this looks like, just so you can sort of see and how it works in terms of our custom fields living in certain locations, I'll go here first and let's say we have a custom field just at the list level. So in this website list, I have an example custom field. As we'll see, it's in all these tasks. I can label them, I can come here, and we'll see it right here as well. So we have example custom field option one that's applied there. But if I were to go to this content list, it's not going to be in this list. So if I go to add a column, we're not going to see it in the show hide as well as if I come into this task, we're not going to see it there. So that custom field is only available in in my website list. However, if I were to go to my marketing folder here and I wanted it to be applied to all these tasks in this marketing folder, I could come here to add a show or add a new column here, go to use existing field. I could search for that example custom field in my custom field manager and we'll see it's going to be right here. So now I can go and click on this and I can add this field to this folder. And what that's going to do now is now it's going to make it available to all of these lists here within the marketing folder. It's not going to be available to sales over here. It's just going to be anything below or within this folder here. So as you can see now we're seeing example custom field. I can now apply to all these tasks. If I were to go to content here and I go to add a column, show, slash, hide, we'll see it right there. In addition, if I were to go into this task here, I would see it right there. It's not filled out. If I wanted to fill it out, I could go just like that. So that is what it looks like when you move it to the folder level. So now as we mentioned, the sales folder, I'm not going to see it in this one, but if I wanted to, I could do that. So let's just add a task just so you can see it. Go here, add a column. Again, we won't see that custom field there. But now if I wanted to open that up to this folder as well as this folder, so I can see in the prospecting and deals list, I could come here to my grow space. I could go to a view, go to add a column. I can use an existing field just like this. We can search for example yet again, just like that. Example custom field, grab this and add this field to the space. Now what that's going to do is now this example custom field will be available to me at all of these lists and all of these folders that are in this space. So now if I come here to this task again, this is in the sales folder. Now we can see the example custom field right there. So that's how they work. Again, anytime it's at the space level, that means I can use it in every task in the space. Doesn't mean I can use it in delivery space right now. But if I wanted to take that custom field and move it over to this space as well, I could do that the same way I just did it with the growth space. And now I go to add a new column, use an existing field, come here and search for example, just like this, we'll see example custom field. I can take that and I can add this field to this space now as well. So again, now we're able to use the example custom field for our filters and things like that. I wanted to come to the everything level here, add and I wanted to add a filter where the custom field of example is option one. I can now use that here. So again, that's going to be the same custom field that and I have other filters turned on. So it's not actually going to work here. But if I want to do that now, we're only going to see the custom Fields that have that example one applied to it. So we can see we have some overdue, some on the due date, but we'll see those here. So that's going to be in our growth space and delivery space. If those were filled out, if I came to delivery space and I took one of these tasks and labeled them as option one, that would, after it loaded, come into this view right here. So as we can see now, that custom field, because it matches these filters, I can see it in this particular view. All right, so now we've talked a lot about the what in the why behind custom fields. Let's jump into talking about a few different custom fields that I'd recommend that you build out inside of your ClickUp workspace. And so we've talked a lot about most of these, but I want to give a little bit more detail and maybe talk about some of them that we haven't talked about. Most of these are going to be dropdown custom fields, as you see here. These are all dropdowns, but I also recommend this progress bar, which is a progress custom field. But I'll go over a few of these and add a little bit more detail to them. So the first one that I recommend, and this is especially for client services or agencies, is going to be Account manager. So this could also be team lead, whatever way you want to use it. Essentially, if you have account managers or team leads and they need to sort of see work across their team or the clients that they're managing, you can use this custom field for. So essentially I showed you what this looks like and how you can use it. But you'll be able to use this to create a nice account manager view, just like this one for Steve. So this could be a view, this could be a dashboard. Essentially, I need that account manager custom field to use this as a filter to just take the tasks where they're an account manager or a team lead for. So again, this is a dropdown custom field. It could be labeled John, Steven, Mary. If those are account managers or team leads, I can add additional options. And I'm just going to. Basically, any task that Steve is the team lead or account manager for would get this custom field of Steve applied to it for me to use that as a filter to create a nice view for Steve there. After Account Manager, we also have work category, as I mentioned. This is going to be a great one for me to be able to create a nice dashboard inside of ClickUp. So I showed you that at the beginning of the video. Essentially a way for me to sort of see how profitable we are by each of these different work categories. So especially for anyone that's an agency or in client services, this can be very helpful. Again, this is a dropdown custom field. We'll see. These are just all of our different work categories that we have here. And any task that's paid social, that's SEO, that's paid search, web, so on and so forth would get that custom field applied to it. So again, I can take those, I can group them all together, I can filter by them, and I can also use those whenever time is tracked against each of these tasks. It'll also get applied to this paid social work category. So I can sort of see how profitable we are within this particular service or work category. So that's the next one I'd recommend. Again, this is a drop down with basically all of our different work categories that we have as a business. And I can label it that way. After work category is then is client. So client is also going to be used in something like an account manager view here to group by those particular clients. If you use this sort of folder structure here with your clients, you can also make this an automation where any task that gets added to shrut farms would essentially have this client of shrut farms applied to it. So that makes it a little bit easier on the actual deployment of it. But as you can see here, this is just going to be a group of all of our clients here and then we can use those for again filters to create a dashboard as well as grouping by them for other views there as well. So that's your third custom field you want to have. Next up is going to be that deliverable custom field. As I mentioned, this is great for making hiring decisions as well as bulk assigning work. So as you can see here, this custom field has all of my different sort of deliverables in our organization. So all the way down, ClickUp Champion, we have strategists, project managers, copywriters. You'll want to think about what those deliver roles are that you have again to help you make good hiring decisions and assign work in bulk. The way that that one's used is if I go down to my process library here. Just give you a bit of an overview here. As you'll see here, I have all of my sort of workflows built out here for brand redesign. We have our brief, we have our brand audit, mood board design, so on and so forth. Each of these tasks here are going to have a deliver role applied to it. This is going to be what helps me again assign work in bulk in the future. Because if I'm building out my processes or my workflows and saving them as templates inside of ClickUp, I don't want to add the assignee to it because I want to make sure that these are built to grow. Because you're not always going to have the same person writing this questionnaire or attending a kickoff call every single time. If you have multiple clients as your business grows, you want to make sure these are scalable. So you're going to use these deliverables to help assign that work and make smart hiring decisions. As you can see here, questionnaire is for the creative director Q and A and send questionnaire to clients for the account manager and so on and so forth. That's how you would use that deliverable custom field. So those are the four big ones. In addition, I love to leverage this progress bar here inside of ClickUp. This is also, as you can see here, used inside of this account manager view. This progress bar essentially is a progress bar. That's what it is. And this is basically going to just show us at a high level how far along we are on a particular deliverable or project. Because what this does is essentially just gives you progress on how many subtasks, checklists and assigned comments have been completed. So those are a few custom fields I'd recommend building inside of ClickUp, but there's obviously plenty of others that help you gain clarity and visibility into your business. Just make sure that each field you add has a unique purpose, purpose and strategic direction behind why it was actually added. You want to keep your workspace clean, and with that, I'd also recommend you have a ClickUp champion or someone in charge of managing your workspace as well as those custom fields to help keep it clean and tidy. And at ZenPot, we've helped close to 3,000 different teams streamline their operations in ClickUp. And the first step to this journey to clarity always begins with our blueprint process. In this process, you walk us through your pain points, your goals, your current project management setup, and talk about what you need visibility into. And we design you a custom solution and inside of ClickUp with all the custom fields that you're going to need to help you achieve this clarity. So if you're ready to build a more productive, profitable and healthy team by streamlining your operations in ClickUp, go to zenpower.com call and book a call with one of our experts. And if you like this video, please go and like it below and hit subscribe. We're going to continue to deliver weekly content for those trying to get the most out of ClickUp. And with that, I'll see you again next time. It's about time. It's about time. Yes, about time. By time.