Custom fields: capture extra data on your work

Custom fields in Beebole add your own data fields to people, projects, tasks, and time records. Use them to capture what Beebole’s built-in attributes don’t cover — an employee ID on every person, a client reference on each project, or a ticket number on every time entry — and reuse those values as columns in your reports.

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Creating a custom field

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Field types

Beebole supports seven field types, each suited to a different kind of data: You can change a field’s Field type later from the Custom field details panel — the type-specific options switch accordingly.

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Field options and validation

Each type comes with its own options, all edited in the Custom field details panel and saved automatically: Custom fields don’t carry default values — a field starts empty (or shows its Placeholder text) until someone fills it in. Turn on Use predefined values to restrict a text field to a fixed list: add each entry under Allowed values, and users pick a value from that list instead of typing freely.

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Unique ID fields

A Unique ID field holds an identifier that only one item can carry, such as an employee number or the code a project has in your ERP. Each non-empty value can belong to only one item across everything the field is used on, whatever its type: if a person holds EMP-0042, no other person, project, task, or time entry can take it.

• Matching ignores upper and lower case and any spaces before or after the value, so emp-0042 counts as EMP-0042. Beebole removes those surrounding spaces when it saves the value.
• Archived items keep their values, so archiving an item doesn’t free its ID. Deleting the item does.
• Empty values don’t count: any number of items can leave the field blank.

Use Validation pattern (regex) to enforce a format, for example ^EMP-\d{4}$ for EMP followed by four digits. A Unique ID field has no length limits and no list of allowed values. When someone types a value another item already holds, the field is flagged Already used and the value isn’t saved. If Beebole refuses the value when saving, the message names the holder — This ID is already used by followed by the item’s name — when that person is allowed to see the item, and reads This ID is already used by another item. otherwise. The same check applies to values written through the API. You can switch an existing field to Unique ID only if its current values contain no duplicates, compared the same way. Otherwise Beebole refuses the switch with This field has duplicate values, so it cannot become a Unique ID field. Remove the duplicates first.

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Choosing where a field appears

The Custom field visibility panel controls which items carry the field. A single field can apply to several, and each toggle is saved automatically:

• Visible for People — The field appears on every person’s profile.
• Visible for Projects — Turn it on, then use Add a category to choose the project categories where the field applies. Within each category you can tick the hierarchy levels — for example top-level projects only, or their subprojects too.
• Visible for Tasks — Turn it on, then choose the task categories where the field applies.
• Visible for Time Records — The field appears when filling in a time entry’s details on the timesheet. Narrow it down with Project categories and Plannings, and turn on Absences to also show the field on time-off entries. A field scoped to a planning applies to tasks at every level of that planning.
• Visible for Absence types — The field applies to your time off types. It appears in the Custom fields panel of each type, and it becomes a column you can review and fill in for time off types in Master data review.

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Who a field is asked of

Visibility decides which kind of record can carry the field. The field’s Who has access? panel then decides which records actually get it, with sections for people, tags, projects, tasks, and time off types. When Show all custom fields is on in Show or hide by default, those sections flip into exclusion lists instead. See Assignments for how the two directions work together. On a time record, the field follows the person the timesheet belongs to — not whoever types the entry — and Beebole checks every link the entry offers: the person and their tags, the projects on the entry and their parents, its task, and, on a time-off row, the time off type it is booked against. A match on any one of them brings the field in, which is what makes an assignment to a time off type show the field on absences of that type.

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Entering values

Which records show a field depends on Show all custom fields, in the Show or hide by default panel of Account Settings. While it is on, as in a new account, a field visible for a given type appears automatically on every matching record, except the ones excluded in its Who has access? panel. With it off, the field appears only on the people, tags, projects, tasks, and time off types listed in that panel, directly or through a tag. See Who a field is asked of. Open a person, project, or task and fill in the field in its Custom fields panel; values are saved automatically as you enter them. For time records, open the entry’s details on the timesheet and fill in the field there.

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Custom fields in reports

Custom field values flow into reporting. When you build a custom report, a custom field is offered at the bottom of the field list of the report columns that match its visibility, so a field like a client reference or region becomes a regular report dimension:

• Fields visible for people appear in the Person column.
• Fields visible for projects appear in the column of each project category they apply to, at the levels you ticked. Fields visible for tasks appear in the column of each planning they apply to.
• Fields visible for time records appear in the Time column.
• Fields visible for absence types appear in the Absence type column.

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Custom fields in the API

Definitions and values are both exposed in Beebole’s GraphQL API: read them with getCustomFields and getCustomFieldValues, write values with addCustomFieldValue and its edit mutations. This is how an identifier from another system — an HR or payroll ID kept in a text field, or the External ID field a legacy migration creates — is looked up or filled in from a script. See Custom fields on the Queries page and Custom fields on the Mutations page.

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Managing custom fields

To manage an existing field, open it in Settings > Custom Fields and click the ⋯ action menu next to its name. The menu offers Duplicate, Rename, Archive, Unarchive, and Delete. Archived fields disappear from the list. Click Show Archived to display them, then use the ⋯ action menu and Unarchive to restore one.

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Related content

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Frequently asked questions