Custom Fields in CRM: Track Industry-Specific Data

Custom Fields in CRM: Track Industry-Specific Data

Every service business has details that a generic CRM will not guess correctly.

A dog groomer may need coat type and temperament. A driving instructor may need licence stage and test date. A clinic may need referral source, consent details, or visit-specific measurements. A trades business may need appliance model, access notes, or property type.

The wrong response is to put everything in notes. Notes are useful, but they are hard to filter, standardise, or report on. Custom fields give the business structured data without building a custom system from scratch.

Notes Are For Reading, Fields Are For Acting

The difference is simple.

If staff only need to read something, a note may be fine. If the business needs to filter, validate, require, segment, or report on it, the data belongs in a field.

Example:

Data	Better As	Why
"Client prefers quiet appointments"	Note	Contextual and human
Coat type	Select field	Standard options make filtering possible
Next renewal date	Date field	Can be searched and used in follow-up
Vehicle registration	Text field	Specific identifier
Appointment measurement	Number field	Structured per visit

This is why custom fields are powerful. They turn industry-specific knowledge into usable operational data.

What Tregovia Supports

Tregovia's Custom Fields module is a baseline module. It supports tenant-defined fields across supported entity types including clients, pets, patients, appointments, invoices, estimates, deals, suppliers, documents, lab orders, products, memberships, support tickets, services, telehealth sessions, employees, shipments, assets, inventory items, prescriptions, vaccinations, veterinary records, and medical records.

Supported field types include:

• Text
• Textarea
• Number
• Date
• Boolean
• Select
• Multi-select
• Email
• Phone
• URL
• Currency

Field definitions can include labels, descriptions, placeholders, required status, position, select options, validation rules, default values, portal visibility, filterability, and section grouping.

For an example of custom fields in a real vertical workflow, see CRM for pet groomers.

Why Generic CRMs Fail Specific Industries

A CRM built around a single vertical (a salon-only booking app, a clinic-only patient system) can hardcode the right fields from day one because it only has to serve one kind of business. A general CRM serving veterinary clinics, law firms, cleaning companies, and photographers at once cannot hardcode "coat type" and "licence stage" and "referral source" into the same schema without becoming useless for everyone else.

That is the actual problem custom fields solve: they let a single underlying data model bend to each tenant's industry without a code change per vertical. A few concrete situations where this matters:

• A veterinary practice needs to track vaccination due dates and breed-specific notes that a law firm has no use for, and vice versa for case numbers and filing deadlines.
• A trades business wants to filter clients by "has a service contract" to plan renewal outreach, which requires a real filterable field, not a sentence buried in a notes column.
• A fitness studio wants to require an emergency contact field on every new client before the first session, which needs field-level validation, not a reminder to staff.

Without custom fields, each of these businesses would either misuse notes (unfilterable, unstructured) or need bespoke database changes per tenant, which does not scale across a multi-tenant platform.

The Most Common Mistake

The most common mistake is creating too many fields.

Custom fields feel cheap, so teams add everything:

• Favourite colour
• Secondary preference
• Third contact note
• Internal flag nobody uses
• "Maybe useful later" fields

Then the form becomes long, staff skip it, and the data quality collapses.

Better rule: create fields only when the answer changes a workflow. If it affects service, billing, scheduling, compliance, follow-up, or reporting, it may deserve a field. If it is just background detail, leave it as a note.

Fields Age Differently Than Notes

An overlooked aspect of custom-field design is that structured fields need periodic review in a way freeform notes don't. A note is inherently timestamped by context and rarely misleads a reader about when it applies. A field with no date attached can quietly go stale and be trusted as current when it no longer is.

A "preferred staff member" field is a good example: useful when set, but if that staff member leaves the business, every client record still pointing to them silently becomes wrong until someone notices. The same risk applies to any field capturing a state that can change (membership tier, active medical condition, current vehicle). Building in a habit of periodically auditing which fields represent a snapshot-in-time versus a durable fact helps avoid decisions being made on data that quietly went out of date.

Choose The Right Field Type

Bad custom-field design creates messy data even when the software works.

Use select fields when values should be controlled. "Long coat", "long-haired", "long hair", and "L/H" should not become four separate answers if the business wants to filter them later.

Use dates for reminders, expiry, renewals, review dates, and test dates. Use number fields for measurements or quantities. Use boolean fields for yes/no flags. Use text only when the value is genuinely open-ended.

That discipline matters later when the business wants segmentation, recall, or cleaner reporting.

Client-Level Or Visit-Level?

Put the field where the truth lives.

Client-level fields are for stable facts:

• Preferred staff member
• Communication preference
• Membership tier
• Referral source
• Pet coat type
• Vehicle registration

Appointment-level fields are for visit-specific facts:

• Measurement from that appointment
• Service variation that day
• Check-in detail
• Visit outcome
• Per-appointment note

Mixing these up makes records noisy. A stable client preference should not be re-entered every visit. A visit-specific result should not overwrite the client profile.

Pricing Snapshot

The Custom Fields module is included as a baseline module. The default free limit is 10 fields, controlled by platform configuration.

The custom-fields cap-removal add-on is EUR 5/month and removes the field limit.

The base Tregovia CRM plan is EUR 47/month. Many small businesses can start with the included field limit and remove the cap only when the data model genuinely needs it.

The Bottom Line

Custom fields make a general CRM fit the details of a specific business. The key is restraint.

Use fields for data you need to structure, require, filter, or act on. Use notes for human context. Keep field types clean, use select options where possible, and put each field at the right level. Done well, custom fields give Tregovia enough flexibility to serve many industries without turning every business into a custom software project.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are custom fields in a CRM?

Custom fields are tenant-defined fields added to records such as clients, appointments, estimates, invoices, deals, services, employees, shipments, and other supported entity types.

What field types does Tregovia support?

Tregovia supports text, textarea, number, date, boolean, select, multi-select, email, phone, URL, and currency custom fields.

Are custom fields included in the base plan?

Yes. The Custom Fields module is baseline. The default free limit is 10 fields, and a EUR 5/month cap-removal add-on is available when the business needs more.

Can custom fields be required?

Yes. Custom field definitions can be marked required. They also support position, options, validation, default value, portal visibility, filterability, and section grouping.

Should everything go into custom fields?

No. Use custom fields for data that needs structure, consistency, or filtering. Use notes for freeform context that staff only need to read.