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 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 reporting capabilities that you're looking for in a project management system and they 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 and 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 let's jum 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 click up they're really what's going to allow you to add that 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 click up U 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 could 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 tests 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 drop downs 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 they're 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 uh in this particular view for me to show certain custom Fields as well as hide them in addition I can use click up 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 and panic a bit this is why it could be a bit confusing from the 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 roll 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 or if I still had it shown which we'll make it

shown again I could also go 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 roll is still labeled right there and then these are all the custom fields that I am using um within this task here as well so as you'll see all of our options

it shows you a little icon on 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 into 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 um labeled for this to actually get populate it into a view or a dashboard like that so we'll just label that client a for right now um so from there you'll also notice if I come back here um again I can come back and show the deliver roll 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 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 um 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 custom Solutions um in the future so for starters one that's very common within sort of Client Services if you're an agency um you'll have your account managers who have a book of business so maybe they're in charge of

three four five or however are 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 oura 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 shuit farms then 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 um 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 shro Farms again all the work that's in this folder gets that shuit Farms custom field applied to

it now I'm just seeing work for sh Farms here dun Mifflin the same thing and then Michael Scott Paper Company um 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 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 um you can choose what you want but the progress one that is auto 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 and we'd be able to see that information right here so again using custom fields to um 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 assign view so essentially what this is is I have a deliver roll custom field that's built into all of my tasks here inside of clickup we lever to 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 deliverer roll all of the tasks that are for my strategist I can group together as we can see we're grouping by the deliver roll I'm not

using any filters here I'm just building it into a certain location but I can use that strategist um this deliver Ro 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 uh 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 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 um that role for other projects so as you can see here this is kind of a great way to 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 and really start to use your workload views here inide 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 powerbi that we pull out clickup data in 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 um but the same thing could happen with a 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 deliver 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 cost 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 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 field 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 lence pies Poor Richards shot 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 uh 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 all the ones that I have applied to it things like MPS we can bring those scores into clickup objectives length of our engagements um as I mention 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 super helpful super useful um to build these inside of clickup okay so now before I jump into the custom Fields I'd recommend that you use um although we've gone over some 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 um 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 uh 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 your folders for our growth um 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 um so you have spaces folders and then lists these lists are basically representing um 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 in deals um 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 sh Farms as our folder here and then that folder will have list in it and we typically represent these lists by projects

or retainers or basically Bally 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 into 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 um 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 Crum here inside of clickup we don't want to have these custom Fields here being applied to all of the the tasks that are in my operations delivery at growth spaces so I don't need to have a health score on all these tasks in here um same thing with delivery I don't need to have the deliver

roll on all 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 at uh 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 and a dashboard um as well as a view at the everything level but I don't want to

have custom Fields living at the workload level um 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 recom recomend 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 um 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 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 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 to this task we're not going to see it there so that custom field is only available 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 um 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 it will 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 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/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 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 lists 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 field will be available to me at all of these lists in all these folders um 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 any times 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 the 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 grow space so 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 if I wanted to come to the

everything level here 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 um 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 appli to it so we can see we have some overdue someone no due date but we'll see those here um so that's going to mean our

grow 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 and 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 drop down custom Fields as you see here these are all drop downs but I also recommend on 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 in this especially for client services or agencies um

is going to be account manager so this could also team lead um 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 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 there're an account manager or a team lead for so again this is is a drop down custom field it could be labeled John Steve and 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 a nice dashboard inside of clickup so I showed you that at the beginning of the video essentially away 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 drop- down 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 um within this particular service or work category so that's the next one I'd recommend again this

is a drop down basically all of our different work categories that we have as a business and I can label it that way um after work category is then is client so client is also going to be used in something like an account manager um view here to group by those particular clients um if you use this sort of folder structure here with your clients you can also make this in automation where any task that gets added to sh Farms would essentially have this um client of sh Farms applied to it so that makes it

a little bit easier on the actual deployment of it 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 um that's your third custom field you want to have next up is going to be that deliver roll 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 delivery roles in our organization so all the way down uh clickup Champion we have strategist 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 to give you a bit of an overview here um as you'll see here I have all of my sort of workf flows built out here for brand redesign we

have our brief we have our brand audit um mood board designs so on and so forth um 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 um want to add the assign 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 deliver rules to help assign them Network and make smart hiring decisions so as you can see here questionnaire is for the creative director Q&A and send questionnaire to client is 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 the high level how far along we are on a particular deliverable or project because what this does is essentially just uh gives you a progress on how many subtask 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 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 zot we've helped close to 3,000 different teams streamline their operations and click up in 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 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 stream oning your operations and clickup go to zen.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 trying hard not to waste it it's about time about yeah it's about time