OpenCRM is being used by a huge variety of companies, each of which has their own individual needs and demands of the system. One way in which we are able to service these differences is by enabling the creation of custom fields. This allows you to capture all kinds of unique data within your CRM solution.

Furthermore there are many distinct types of user-defined fields you can create. As well as text fields,  some of the more common ones we use all the time on clients’ systems include creating picklists, checkboxes, URL, telephone  and user selector fields. As well as broadening the functionality, this makes creating new records quicker and reduces the margins of error – selecting a value from a picklist means they will always be consistent rather than having to type the entry every time.

To give you an example you could create the following field on a company record entitled “Catchment Area”. This might be a picklist populated with the values South-East, South-West, North-East, North-West, Midlands and London.

Once you have created the ability to capture this unique information, the next logical step is to make this data quickly and easily available for you. Having a way of displaying all the companies in a particular catchment area means you are able to use this list, perhaps to send out a targeted message relevant to this group of companies, or you can work your way through the list in a systematic and logical way. This is easily done in OpenCRM by creating a view which displays companies based on the selected filter.

This is just one example of how creating custom fields gives you a great way of distilling your data – by using combinations of fields, custom fields and views, you can clarify the data in as specific or general as your needs demand.

For further information on how you can create custom fields in OpenCRM please refer to this FAQ.