Overview
AchieveIt’s Custom Fields feature gives you the flexibility to track the information that matters most to your organization. Whether you're managing strategic plans, operational initiatives, or departmental goals, Custom Fields allow you to tailor your tracking experience—making it easier to view, filter, and report on the data that drives decisions. If you are unsure of how you could use custom fields this article will give you a number of use case examples to get your started!
Why Use Custom Fields?
Custom Fields empower you to:
Track Unique Data Points
- Capture specific information that isn’t covered by default fields—like budget status, risk level, department owner, back up reporter, date last review, or priority level.
Improve Visibility
- Quickly filter and sort your plan items based on custom criteria, helping you surface insights faster and stay focused on what matters. When you use Custom Fields you can filter and create searches based off of that criteria as well as see the exact nomenclature that you set as the custom field. For example you may add a user as a member of an item because they are a back up for the assigned to user, but you can’t easily identify why they are a member, by using a custom field you can now identify who the back up reporter is and quickly identify why they are a member as well as what items they are the back up for.
Enhance Reporting
- Include Custom Fields in dashboards and reports to give stakeholders a clearer picture of the information you may be documenting currently in the description field, as a tag, or somewhere outside of AchieveIt.
Increase Flexibility
- Use Custom Fields to make AchieveIt even more intuitive to your users. Customize your fields to adapt AchieveIt to your organization’s language and unique processes.
Easily Track when Data was Reviewed by Leadership
- Instead of manually tracking or remembering when you last reviewing a key item give your leadership a date custom field that highlights the date it was last reviewed. Now they are easily run reports on what they haven’t reviewed yet or things that were reviewed longer than a set timeframe ensuring they see everything they need to on a regular basis.
Examples of Custom Field Use Cases & The Field Type You Should Leverage:
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Know if leadership has reviewed items with the Date field
- How to use: Add the Date field type to your Custom Fields and give it a name such as “Date Last Reviewed”. Add this to a plan of your choice and train leadership to change this field to the date that they review an item. Now you can easily run a report on this date custom field to see items that haven’t been reviewed or were reviewed more than a set number of days ago.
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Quickly see the priority of items with the Dropdown field
- How to use: Add the Dropdown field type to your Custom Fields and give it a name such as “Priority”, then add the priority types “High”, “Medium” and “Low” (or whatever priority names you would like). Add this custom field to the plan you’d like to track this information on and simply mark this on each item you’d like to be able to identify the priority. Now you can easily run reports and see each item that fits into those designated priorities.
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Easily identify key items with the Boolean field
- How to use: Add the Boolean field type to your Custom Fields and give it a name such as “Key Item”. Then select the “Yes/No” or “True/False” state option. Add this custom field to your plan you’d like to track this information on and simply mark this on each item you’d like to be able to identify as a key item. Now you can run a report or add to a custom dashboard the items that fall in this criteria.
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Identify different roles that were previously just a grouping of members, such as backup, executive sponsor, and more using the User field
- How to use: Add the User field type to your Custom Fields and give it a name such as “Backup”. Add this custom field to your plan you’d like to track this information on and simply select the appropriate user for each item you’d like to identify a backup on. This allows you to now easily identify why a user might be a member of an item and allows you to now generate reports for your users that quickly shows them where they are the backup.
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Understand the Team that owns the items with the Team field
- How to use: First have a Team created in AchieveIt. Once that is done, add the Team field type to your Custom Fields and give it a name such as “Department”. Add this Custom Field to your plan you’d like to track this information on and simply select the appropriate team for each item you’d like to identify the department or team on. This will allow you to easily see what department may own an item that was previously being identified by a tag.
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Navigate to SharePoint or other source documentation with the Hyperlink field
- How to use: Add the Hyperlink field type to your Custom Fields and give it a name such as “Source Documentation”. Add this Custom Field to your plan you’d like to track this information on and add in the hyperlink you’d like to navigate to. This is extremely helpful to navigate to SharePoint or other cloud sources where this information may be stored and allows you to easily see it without the information getting lost in the description field.
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Sort projects that are over, under or within a specific amount with the Currency field
- How to use: Add the Currency field type to your Custom Fields and give it a name such as “Total project budget”. Add this custom field to your plans that you would like to be able to search and filter on budget and put in the budgeted amount on the project. Now that this is in place you can run searches across multiple plans and add in a range of values to see the projects that fall within that set range.
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Track what Percent of your budget is being allocated to an individual item or project with the Percent field
- How to use: Add the Percent field type to your Custom Fields and get it a name such as “Percentage of allocated budget”. Add this custom field to your plans that you would like to track this on and add in the percentage for that item in the custom field. Now you can run a search across all of your plans that you are tracking this field on and see it consolidated in one clean view.
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Share important context that needs to be highlighted with the Text or Long Text field
- How to use: Add the Text or Long Text field type to your Custom Fields and give it a name such as “Board Context”. Add this custom field to your plans that you would like to highlight key details and start to add in those details to the appropriate plan items. This can be great if you want a specific group like a board or the public to see a different comment than the one an internal user provides. Also a great way to call out what the information you might be putting in the description field is actually for. NOTE: Text gives you a character limit of 100 vs 400 for Long Text. When it doubt pick Long Text.
To take Custom Fields to the next level you'll want to leverage them on your Custom Dashboards and in Saved Searches. In this article we'll share suggestions for making the most impactful Custom Dashboard.