Every business keeps something TaDa Books does not ask for: the job site and permit number on a contractor's invoice, the unit on a property manager's bill, a customer's account rep, the project code on a purchase order. Custom fields add those boxes to your own forms.
Add a field
Open Company Settings > Accounting and find Custom fields. Press Add field:
- Name - what the form shows above the box, and what the paper prints beside the value. Up to 40 characters.
- Used on - Customers or Vendors put the field on the contact; Sales forms or Purchase forms put it on each document.
- Shows on (sales and purchase forms) - tick the forms it belongs on: invoices, sales receipts, estimates and credit memos; or bills and purchase orders.
- Holds - Text (up to 200 characters), Number, Date or a Choice list of up to 30 choices. An id, a ZIP code or a phone number is Text, so its leading zeros stay.
- Print it on the paper - the value shows on the printed and emailed document and on your customer's own pages, whenever it has one. At most eight fields print on one paper.
A company can have up to 12 active fields of each kind. The up and down arrows set the order they appear on the form.
Fill one in
Open the invoice, bill, estimate, credit memo, purchase order or contact. A Custom fields card sits at the bottom of the window with one box per field. A contact that is both a customer and a vendor shows both sets.
A custom value is not accounting data. Changing one never touches the amounts, the dates or the entry behind the record, so you can fill one in on an invoice in a locked month, or on a bill waiting for approval, without changing anything else.
Where the values go
- Copies and conversions carry them: an estimate turned into an invoice, a purchase order billed, a copied invoice, bill or purchase order, a recurring invoice and each invoice it makes, a memorized bill and each scheduled bill. Only fields that belong on the new form travel.
- Search in the invoice, estimate, credit memo, bill, purchase order and contact lists finds a record by its custom values, numbers included.
- Download my books gives each customer, vendor and document file one column per field, and adds custom-fields.csv describing them.
Change or retire a field
You can rename a field, change its choices, the forms it shows on, and whether it prints at any time. Once any record holds a value, what it holds and where it is used are fixed: make a new field instead.
A field holding values cannot be deleted. Make inactive takes it off every form and keeps every value; a printed one still shows on the documents that have it. A field nobody has filled in can be deleted.
Removing a choice leaves it on the records that already hold it. The form shows it as "no longer an option", and saving the record unchanged is always allowed.