Custom contact fields — Help

Every contact carries a few things that 1pm asks for out of the box: a name, a business, a role, an email, a phone number. But the things you actually need to track on a supplier are often more specific than that. A licence number. An account code. Whether their public liability cover is still in date. A T-shirt size for the volunteer crew. Custom contact fields let you add those to every contact, so the detail you care about lives on the person rather than in a spreadsheet you have to dig out each time.

The real payoff is that a custom field can be filled in by the crew member themselves. Tie a request to a field, and when the supplier answers it (or uploads the document), their reply lands straight on their contact record and stays there for the next event. This article covers defining your own fields, the field types on offer, and how to collect them automatically.

Where to find it

Open Contacts from the sidebar, then the Custom fields page (you may remember it as Contact fields). Custom fields apply to every contact in your address book, not to one person or one event, so they live here rather than on an individual contact.

A field you define shows up on every contact's edit form, but only once that contact actually has a value for it. An empty field stays hidden, so adding a "Forklift licence expiry" field doesn't clutter the record of every florist and photographer who will never have one. Records stay as clean as they were before you added the field.

The field types

When you add a field you pick its type, and the type is fixed once the field exists (so is a Choice field's option set). Pick it deliberately.

Text. A free-text value. Keep it to a single line for a licence number, an account code, or an arrival preference, or switch it to multi-line when you need room for a longer note or a standing briefing.
Choice. A fixed set of options you define, picked from a list. Set one option per line, with at least two. Tick "Allow more than one selection" if a contact can have several at once (dietary tags, for instance); leave it unticked for a single pick (a shirt size, a tier). A contact's selection is stored as the chosen option or options.
Date. A calendar value entered through a date picker. Use it for a certificate expiry, an induction date, or any fixed day you want to keep against the contact. It is stored as a plain date and is not wired into document expiry reminders, so treat it as a record of the date rather than an alarm.
Number. A numeric value such as a party size, a table count, or a vehicle count. Number fields also roll up: on an event's planner page, 1pm totals the value across all the event's contacts (the combined party size, say), which stays on the planner view and never appears on a crew's run of show.
Time. A clock time, stored tidily as HH:mm. Use it for a standing call time or a recurring slot a supplier keeps.
Upload. Tracks the latest document a crew member has submitted against a request mapped to this field. Use it for a compliance document like a public liability certificate or an ID, where what you want on the record is the file itself.

Adding and ordering fields

Give the field a name (for example "Public liability certificate"), choose the type, and for a Choice field type the options into the box. Add field saves it, and the form clears so you can add several in a row.

The list of fields can be reordered: grab the drag handle on any field and drop it where you want. The order you set here is the order the fields appear in everywhere they show, so put the things you look at most near the top.

Filling fields in yourself

For every type except Upload you can set the value directly on the contact. Open the contact, and the custom fields sit beneath the standard ones: a text box for Text, a date picker for Date, a number box for Number, and a time picker for Time. A Choice field shows its current value collapsed, with an Edit reveal so the full option list only appears when you want to change it. This is the right path when you already know the value, or a supplier told you over the phone.

Letting crew fill fields in for you

This is where custom fields earn their keep. Instead of typing every supplier's licence number yourself, you can ask them once and have their answer write straight onto their record.

When you create a request (either a per-crew request to one supplier, or an event-wide request asked of everyone), you can point it at a custom field instead of asking a loose question:

Map a request to a Text, Choice, or Date field, and the crew member's answer writes through to that field on their contact. The request card on their share link shows the right input: a text box for Text, radio buttons or checkboxes for Choice, a date picker for Date.
Map a document request to an Upload field, and the most recent file they submit becomes the latest document on that field.

Because the value lands on the contact and not just on the event, the next time you book that supplier the licence number or the certificate is already there. You only have to ask once. Both per-crew and event-wide requests support this, so you can collect a licence number from one specific contractor or ask your entire casual pool for their shirt size in a single request.

Good uses, and keeping it tidy

Custom fields are at their best for details that are durable and that you reuse: things that belong to the person and outlast any single event. A licence or insurance document, a supplier account code, a uniform size, a standing dietary requirement. For one-off, event-specific questions ("what time will you arrive on Saturday?") a plain request without a field mapping is usually the better fit, since you don't want a one-night answer permanently stamped on the contact.

Because empty fields stay hidden on a contact, you can afford to define a field that only applies to a slice of your address book without it cluttering everyone else. The field only surfaces on the contacts that actually have a value.

Removing a field you no longer need

There are two ways to retire a field, and 1pm steers you to the safe one. If a field has never been used (no contact holds a value for it and no request points at it) you can delete it outright. If it is in use, deleting it would throw away data you have already collected, so 1pm keeps the field and tells you what is blocking the delete (a value on a contact, or a request mapped to it). In that case archive it instead: archiving takes the field off your active list and hides it from new records without erasing what crew already submitted. Reach for delete only to tidy up a field you created by mistake, and archive for anything that has done real work.

Asking crew for documents and info covers per-crew requests in full.
Asking everyone for the same thing covers event-wide requests.
A contact's request history shows everything a contact has ever sent back, including the values that wrote through to their custom fields.