How To Make Work Tracking Easier And More Efficient With Custom Fields

How To Make Work Tracking Easier And More Efficient With Custom Fields

It is essential for organizations to keep track of every little detail related to work. 

It aids in recording and measuring a wide range of internal and external activities and serves as the foundation for all reporting, and is therefore critical in business.

But dealing with overwhelming amounts of information and data is nothing but a growing challenge for businesses all around the world. 

Around 36% of managers claim that their health and efficiency are deteriorating as a result of the overwhelming amount of information they have to process at work.

They’re struggling with information overload, to put it another way. And it’s having a significant impact on their personal well-being, decision making, and productivity.

However, we still have a reason to be optimistic.

New tools and techniques are here as a solution for those of us struggling with information inundation. Some technological solutions sort and prioritize information or data as per your requirement and save you loads of time and effort.

One such data management solution is Custom fields. It lets you track and capture information pertaining to your requirements and configure your work accordingly. 

What are Custom Fields?

Custom fields are definitive sections that allow you to record pertinent project information, adjust details as per your workflow, and better understand project needs to help you keep track of every element of your work and make sure that nothing falls through the cracks. 

They allow users to store personalized task details such as project status, project stage, type, expenditure, priority, categorization, and more. Custom fields help users store specific task information and alter details such as date, currency, percentage, list, text, numbers, etc. Further, users can also use custom fields in table view for formulae calculations.

Custom fields can be created on a diverse range of entities and make everyday data and task management easily approachable. Users can create computed task-specific fields that can be modified as per demands and display a comprehensive list of information essential for successfully completing a task. 

Custom fields are a great addition to everyday project management and reduce a large amount of busy work. More often than not, the default field offered by tools is not enough when working on a task. Therefore, custom fields are quintessential to suit the unique requirements of each project and team.

Custom fields are a boon for users looking to improve project management and overall collaboration. For better understanding, here are a few upsides to using custom fields for day-to-day project management. 

Personalize project information as per your discretion with Custom Fields. Switch to ProofHub Today!

  • Improved usability

As mentioned above, custom fields help clarify task requirements, project-specific information and make it readily accessible for users. Including relevant information that is otherwise excluded in static task fields improves the tool’s overall usability and enhances the user experience.

  • Project categorization

Custom fields greatly help in categorizing projects and prioritizing essential tasks. They allow users to personalize projects as per their workflow, such as setting specific project statuses by creating a dropdown list, reporting project-related metrics, or recording high priority dates. 

  • Customized workflow 

As the name suggests, custom task fields enable users and teams to alter their workflow and customize it according to task prerequisites. This helps save time, minimize efforts, and detailed information also helps promote accountability among groups. 

  • Improved reporting

Another bonus of using custom fields is it indicates progress better. By creating a custom dropdown list including detailed reports, users can help others get an in-depth idea about the project status. Extensive indexes with subcategorization make custom fields an indispensable addition to project reporting.

  • Budget details

Custom fields also help record costs and manage project budgets better. This is a great way to keep track of budgets and never go overboard, thereby wasting time and energy. Further, by defining access to these fields and restricting visibility to specific people, you can ensure such pertinent information is secure. 

  • Multiple uses

Custom fields can be altered as per a user’s needs and can store pivotal information. Its uses are not limited to particular project details. The number field can be used to track information such as budgets, invoices, ticket numbers, user ID, costs, and more. Likewise, dropdown has many uses, such as setting project priority, status, stages, phases, content type, and more.

Custom Fields in ProofHub

ProofHub Custom Fields

ProofHub’s Custom Fields allow you to customize your workflow and define project parameters as per your usage and the requirements. They help you gain better clarity about task requirements and let you define your own parameters.

Using ProofHub’s Custom Fields, users can easily include relevant information that would be otherwise excluded in fixed fields and personalize their projects as per their workflow to report on the organization and project-related metrics.

Custom fields are also quite useful for obtaining detailed information on the status of a task, whether it is done, in production, or has just begun.

Users have access to the following custom task fields:

  1. Date- The date field can be used to save and keep track of important dates. 
  2. Currency- The currency field can be used to store information in a variety of currencies. $ USD, $ CAD, $ AUD, £ GBP, € EUR, YUA, $ NT, and RU are the default currency kinds. You can, however, add other currency types to save financial information.
  3. Percentage-  The percent field type can be used to store numerical values that are represented as percentages.
  4. Tags- Using the Tags field, you can create task tags and personalize them with various color schemes. You can even attach several tags to a task.
  5. Dropdown- You can use the dropdown field to generate a list of options to select from(as per the requirement).  For a better look, you can add as many options as you want and color code them accordingly.
  6. Text –You can mention any type of information in the text field. The added information will be displayed in a single line.
  7. Text area- The text area field is similar to the text field as you can save any sort of information in it. The only difference is that data is displayed in numerous lines instead of a single line.
  8. Numbers- The number field helps you store number data in various formats. The default formats available in ProofHub’s custom fields are positive, negative, decimal, and exponential figures. 

Simplify everyday tasks, customize your workflow, and deliver projects successfully with ProofHub’s Custom Fields. Sign up for free today.

How to create Custom Fields in ProofHub?

Adding custom fields to your project in ProofHub is simple and takes only a few clicks. Users can add Custom Fields to their projects in two ways-

From Table view- 

How to create custom field in table view

  1. In the project’s Task section, go to the Table view and click the + icon in the upper right corner of the screen.
  2. Choose the type of field you wish to add to your project. 
  3. Give the field a name or a title. You can even add a field description if you want. 
  4. Make the necessary changes based on the requirements and field type you’ve chosen.
  5. To add a field, use the ‘Add’ option.

Table view and Custom Fields

Custom fields also help boost other features offered by ProofHub but the key feature is Table view. 

These task fields enable users to take complete advantage of the table view and increase everyday productivity manifold.

The table view is critical for managing data in a central space. Custom fields add value to the table view by helping visualize more data in a single window. Viewing more data on a single window helps manage it more effectively, thereby augmenting the table view’s overall usability. 

These fields are highly configurable and convenient to update comments, indicate progress, resources, and statuses of multiple tasks within a project. It almost serves as a project schedule in an excel sheet but without the hassle of switching tools. 

From Task window

How to add custom field from the task window

  1. Open the task window and click on any task you need to create fields for.
  2. Add a new field by using the ‘Add field’ option.
  3. Create a new field with a new name and title.
  4. Choose a field type.
  5. Include a field description (optional).
  6. Click on the ‘Add’ option to add the field.

How can different teams use Custom Fields to track work efficiently? 

Since every business is unique, there is a need for a separate location to record information specific to its workflow or projects.

The fixed fields provided by many platforms are insufficient if you want to put in the information that is relevant to your work process. 

ProofHub’s custom fields are super flexible and can be easily used by different teams to track their work efficiently. 

Recruitment Teams

Every hiring procedure is different. What’s significant to your team might not be relevant to another firm.

ProofHub’s Custom Fields help you personalize your recruiting data as per your requirements and match your workflow to your actual hiring process. 

You can create specific fields to keep track of applicants, like position, years of experience, department, expected salary, willingness to relocate, interests and more. 

Marketing Teams

Today’s marketing tactics revolve around data and information, which is critical for making the appropriate connections with the right people and across the right channels.

With the constant flow of information coming in and out of channel systems and customers interacting with companies through a variety of contact points, marketers need to be extra diligent while managing all their marketing information and data.  

With ProofHub’s custom fields, marketing teams can easily keep track of their marketing tasks and information. They can create fields to manage their marketing budgets, keep track of social media posting schedules, blog editorial calendars, and much more.  

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Engineering Teams

Engineering should be about engineering. However, when data management spirals out of control, resulting in errors and missed deadlines, engineering feels more like administration.

As a new development or product proceeds through its lifespan, from concept to launch, it collects a plethora of data, including numbers, descriptions, thousands of files, spreadsheets, PDFS, and whatever else. 

Custom fields make it easy for engineering teams to track their data efficiently and make way for technical cooperation. For example, engineering teams can easily create fields to track different versions of an iteration, track bugs by creating drop-down fields to keep track of priority levels, QA testing and much more. 

Design Teams

The design process generates a large amount of data. Your design information and data are literally the blueprint for your product, therefore, proper data management is vital to your organization to produce great designs.

Designers already have a lot on their plates, so they need a simple way to keep track of everything in one place. Using Custom Fields is the simplest method to achieve it.

Design teams can easily keep track of creative developments by creating different fields related to design requests and types, the person working on the design, number of hours it will take to complete, type of collateral and more. 

Track work efficiently and stay on top of deadlines with Custom fields. Sign up for a 14 day free trial.

Conclusion

Businesses have to keep track of a great amount of information in a precise manner. Custom fields make it easy for teams of all kinds to keep track of all the tasks and data that matters to them. 

It gives your team the power to customize their projects and workflow and track everything relevant to their work process. 

Therefore, by tailoring ProofHub to their particular needs teams can eliminate silos, stay on the same page, and accomplish great things together. 

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