Custom Fields: The Swiss Army Knife of Project Management

After more than twelve years in project management, I can say: every project is different, yet every project is the same. This paradox exists because there are corporate standards for project planning and deviations from them. Basic project information must always be entered: project name, project number, start and end dates, division assignment, and project category. When these standard fields are not enough and special information is needed, custom fields* come into play as the controlled deviation from the standard.

To prevent custom fields in your InLoox account from sprouting like mushrooms in the woods, thereby creating chaos through excessive individualization, here are some tips and practical examples of how to use custom fields effectively in InLoox.

Contents

• What are custom fields?
• Who can create, edit, and leave them blank?
• Three practical use cases for custom fields
  1. Mechanical engineering: managing technical details and quality assurance
  2. Marketing: structuring topics, subcategories, and approvals
  3. Construction and infrastructure projects: creating transparency and traceability
• Where else can you use custom fields in InLoox?
• Conclusion: well-configured custom fields for efficient project control

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What are custom fields?

Simply put: they are data fields that you can create yourself for almost any area within a project. In InLoox, you can create custom fields for the project manage page, tasks, Gantt planning and time tracking, as well as for budgets, risks, or documents.

You can choose from various field types such as string (for text), datetime, integer, decimal, boolean (for checkboxes), list, or currency. This allows you to enrich projects with individual information and structure and analyze them accordingly. Each custom field is also available as a column in list views.

But custom fields are more than just extra data fields. They make project management with InLoox more flexible, precise, and far better adapted to the working reality of every team or company.

Who can create, edit, and leave custom fields blank?

Security and control are always important when dealing with project data. That’s why custom fields in InLoox are protected by a permissions system.

Project administrators can create custom fields and define in the InLoox settings:

• whether all users with write permissions in a project can edit these fields, or
• whether only specific people or roles have access.

This ensures that sensitive information such as parts numbers or internal approval gates can only be modified by authorized persons.

You can also define rules for creating custom fields, specifying under what conditions a field will even be generated. For example, you can make a Gantt-related custom field dependent on the project’s division assignment. This prevents the kind of wild growth mentioned above and keeps the InLoox interface free from unnecessary data clutter.

Additionally, each field can display a warning if it must not be left blank. This ensures that mandatory information is not overlooked, keeping your project data consistently clean.

Three practical use cases for custom fields

1. Mechanical Engineering: Managing Technical Details & Quality Assurance

Projects in mechanical engineering are complex, with many components, standards, and checkpoints, often in long process chains with interdependencies. Custom fields supplement key information such as part numbers or types and are also useful in quality management for tracking quality assurance (QA).

For serial numbers and part types, a string field works well, allowing you to enter alphanumeric combinations. If you prefer to avoid free text and standardize inputs, use the list type instead. This reduces typos but requires that an administrator adds new entries to the list in the InLoox settings.

Both project managers and team members should maintain these fields to prevent unnecessary inefficiency or back-and-forth communication. Since the data is important, warnings should appear if fields are left empty.

^{Image: Custom fields for mechanical engineering projects in the InLoox settings. © InLoox, Inc.}

For the quality assurance process, two custom fields are helpful:

• one list field for the QA status (e.g. “Not started,” “In review,” “Rejected,” “Approved”)
• and one checkbox field QA completed to confirm the final approval.

With permissions management, only two people,  a responsible QA person and a deputy, can change the status and mark QA as complete. This keeps responsibilities transparent and traceable.

All of these fields should allways be visible since they are universally relevant in mechanical engineering projects.

2. Marketing: Structuring Topics, Subcategories & Approvals

Marketing thrives on creativity, but when it comes to planning campaigns and measuring effectiveness, structure is essential. Custom fields can ensure that marketing projects and tasks are properly categorized, organized into topic clusters, and that approvals are well documented.

InLoox already provides a standard “Category” field, allowing you to tag projects as “New Business,” “Onboarding,” or — for marketing — “Lead Generation.” However, for division-specific categorization, it’s better to use custom fields to avoid cluttering the category list.

For example, a list-type custom field “Subcategory” might include “Social Media Marketing,” “SEO,” or “Event Marketing.” This allows you to group and analyze project lists by department, category, and subcategory.

Similarly, a list-type field “Topic Cluster” for tasks helps structure content creation. Instead of maintaining long Excel lists of blog titles or videos, you can tag tasks across multiple marketing campaigns by topic (e.g. “Project Management Office”) and evaluate how much content is planned, in progress, or completed.

^{Image: Custom fields for marketing projects in the InLoox settings. © InLoox, Inc.}

Approval workflows are also common in marketing projects, so a custom field “Approval Status” makes sense, with statuses like “Not processed,” “In review,” “Rejected,” and “Approved.” Edit rights should be restricted to the project manager or two designated QA persons to ensure no document is published or campaign launched prematurely.

These fields are automatically created only when the project is assigned to the Marketing department (Rule: Department = Marketing). That way, other departments are not burdened with irrelevant fields. Again, warnings help ensure no required data is missing.

3. Construction and Infrastructure Projects: Creating Transparency & Traceability

Whether in the private or public sector, construction and infrastructure projects demand solid preparation and governance. Lengthy planning and approval processes involve many stakeholders and consume significant time. Changes after project kickoff are even more time- and cost-intensive.

To ensure that projects are optimally prepared before final approval, custom fields can support three key areas: approval planning, risk analysis, and stakeholder management.

These fields rely on the project status. It’s recommended to use the InLoox project application mode, which allows only authorized users to submit project requests instead of creating projects directly. Two people should have the right to approve project requests. Custom fields are then created based on the rule Project status = Request.

^{Image: Custom fields for construction and infrastructure projects in the InLoox settings. © InLoox, Inc.}

Each of the three list-type fields can include statuses like “Pending,” “In progress,” and “Completed & submitted,” along with a warning if left empty. Only the project manager and one representative may edit them, ensuring accountability and transparency. Together, they provide a simple yet effective control mechanism to improve the quality and approval rate of project applications.

Where else can you use custom fields in InLoox?

InLoox wouldn’t be a professional project management platform if the data from custom fields couldn’t be further utilized. Depending on where the custom field is created, it can be displayed as a column in list views, and used in reports and dashboards.

To display a custom field as a column, right-click any column header, select Choose Columns, then drag and arrange your custom fields.

For example, in construction projects, displaying the custom fields Approval Planning, Stakeholder Communication Plan, and Risk Analysis as columns allows you to quickly see which project applications meet all prerequisites. You can even add conditional formatting for columns in the list view, e.g. traffic-light colors, to highlight applications that don’t yet fulfill all approval requirements.

Once you’ve customized and formatted a list view, it’s a good idea to save it as a list view template and share this view as a standard view across your organization.

Conclusion: Well-configured custom fields for efficient control

Custom fields are the Swiss Army knife of project management — versatile, powerful, and adaptable. In InLoox, they go even further: thanks to permissions, rules, and warnings, they become genuine governance tools.

This creates the perfect balance between flexibility and control. Projects can be tailored individually without descending into chaos. Whatever your industry, anyone who wants to manage projects cleanly and efficiently will greatly benefit from thoughtfully configured custom fields.

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* Custom fields are a feature of the InLoox Enterprise, Enterprise Plus and On-Prem Editions. The InLoox Professional Edition does not include the feature Custom Fields.