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Tutorial: Using Custom Fields

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Shane Workman May 20, 2024


Extend Projectal with custom fields to match your company's exact needs.

Using software tools within your company that cannot be easily customized or extended to align with your specific workflows can lead to frustration and inefficiency for your team.

Projectal has a default set of entities and data fields that will meet the needs of most companies to bid, budget, plan, schedule, track and report on projects, departments, staff, locations and more. However, there may be circumstances where you wish to extend Projectal and introduce your own custom data fields.

You can easily add you own data fields into Projectal that are specific to way your company works. Custom fields can be added for staff, departments, projects, tasks, companies, customers, bookings and much more. You can add as many custom fields as you like.

Custom fields can be used to sync data from your other software tools. Custom fields can be used to store extra data that you need when bidding, budgeting, planning, scheduling, tracking or reporting.

Users can create and manage custom fields in Projectal via the Management screen. Developers can create and manage custom fields via Projectal's API & Python library. Using permissions and access policies, access to custom fields can be restricted to only certain users such as system administrators.

Working Example

Let's imagine your company uses the BambooHR software tool for managing all your staff records, and you wish to sync these records into Projectal so that all these details are kept up-to-date. Most data can be automatically transferred using our connectors, but you may have additional data points you wish to sync. Let's add 2 new fields to cater for this data:

  1. BambooHR ID: You may want to store BambooHR's staff IDs. This extra "BambooHR ID" field in Projectal makes it easier to manage syncing your staff each day from BambooHR to Projectal.
  2. Visa Expiry Date: Additionally, let's add a "Visa Expiry Date" field for staff into Projectal so you can better manage your team that are coming from other countries under work visas.

Creating Custom Fields

It's easy to add custom fields in Projectal. Simply go to the Management screen and click on the Custom Fields button. If you don't see the Custom Fields button on the Management screen, talk with your system administrator to give you permissions.


The Custom Fields screen lists all the entities in Projectal, such as STAFF, PROJECT, TASK, DEPARTMENT, COMPANY, etc. Select an entity from the drop-down list that you are interested in and the custom fields for that entity will be listed. If you have not yet added any custom fields, then the list will be empty.

To add our two custom fields, we would select STAFF from the Entity dropdown and click the Add button to display the New Custom Field screen.


There are various attributes that you can fill in:

Custom Field Types

When adding a custom field, it's important to choose the right type for the custom field. Projectal has a set of 14 different types to choose from.

For our two custom fields that we wish to add into Projectal, we would add the following:

For the "BambooHR ID" custom field:

For the "Visa Expiry Date" custom field:

Viewing and Editing Custom Fields

After you add a custom field to an entity, then you can see your custom field wherever that entity's data is displayed.

For our two custom fields for the STAFF entity, whenever we add new or edit existing staff in Projectal, then we will see these two new data fields on the New Staff screen and Edit Staff screen.


We can also create reports in Projectal using data views and include the custom fields into those reports. 

Setting Permissions for Custom Fields

You can set the permissions and access policies for custom fields just like you would for any other field in Projectal. This lets you control:

In our example, let's say we don't want users to edit the "BambooHR ID" data since this is being automatically synced from your BambooHR tool. So we could choose to set the permissions on this field so that it is hidden from users, or set it to read-only so users cannot change it.

Changing or Removing Custom Fields

If you wish to change or delete your custom fields, then simply go to the Management screen and click on the Custom Fields button. Select the entity you wish to see and then select the custom field you wish to edit or delete. Use the toolbar buttons to change or edit the custom fields.

Want to learn more? Contact us and we can help you to extend Projectal to be the perfect fit for your company.