Recording something the CRM has no field for

Every business tracks something Gorilla Dash has no box for — a membership number, a vehicle registration, a preferred branch, a renewal month. Custom fields are that box.

Creating one

Custom fields are set up once for the whole organisation, in CRM Settings, so every tribe records the same thing the same way. Give the field a name your team will read on a form and pick the type that matches what goes in it — a list of options is far more reportable than free text.

Where they show up

On the contact form, below the standard fields.
On the contact's profile.
In the import column mapping, so a spreadsheet column can fill them.

CREATE THEM BEFORE THE IMPORT, NOT AFTER

A field that does not exist yet cannot be mapped to a column, and the import quietly drops that column. Creating the field afterwards does not go back and fill it — you would have to import the file again.

Keeping the list usable

Custom fields are cheap to add and expensive to live with: every one of them lengthens the form every rep fills in. Before adding one, check that a category, an industry or a tag would not do the job — those are already filterable and already reportable.