Track your own fields on any record
Every trade needs to record something nobody else does. Add your own fields to customers, invoices, products, employees, projects, tickets, orders and bookings — then search by them, and ask Yion about them.
In this guide
Setup- Steps
- 6
- Prereqs
- 1
- Pitfalls
- 4 common ones
- Related
- 2 guides
Walkthrough only — no setup wizard. The flow is exactly what you do inside YionStack today.
Before you start
- Permission to change settings (owner or admin) — only to CREATE a field. Anyone who can open a record can fill one in.
Steps
- 1
Decide what you are missing
The test is simple: what do you currently keep in a spreadsheet, a notebook, or the notes box because the form has nowhere for it? A boiler model and service date. A tenancy deposit-scheme reference. A learner’s ULN. An allergen list. A Gas Safe card expiry.
- 2
Open Settings → Your own fields
Go to Settings and choose "Your own fields". You will see everything your business already tracks, grouped by the kind of record it sits on.
- 3
Add the field
Choose the record it belongs to — Contact, Company, Deal, Invoice, Product, Employee, Project, Task, Ticket, Order or Booking — then give it a label and pick its type.
- 4
Pick the right type, because it decides what you can ask later
Use Date for anything with a deadline, Number or Currency for amounts, and Dropdown when there is a fixed set of answers. This matters more than it looks: a date stored as a Date can answer "who is due before March", and the same date stored as Text cannot.
- 5
Fill it in on the record
Open any record of that kind. Your fields appear on it under "Your fields". Type the values and press Save. Nothing appears on records you have not added a field for, so the rest of the product is unchanged.
- 6
Ask Yion
Yion can read your fields, fill them in, search by them and create new ones. "Which customers are due a service before 1 March?" · "Record this boiler as a Worcester Bosch 8000." · "Start tracking a Gas Safe expiry on my engineers." · "Who is missing a licence number?"
Common pitfalls
Storing a date as Text
The most common mistake, and it is silent. A date typed into a Text field can still be read on the record, but it cannot be compared — so "everyone due in the next 30 days" will find nobody rather than telling you it cannot answer. If you already have one, add a Date field alongside it and copy the values over.
Who can fill a field in follows the record, not the field
Someone who can edit an employee can edit an employee’s own fields; someone who can only edit customers cannot. That is deliberate — a custom field is part of the record, so it inherits exactly the same permission. If a colleague cannot fill something in, the answer is their access to that module, not to custom fields.
Removing a field does not delete what you recorded
Removing a field stops it being shown on the record. The values already stored are kept, so it can be undone and nothing is destroyed. If you genuinely need the data gone, raise a data-deletion request instead.
A field is for a fact, not a calculation
Your own fields hold facts about a record. They do not compute anything and they do not run rules — VAT, payroll and ledger behaviour stay statutory and stay ours. If you want something worked out rather than recorded, ask Yion.
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