← Glossary

Custom field

Contacts & data

Also called: custom property, contact attribute, merge data

A custom field stores a value on a contact that the standard fields do not cover — a renewal date, a plan name, a quoted price, an external system's id — for use in personalisation, branching and date-driven automation.

Fields hold values; tags hold facts. The moment you find yourself creating tags named price-under-500, price-500-1000 and price-over-1000, you wanted a field and a comparison.

Date fields are the highest-leverage kind, because they turn a static record into a scheduler. A renewal date on the contact means a renewal reminder can exist without anyone maintaining a calendar.

Fields are also where integration lives. Storing a partner system's identifier on the contact is what lets a later webhook find the right person, which matters more than it sounds when the incoming payload has no email address.

How it works in FrazzleCRM

  • An Update Field step can set, clear, copy, add, subtract, multiply, divide, or shift a date forward or back by days, weeks or months.
  • Field changed is a trigger, and a date field can drive a trigger or a wait with an offset before or after, optionally repeating annually.
  • Fields are readable in branch rules with comparison operators, and merge into email and SMS content.
  • Contact lookup can match on a custom field, including a contains match against a field holding many appended values — the pattern for storing an unbounded history of external ids on one contact.

Where teams get this wrong

Date fields have to hold a real date in a consistent format for date triggers and waits to see them. A date arriving from a webhook as free text looks fine on the contact record and silently never fires anything.

Common questions

Can automations do arithmetic on a field?

Yes — add, subtract, multiply and divide are field operations, which is how counters and simple scores are built.

What happens if a merge field is empty?

It renders as nothing, which is how emails end up greeting Hi , — guard personalised openings with a fallback or a branch.

See it on a real map

Free templates where this shows up as an actual node. Clone one and the diagram runs as the automation.

Related terms

Or browse all 24 terms — grouped by what part of the funnel they belong to.

Draw it once, and it runs

In FrazzleCRM the funnel map IS the automation — every node you draw is a real step, and every step you edit redraws the map. Free plan, no credit card.

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