One Size Fits No One
Default task fields cover the basics: title, assignee, status, due date. That’s enough for simple workflows. The moment your team has specific data needs — customer tier, story points, review link, regulatory flag, deployment target — you’re stuffing information into the description field, using tag hacks, or building workarounds with naming conventions.
Custom fields exist to solve this. The goal is capturing structured data that can be filtered, sorted, and reported on — not free-text notes.
Field Types Available in FlowEra
FlowEra supports the following custom field types:
Text — short free-text input. Good for URLs, ticket references, external IDs.
Number — numeric input with optional unit suffix. Use for story points, effort estimates, dollar values.
Date — date picker. Useful for customer-promised dates, review deadlines, SLA expiry.
Select — single-choice dropdown. Good for categorization fields with a fixed set of values (tier: Free / Pro / Enterprise).
Multi-select — multiple values from a fixed set. Platform tags, affected modules, customer segments.
Boolean — true/false toggle. Use for flags: “customer-facing”, “needs QA sign-off”, “in production”.
User — assign any team member. Useful for secondary roles beyond the primary assignee: reviewer, QA owner, stakeholder.
Field Templates
Fields are defined at the workspace level as templates and applied to specific flows. This means you create a “Story Points” number field once and apply it to any flow that tracks sprint capacity. You create a “Customer Tier” select field and use it across every customer-facing flow.
When you update the options on a shared field template — adding a new tier, renaming an existing one — all flows using that field see the update immediately.
Not Every Field Belongs on Every Task
The most common mistake with custom fields is adding all of them to all tasks. This creates visual noise and cognitive overhead. A task about fixing a typo in the UI doesn’t need a “Customer Tier” field.
FlowEra lets you configure which fields are visible by default and which are collapsed. Fields can also be flow-specific — a field that only appears in the customer support flow, not in the engineering backlog. Keep the default task view clean and reserve extended fields for the tasks and flows that need them.
Filtering and Sorting by Custom Fields
Custom fields aren’t just display metadata — they’re queryable. You can filter your Kanban or List view by any custom field: show only tasks with Story Points >= 5, filter to tasks with Customer Tier = Enterprise, sort by effort estimate ascending.
These filters can be saved as named views so your team members can switch between “this sprint’s high-priority enterprise issues” and the default view without rebuilding the filter each time.
Reporting on Custom Fields
Custom field values feed into FlowEra’s analytics layer. You can see aggregate distributions (how many tasks this sprint were high-effort vs. low-effort), track trends over time (are enterprise customer issues taking longer to resolve than SMB issues?), and filter burndown charts by custom field segments.
This turns fields from display annotations into actual data assets.