Custom fields, now with real field types

Custom fields let you track what matters to your business: a lead source, a contract value, a renewal date, an account tier. But a custom field that's just a free-text box invites a mess. Three people type the same date three different ways, a number field fills up with "~50k" and "fifty thousand," and suddenly you can't filter or trust any of it. Custom fields now have real types, so the data going in stays clean.

What changed

When you create a custom field on contacts, you now choose its type: text, number, date, URL, yes/no, single-select, or multi-select. You can also mark a field required. From then on, editing that field uses the right control for the job, a number input for numbers, a date picker for dates, a checkbox for yes/no, a dropdown for single-select, a set of checkboxes for multi-select, and values are validated against the type, so a date field can't fill up with free text and a number field stays a number.

Fields that FirstSales fills in for you through enrichment now carry an Enriched badge, so you can always tell auto-filled data apart from what you typed. And because that enrichment data is valuable, deleting an enrichment custom field now asks you to confirm first, so you won't lose an enriched field to a stray click.

Alongside the typed fields, adding contacts got more flexible. The New contact button, previously a grayed-out "coming soon," now opens a form to create a single contact by hand: first name, last name, email, and optionally company, title, and phone. The form validates the email and warns you inline if that address already exists in your workspace, so you don't create a duplicate on the spot. In the same release, the Deals page filter button came alive too, letting you filter deals by owner and stage.

How to use it

Define and use a typed custom field:

1. Open Contacts and click into any contact.
2. In the detail panel, expand Manage custom fields.
3. Add a field, name it, and choose its type: Date, Number, Single-select, and so on. Mark it required if you need it filled.
4. Back on the contact, enter the value using the type-specific control. Invalid entries are rejected before they're saved.
5. Fields filled by enrichment show an Enriched badge. Deleting one asks you to confirm.

Create a single contact:

1. Open Contacts.
2. Click New contact in the header.
3. Fill in first name, last name, and email (required), plus company, title, and phone if you have them.
4. Submit. If the email already exists, you'll be warned inline. Otherwise the contact is created and your list refreshes.

Why it matters

The value of structured data is that you can act on it: filter by it, sort by it, trust it in a report. Free-text fields quietly destroy that value, because the same thing gets entered a dozen ways and none of them line up. Typing a field at the point of entry is the cheapest possible fix. The data is clean because it couldn't be entered dirty, not because someone cleaned it later.

Marking and protecting enriched fields matters for a different reason: trust. When you can see at a glance which values FirstSales found for you versus which you entered, you know how much to lean on them, and you're not one misclick away from deleting research you didn't gather yourself. Typed fields also make merging duplicates smarter, since FirstSales understands what a field actually holds when it decides which values conflict. It's all part of the Companies and Deals CRM and the Contact 360 record it feeds.