Designing custom fields

Custom fields extend BNDRY with the data that matters specifically to your organisation. Before deciding what to build, it's worth thinking about what you're actually trying to do — because the best custom field design comes from understanding the problem, not from filling out a form.

Why custom fields exist

BNDRY's standard profile covers what most compliance programmes need: identity, risk rating, relationships, documents. Custom fields fill the gap for everything else that shapes how you manage a customer. A membership number that connects to your venue management system. A source-of-wealth category your team agreed on internally. A risk input specific to your product mix. These are facts about the customer that belong with the customer — not scattered across a spreadsheet or buried in a note.

Custom fields, notes, and tags

Before adding a custom field, it's worth asking whether a simpler tool already fits.

Notes are for things that are contextual, conversational, or one-off — a reminder about a customer, a summary of a phone call, a heads-up for a colleague. Notes don't need to be consistent across customers, and they're not designed to be reported on.

Tags are for quick categorical labels that your whole team shares: vip, high-risk, requires-edd. Tags are fast to add and easy to filter by. Use a tag when a label is simple and you don't need a specific value per customer.

Custom fields are the right tool when you need to:

• Report across all customers by a consistent value.
• Pull the data out in an export.
• Feed the value into a risk rating rule.
• Have it appear predictably on every entity profile of that type.

If the data is only meaningful in the context of a specific interaction or investigation, it belongs in a note or an activity log — not as a permanent field on the entity.

Deciding what to capture

For each piece of data you're considering, work through these questions before you add it.

What will I do with this? If you can't name a concrete use — a report, a rule input, an export column, something a user needs to see on the profile — don't add it yet. Custom fields you don't act on become clutter.

Does this describe the customer, or something that happened to them? Data that describes the customer — their membership tier, their product holding, their source of wealth — belongs on the entity. Data about an event — they were screened, they submitted a form, they were contacted — belongs in an activity log or a workspace.

Is this already in BNDRY? Check whether a standard field, a document record, or an existing automation already captures what you need before adding a custom field that duplicates it.

Will this value be stable over time? Custom fields are best for attributes that stay consistent. If a value changes frequently and the history matters, an activity log entry is often a better home than a field that gets overwritten.

Thinking about structure

Custom fields are organised into groups on the entity profile. Groups communicate to your users what a set of fields is for — they're the context that makes a long list of attributes navigable.

When deciding how to group fields, think about purpose rather than form layout. Fields that feed risk rating rules belong together. Membership or account data belongs together. Internal reference numbers belong together. The grouping should reflect how your team thinks about a customer, not how the data was collected.

For entity type — Individual, Company, or Trust — the question is: which entity is this fact about? A field about a business relationship belongs on Company. A field about a person's employment status belongs on Individual. When the same attribute applies to multiple entity types, it needs to be added to each one separately.

One thing to know before you start

The names you give fields are permanent in a meaningful way: they're the identifiers used by rules, forms, and exports. Changing one later is a data migration, not an edit. This is the main reason to think clearly about what you're capturing and why before you build — not because building is hard, but because the thinking is what makes the result useful.

Next step

Once you know what you want to capture and why, use Edit your forms and custom fields with help from AI to build the schema and paste it into Settings.