Extensibility

Every business has unique processes and a need to capture data that is custom to their operations. For instance, a business might want to add a Profit Center to the Account Screen to track their multiple profit centers. Profit center would be a drop-down containing a list of curated profit centers for that customer (e.g. Atlanta, Orlando).

The information captured in this field would be displayed in associated reports such as a revenue per profit center report. As another example, when adding a subscription several pieces of data might be added. These may be subsequently displayed in an invoice. Custom fields can be used to handle these scenarios.

Custom fields can be added to the following entities in the system: account, package, package frequency, account package and account service. The admin console offers a user interface for defining new custom fields on these entities. The following attributes need to be specified during custom field creation:

• Display Name: The custom field display name. This will show up on the UI as the field name

• Column Name: Internal reference and is used for integration purposes, such as custom controls and the API

• Description: Description of the field

• Hint: The text that will appear within the field to assist the end user with data population

• Required: Whether to enforce that a value is always required

• Default Value: Default value for the field

Associated with a custom field is the ability to enable or disable. Disabling a custom field hides it from the user interface which you may want for storing information from an integration with another system without displaying the data to the user. The data will still be stored in the database but is not viewable to a user of the system. This is done by adding or removing the custom field from the Layout of the entity. Custom field definitions can be deleted. Deleting a custom field removes it from the system - all data associated with the custom field will be permanently deleted or anonymized.

Validation rules are supported on custom fields to maintain the integrity of data collection. The type of validation allowed will be based on the type of custom field. For instance, if the field is a text field, a validation rule can be added to ensure that only alpha numeric values can be added to the text field.

Custom Field Types

Different types of custom fields are available in the system. These are displayed in the table below: