🧠 Custom Fields & Custom Item Types (CITs) — How Do You Keep It All Clean?

Hey Wrike Admins! 👋

As more teams adopt Wrike, the number of Custom fields and Custom Item Types (CITs) can grow fast — and if we’re not careful, it can lead to confusion, duplication, and clutter. We’d love to hear how you’re managing this in your workspace:

How do you handle an increasing number of custom fields in your account? Any tips for avoiding “field overload” and ensuring the right teams see the right data?

Have you retired or consolidated old custom fields? What’s your approach to doing this without disrupting active workflows or dashboards?

How do you balance account-level vs space-level CITs?Do you allow teams to create their own, or do you centrally manage them to reduce complexity?

Do you have a review process in place for CITs or custom fields? Would love to hear if you’ve implemented a regular audit or approval workflow to keep things relevant and organized.

👇 Drop your experiences, tips, or even your field cleanup horror stories. Let’s help each other maintain clean and scalable Wrike workspaces!

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

Florian Kislich

Well, first of all, I'd like to mention the account wide custom fiel management (see Managing All Custom Fields in the Account – Wrike Help Center), where admins can see what custom fields are really used and which ones could be cleaned up.

Second, if someone needs a new custom field, it should be discussed with the space admin and with other wrike admins, if it makes sense to add it as an account level custom field.

Ali Moses

I manage most of our CITs and custom fields to reduce clutter. I stick to a specific naming convention which allows me to quickly understand what the fields and CITs are used for. (Space Initials_Department Initials_Function) So far, this has been pretty successfull though I do wish we could have organizational folders for these items as well as for automations.

Darren Clark

We probably went overboard with custom fields during our initial deployment phases with multiple people creating custom fields for various spaces. Now that I'm the primary curator of almost all things Wrike in my local organization I keep an external spreadsheet of custom fields with the following columns:

Title - this is the name of the custom field.
Type - the data type of the custom field (text, date, checkbox, etc).
WrikeId - This is the ID that I see in the API.
Creator - The person/group that created the custom field.
Function - What is the custom field used for.
Spaces - what space or spaces is the custom field used in.
API - Is this custom field used in any of our custom API's we've created.
Status - Defined (I know its purpose), Delete (this is unknown/unused), and Investigate (what is this used for)

This has helped my create order out of the chaos and keep custom fields manageable.

Mat Ward

I've come onboard as a Wrike admin for our company after the person who set it up for us moved on - and I'm really struggling because they didn't document anything!

As Darren suggests above I'm planning to build a list of all of our custom fields and custom item types to detail what they are used for and by who. It might take me a while to figure it all out though!

Jason Longo

Honestly I just deleted all of our custom fields yesterday. We never used them. I thought we would use them on our input forms but mostly our jobs come in via meetings, emails, and conversations. I never found them to be conviently located either in Wrike.

Talia Neal

I've adopted a naming convention for custom fields (and automations) to try to at least group items together. I use a lot of "hidden" fields that help on the account management and reporting side but that not everyone needs to see.

We use custom fields A LOT. And naturally, this means we have a huge volume of them. I would love an easier way to manage them within Wrike.

Lindsay Ventress SESA750949

We have restricted the ability for most users to create CITs or CFs.

We set up the account and spaces in a way that works for our teams, then we have a small group of users whom we label as "Regional Champions" They are the users who can add or manage CFs (we actually dont really use CITs much at all)

Any suggested required new CF is considered and applied consistently

Amy Hunter

We have restricted the ability to create custom fields to admin users only. We have a lot CFs that have been created specifically for teams so we make these only visible within that team folder. We use a simple naming convention and add the org unit/area abbreviation to the start of the CF so I know where it is used. For any of our standard reporting fields that are shown across our account on all projects that we want everyone to complete, I have added numbers to the start so these appear at the top of the custom field panel rather than getting lost amongst all the other fields. I would love a folder system to be able to group them. I liked the suggestion above of creating a spreadsheet to keep track of the CFs - I need to do this.

Kelsey Rudolph

@Amy Hunter how did you restrict it to being available for admin only? Ever since we have tried to integrate table view ahead of the forceful switch, I've noticed more of our regular users going rogue and adding custom fields since it is much easier to do so in that view for the average user, but I am not sure how to restrict them for doing so. Thanks in advance!

Jessica Kvanvig

Hi @Kelsey Rudolph , I believe you can manage the permission to create custom fields within the Access Roles settings in Account Management. Additionally, the Wrike owner has more settings they can adjust.

We also have some users creating custom fields without oversight, making it challenging to maintain order. I appreciate the "Times Filled" and "Last Filled On" fields; they are very useful during the process of cleaning up fields!

We have five CITs and have found it easier to maintain order by limiting the number. Only our Wrike Admins are able to edit the CITs. However, space admins can create any fields they need to stay agile. Currently, we don't have any oversight of custom fields created by space admins. I'm hoping that once all 12 of them become Wrike Certified, we can collectively enforce additional guidelines.

Amy Hunter

Hi @Kelsey Rudolph like Jessica said we have managed the permissions within the Access Roles. I have left on the ability for people to add/edit custom fields that are within their own team folder however as I am doing an audit of our custom fields now I can see that a lot of fields have been added and then never used so I need to do a tidy up of this. This also means naming conventions have not been used so I am starting an excel spreadsheet to keep track of where each custom field sits and how it is used.

Karl Schiesz

To eliminate confusion with CITs and ensure the correct type is selected, I have my team only create projects and sub-projects through blueprints. Took some time to build out initially, but it's offered protection against incorrect item types being selected for certain tasks and disrupting/corrupting dashboards or reports, as well as guaranteeing the correct assignees and folder placement.

I certainly have more custom fields than are necessary, but each CIT only has the pertinent ones listed, as well as the "More Fields" option disabled to prevent any unwanted crossover. Dashboards are set up with only the necessary fields for the particular user's function. That does a fair job at preventing people from being overwhelmed by information.