Custom Fields Kanban: Turn Your Board Into a Database

Every kanban board eventually grows a shadow spreadsheet. The board tracks flow — Backlog, In progress, Done — but the numbers live somewhere else: story points in one sheet, budgets in another, launch dates in a tab nobody remembers to update. Adding custom fields to your kanban board closes that gap. Each card carries its own structured data — a number, a select, a date, a checkbox — and the board quietly becomes a lightweight database that answers questions a column layout can't.

Why every board grows a shadow spreadsheet

Cards start life as a title and a checklist, and for pure flow that's enough. Then the questions arrive: how many points are we carrying this sprint? What's the combined budget of everything in “In progress”? Which of these ten cards actually passed QA? A board answers “where is this work?” brilliantly and answers “what do we know about this work?” badly.

So someone builds a spreadsheet next to the board. It works for a week. Then a card moves and the sheet doesn't, a budget changes in the sheet but not on the card, and now you have two sources of truth that disagree — which is worse than having none.

Custom fields kanban: turning cards into records

A custom field is a property you define once, at board level, and every card gets it. In Decknote you can choose from five types — text, number, select, checkbox and date — which covers most of what teams actually track:

• Estimate (number) — story points or ideal hours, so sprint load is visible card by card.
• Priority (select) — P1/P2/P3, one honest value instead of five urgent labels.
• Budget (number) — what this piece of work is allowed to cost.
• Launch date(date) — separate from the due date, because “done” and “live” are rarely the same day.
• QA passed(checkbox) — a binary gate that's either checked or it isn't.

Because fields are defined per board, every card shares the same schema. That consistency is the whole trick: a pile of cards with the same five properties is, functionally, a table. Decknote includes three custom fields per board on the free plan, unlimited on Pro.

The table view is where it clicks

Fields on cards are nice; fields as sortable columns are the payoff. Decknote's Table view shows your custom fields as columns next to the built-ins, and you can sort by any of them: order by estimate to spot oversized work, by priority to plan the day, by launch date to see what ships next.

Filters work across every view — by label, assignee, due status or text — so “P1 cards assigned to Ana that haven't passed QA” is a filter, not a Friday-afternoon audit. If you use a slice like that often, save it as a named view and it's one click away. And crucially, it's the same cards underneath: edit a field in the table and the board is already up to date, because there's nothing to sync.

If priority is the field your team argues about, our guide on prioritizing when everything is urgent pairs well with a single select field.

What this costs elsewhere

Worth being concrete. In Trello, custom fields require the Standard plan at $5 per user per month, and the Table view (along with Calendar and Timeline) requires Premium at $10 per user per month. For a six-person team, sorting cards by a number field costs $60 a month. Trello is a fine product — but that pricing model taxes exactly the feature this post is about.

Decknote includes the Table view and three custom fields per board on the free plan. Pro — $5 a month or $48 a year — is flat per board owner: one subscription unlocks unlimited fields on the owner's boards for every member, with nobody else paying a seat. Details on the pricing page.

When a real database is the better call

Honesty time: custom fields make a board a lightweight database, and the adjective matters. If you need formulas and rollups — a budget column that sums itself, a status computed from other fields — Airtable is built for that and a kanban tool isn't. If you need linked tables with lookups (clients, projects, invoices), or thousands of rows that never move through stages, Notion databases or Airtable will serve you better than any board.

The dividing line is flow. If the thing you're tracking moves through stages and you want some structure riding along, custom fields on a kanban board are the simpler tool. If the data isthe product — an inventory, a CRM, a content archive — use a database and link out to it. One relational need Decknote does cover natively: card relations (blocks, blocked-by, related) with a red “Blocked” badge on the board, which handles dependencies without a lookup table.

A starter schema to steal

1. Add Estimate (number) and Priority (select with three options). That's two of your three free fields, and it already answers the two most common standup questions.
2. Spend the third on whatever your shadow spreadsheet tracked — a budget number, a client name, a QA checkbox.
3. Open the Table view, sort by priority, and save it as your default working view.
4. Delete the spreadsheet. (Archive it if you must. You won't open it again.)

And if you're still shaping the board itself — columns, WIP limits, labels — start with our guide to organizing projects with kanban; a good schema on a bad board is still a bad board.

Create your free Decknote account and try all of this on your own board — no credit card required.