Some basic info on a lead/contact/account/deal is certainly needed to reach out and pitch a product to a prospect. Also sometimes, to distinguish one lead from another, at least one key piece of info like the lead’s last name or so is required. That’s when the option of making a field mandatory comes in handy.

By making a field required, you can collect the most important information from your prospects, understand them better and eventually strike better conversations.  

In Freshsales, by default certain fields are mandatory across different entities.

- Leads: Last name and Company name

- Contacts: Last name

- Accounts: Name

- Deals: Name, Account Name, and Deal value

This property for the above fields can’t be modified. i.e: This field needs to be filled in for a record to be created.

For other fields, the option to mark them required or not is upto the choice of the admin.

You can make a field mandatory while creating or editing any entity’s field under Admin Settings. Making a field required, mandates the user to enter a value while saving a record.

This feature is available for Lead, Contact, Account and Deal fields.

Before you make a field mandatory, ensure you’ve handled these areas -

1. Record Save - If you make a field mandatory, users cannot save a record if the field is empty. Make sure you make only those fields mandatory for which users should have a value to input. Otherwise, your sales process would be hindered, or users would input junk values to save the record. For existing records, make sure you do a bulk update or import update on the required field for the application to run properly.
   
   

2. Data Import - It is mandatory to map required fields on data imports. 

• You can’t proceed with the import, if your .CSV doesn’t have a mapping for a required field. 

• Records which don’t have a value in mandatory fields would fail and be reported in error log report sent via email.
  
  

3. Mobile App - Apps with iOS version 1.2 (and above) and Android version 1.1.2 (and above) are compatible with this feature. Make sure your team upgrades to this version.
   
   

4. Integrations - Mandatory field validations are triggered for integrations as well. Make sure you have handled these fields in all your integrations. Any integration which creates or updates a record (lead/contact/deal/account) should include mandatory fields.
   
   

5. Freshsales for Web libraries - Mandatory field validations are bypassed while using these libraries.
   
   

6. Lead Conversion - If any field for contact, account and deal are mandatory, make sure those fields are mapped under lead mapping. If these fields are not mapped, lead conversion won’t occur.
   
   

7. Auto forwarding - Lead creation on email auto forwarding are not affected if there are required fields on Lead. However, when the user tries to edit the record, Freshsales mandates a value in required fields on save of record.

Here’s how you do it,

1. Login to your Freshsales portal as an administrator.
   
   

2. Go to Admin settings > Lead/Contact/Account/Deal module > Add Fields.
   
   

3. You can make a field mandatory either while adding a new field(custom fields) or editing one (default and custom fields). To edit a field, click the Edit icon of the field from the custom field list.
   
   

4. In the Add Field/ Edit Field overlay, you can check the Make this field as required checkbox to make the field mandatory. A pop up appears to confirm this.
   
   
   
   

   Pop-up:

   
   

5. Click.

Downgrade scenario:

On downgrade to plans Garden and below, 

• All mandatory fields lose the ‘required’ property and become optional. If you upgrade your account to Estate plan and above, you have to re-configure the required fields.

Note: This feature is available for all field types. For checkbox, if a field is made mandatory, then by default it stays enabled.