This article is part of a series on Formula Fields:

In your customer/prospect database in Planhat, you'll often want to link to other systems. For example, if you sync Accounts/Companies from Salesforce to Planhat, with some of your colleagues still using Salesforce, you may want each Company record in Planhat to include a link to the equivalent Account record in Salesforce, so you can quickly jump between the records in two tools. Or perhaps you want to connect a record in Planhat with the equivalent record in another external system - e.g. this could be a link between a License or Invoice in Planhat to that record in third-party finance software, or a link from a Company in Planhat to a data analysis tool, or a link between a record in Planhat (such as an End User or an Asset) back to your own product.

Of course, each of these URLs needs to be unique - for example, the Salesforce URL for your customer Account (Company) "Spotify" will be different to the Salesforce URL for your customer Account (Company) "Ben & Jerry's". So how can these different URLs be automatically generated, so you don't need to manually copy and paste individual URLs into Planhat? This can be achieved by Formula Fields.

Typically, these Formula Fields will be referring to the Source ID or External ID standard/default fields in Planhat. These contain record IDs from other systems - Source ID is typically populated from CRMs such as Salesforce (via the relevant integrations), and External ID is from another system, usually your own product.

Using Formula Fields, you can use a dynamic replacement code to insert the relevant value from your specified Planhat field into the URL, automatically creating the unique URLs for you.

In Planhat, you can create custom fields, and when you do, you can select a checkbox to make this a Formula Field, which you can read a series of general articles on starting here. Another important element you configure in a custom field is its data type, and in the context of this article, we're looking at URL-type fields.

Once you select the "Formula" checkbox, it will open up a new box where you enter your formula - for example:

Like any other field, you can then choose to include your URL Formula Field in Previews and/or Full-Page Profiles to display it for individual records, as well as viewing it in data table formats (such as in the Data Explorer) for groups of records.

Although Formula Fields are locked rather than editable in the cell's UI (because their values are calculated rather than typed/selected), if you mouse over a URL Formula Field cell you will see an arrow appear on the right-hand side (with the tooltip "Open") that you can click on to go to that URL. This means you can quickly and easily jump to the linked webpage.

You can alternatively copy the URL from the field and paste into your web browser.

URL Formula Fields enable you to have URLs within Planhat that are both custom and dynamic, so you can easily click in a record (such as the Company "Volkswagen") to jump to the relevant webpage, typically in an external system, with the URL unique for that record. So, for example, you could create one single Formula Field, and use that to link to your customer Company Zoom's profile in your product, your customer Company Jiminny's profile in your product, and your customer Company Thinkific's profile in your product, etc., depending on which Company in Planhat you're looking at. The links are very useful to ensure everything is connected rather than siloed, and the dynamic Formula Field element saves you time as you don't need to manually paste all the different unique URLs for different records into Planhat.

We discussed lots of use case examples for URL Formula Fields in the introduction of this article. These URL fields are perfect to link from Planhat to any other external systems you are using, such as your own product, a CRM, a data analysis tool, finance software, and so on - although remember to consider whether you can achieve what you want fully within Planhat, as maybe you don't need some of those tools any more!

URL Formula Fields are a subset of custom fields, which you can learn more generally about creating here - and we showed the modal for configuring these custom fields earlier in this article. In short, you should:

Let's go through how to work out your URL formula, with a simple worked example.

Once you save your field, you can now view it in Planhat like any other field. If you would like it to display in Previews and/or Full-Page Profiles when viewing a record (for a Company as in this example), then remember to modify your Templates - you can read more about this general topic in our separate series of articles starting here.