Allow Custom Fields on Program Period Costs | Community
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Casey_Grimes2
Casey_Grimes2
Level 10
September 22, 2025
New

Allow Custom Fields on Program Period Costs

  • September 22, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 700 views
While being able to list out individual Program cost line items is a useful feature, it's limited by a few things: namely, the ability to only parse certain types of budget information based on information in the note.

 

I would like to build a more robust approach for budget measurement and compliance in Marketo by providing a standardized set of custom fields that could provide more detail in budget analysis. While I would expect to have some of these as fully custom, I think others are widely applicable and may make sense to be in the core product. Some examples of these would include:

 

- Spend Type: Categorizes the primary expense of the campaign (e.g., 'Media Spend', 'Agency Fees', 'Content Creation', 'Sponsorship'). This allows for a more granular analysis of where the budget is going and the ROI on different types of spend.

- Budget Source / Team: Tracks which team's budget is funding the campaign (e.g., 'Corporate Marketing', 'Product Marketing', 'Field Marketing'). This is essential for leaders to see how different teams are performing with their allocated spend.

 

- Vendor / Payee: A field to specify the vendor who will receive the payment (e.g., 'Google', 'LinkedIn', 'Gartner', 'Acme Agency'). This allows you to run reports on your total spend by vendor across all campaigns, which is invaluable for negotiating contracts.

 

- Invoice / PO Number: A text field to record the associated invoice or Purchase Order number for the expense. This creates a direct link between your marketing plan and the financial transaction records, making audits and expense verification straightforward.

 

Implementing these sorts of additional fields would turn Program Costs from a legacy piece of information to one that's more central to Marketo setup and ROI; please consider expanding out the feature in this way or with similar functionality.

    1 reply

    S
    ss2026
    Level 2
    January 23, 2026

    This makes a lot of sense. Today, Program Costs are useful but too unstructured to support real budget governance or ROI analysis at scale.

    Until this becomes a native feature, the practical workaround we’ve seen work well is:

    • Create a standard set of custom program fields (Spend Type, Budget Source/Team, Vendor/Payee, Invoice/PO ID)

    • Enforce these via program templates + required field conventions

    • Use these fields for reporting and cost attribution instead of free-text notes

    This effectively turns Program Costs into a structured budget model without breaking Marketo’s core design.

    Teams that want to operationalize this across hundreds of programs often work with partners like Miinfotech to design the field schema, templates, and reporting so finance, ops, and marketing all stay aligned.

    Agree this would be a strong candidate for future product enhancement.

    saurabh from miinfotech.com
    SanfordWhiteman
    SanfordWhiteman
    Level 10
    January 23, 2026

    ​@ss2026 for the 4th time today, do not promote your company’s services here. This is a direct violation of community guidelines and your account will be banned if you continue.

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