Anyone who moved to Bitrix24 (Alaio) from a spreadsheet asks the same question in week one: where do I type the formula? A deal card shows the budget and the cost, and the margin — the number the manager actually decides by — has to be computed in someone's head. The platform has no native formula field, but the gap is closable: a Market field type computes and displays values live in the card, and for stored results a workflow calculation does the arithmetic. This guide covers both and when each is the right tool.
Does Bitrix24 have a native formula field?
No. Custom fields of the stock types — string, number, date, list, money — store what was entered and nothing more; none of them derives its value from other fields. Products inside a deal sum into totals, but that is fixed platform logic, not a formula you control. Workflows can calculate and write values (more on that below), yet the result is a snapshot that updates only when the process runs — not a cell that recalculates the moment a source field changes.
How do you add a formula field from Bitrix24 Market?
Applications can register additional field types on the portal via the REST API, and installed types then appear in the standard custom-field settings next to the stock ones. The Roboteka formula field is exactly that: attach it to a deal, contact, company or lead, write an expression over the record's other fields in its settings, and the card renders the computed value live. It ships in the same free app as the robot catalog — the full set of available types is in the field types catalog, and the wider mechanics of third-party field types are covered in the custom field types guide.
Which formulas pay off in a card?
The ones a manager currently computes by eye at decision time. Margin and markup: budget minus cost, as an amount and as a percentage. Commission: the manager's cut at the current stage. Weighted score: probability times budget, which turns a pipeline into an honest forecast. Ratios against a plan: how much of the quarterly target this deal covers. Next to the formula field, sibling display types close related gaps — a countdown to a date for deadlines, days elapsed since the last activity, a progress bar for checklist-style completeness — each one number the card previously made you look up elsewhere.
Formula field or workflow calculation?
Complementary, not competing. A formula field is display logic: always current, recalculated on view, but not stored — filters, reports and other automation cannot reference it. A workflow calculation — say Percentage of a number writing the margin percent into a regular number field — produces a stored value that filters, reports and further rules can use, at the price of updating only when the process fires. The practical split: formula field for what humans read in the card, workflow calculation for what machines read downstream; heavy patterns for the latter are in the calculations guide.
Where to go from here
Start with one field the sales team computes mentally on every call — margin is the usual winner — and put it in the card as a formula; adoption is immediate because nobody defends doing arithmetic by hand. The field types catalog lists what else can live in a card, and the CRM fields guide covers keeping the card itself from bloating as you add.