I'm seeing the exact same thing in a client's Simple Start account.
A single Custom Field is supposedly being added to Simple Start in February, as part of the phase-out of QBO's 'Tags' feature. I'll excerpt part of the email I received from Intuit in December on this topic:
"As of March 8, 2025, you and your clients will no longer be able to create tags for reporting insights purposes. Instead, included in all QuickBooks Online plans, your clients will be able to migrate their tags to a custom field for tracking and reporting purposes.... This change is being rolled out to all customers, regardless of their use of tags. Custom fields will support both sales and expense forms.
In February 2025, you and your clients will have the option to migrate all tags to a custom field. Watch for an email from the QuickBooks team in the first week of February.
Week of February 3, 2025 - Both you and your clients will receive an email notification. It will include a link to a tags → custom field migration tool and a how-to FAQ."
We are of course past Feb 3 and I haven't received the email yet. As a guy who previously worked in software development, I'm guessing the issue we're seeing with creating Custom Fields in Simple Start is a bug related to this deployment, and they've encountered a delay with the full implementation.
My plan is to keep trying weekly to create a Custom Field, and I'd expect it'd work at some point. It'd be nice if Intuit would do some proactive communication around the missed deadline, though ...
