topic Re: Auto sequential ID for contacts in CRM

Auto sequential ID for contacts

psx — Sat, 28 Apr 2018 14:41:50 GMT

I need to set (preferably a sequential ID) for each contact - so we can easily refer to a person by number. Is that possible? I understand that each contact have a VID - and that we cannot display that in the hubspot interface - is that correct?

Re: Auto sequential ID for contacts

MFrankJohnson — Sat, 28 Apr 2018 23:06:40 GMT

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Q: I need to set (preferably a sequential ID) for each contact ... Is that possible? I understand that each contact have a VID - and that we cannot display that in the hubspot interface - is that correct?

Short A: No auto-creation of enumerated values. And no we cannot display the VID in the interface directly. You are correct.

Longer A:

But there are two major problems when planning to assign unique customer IDs in a CRM that doesn't allow multiple keyed fields or read-only fields.

- Duplicate Customer IDs - HubSpot doesn't auto-dedup any field other than the email address -- the index (key).

- The fields will be editable -- HubSpot doesn't support read-only contact properties, so even if you create the Customer IDs outside of HubSpot and import them anyone with edit access to the contact record will be able to change (aka: corrupt) the customer id thereby introducing potential duplicates that will be a nightmare to identify and reconcile.

Recommendation? Seriously rethink the strategy and consider using the email address as the identifier.

Hope that helps.

www.MFrankJohnson.com

Please tag @MFrankJohnson if you'd like me to respond.

Re: Auto sequential ID for contacts

psx — Sun, 29 Apr 2018 17:08:44 GMT

Only a few of my contacts have an email address in the sytem - so I cannot use that. Any idea why Hubspot have decided not to show the VID?

Re: Auto sequential ID for contacts

fatih — Wed, 26 Jun 2019 07:51:09 GMT

Hi,

Since we are a B2C company, it is really hard to talk about our leads with the email address rather than a unique ID number. Is there any way to add a unique ID on a property or on the inquiry page?

Re: Auto sequential ID for contacts

yfundora — Fri, 10 Apr 2020 14:32:08 GMT

Hi!

I have the same problem. Have you resolved this? Thanks!

Re: Auto sequential ID for contacts

JMcNeil1701 — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 20:44:49 GMT

I want to link data from a source without e-mail addresses, I can't do that if I can't uniquely identify the information with an auto-number field. Hey hubspot, please add this to the ideas area if not already done so.

Re: Auto sequential ID for contacts

Unmatched — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 14:40:23 GMT

Hey! Matt from Unmatched here.

We've built an app for this! Sequential does exactly what you're looking for, it adds a sequential number onto a deal when it's created (or whatever your workflow criteria is).

Here's the link to the App Marketplace Listing.

Enjoy! Any questions, please reach out to me on LinkedIn or via our website.

Matt