topic Re: Reverting Bulk Property Changes by Importing Historical Property Values in Tips, Tricks & Best Practices

Reverting Bulk Property Changes by Importing Historical Property Values

jleow — Wed, 22 Apr 2020 00:10:36 GMT

HubSpot makes it simple to update and maintain databases with bulk property editing and updating properties via workflows. But at the same time, it's also easy to incorrectly bulk edit records.

Is it possible to revert property changes? The short answer is no - at the moment, we aren't able to automatically 'revert' these properties to the values that they were before the edits were made.

But that said, we can export the historical values of a property, clean up the data to the time before these changes, then import these values back into your portal to update the object. Here is how you can do so:

Part 1: Exporting the Property History

In your HubSpot account, click the settings icon in the main navigation bar.
In the left sidebar menu, navigate to ‘Properties’.
In the 'Search Properties' text-box, type in the name of the property that you are looking to revert.
When the property appears, hover over the name of the property then click on 'More > Export Property History'.

Export Property History

Part 2: Editing the Export File

From the property history file, apply filters to your excel sheet – this sheet can be read from left to right, from the most recent property value to the oldest property value.

Add filter to excel
Using the column with the most recent values (usually column D), filter to the date where the changes were made.
1. As a quick example, if I made an incorrect bulk property change to a set of contacts on 1st April – I would select the checkboxes for ‘April’, and ‘01’.
  
  Filter by date of property change
2. Once these filters are applied, we will be left with only the contacts that were affected by this change.
3. We can then retrieve the last most recent set of values, which would be in column E.
Copy these values, as well as the corresponding Object ID (Contact/Company/Deal/Ticket ID) into a new excel file (.csv or .xlsx) and save it. In this example, I’ve also copied the contact’s email addresses to easily identify them.

Columns to be copied

This is an example of what the new excel would look like:

Example of a new excel file for import

Part 3: Import these values back into your portal

Once the Excel File has been cleaned up to contain the correct values, you can import these companies back into HubSpot.
From the Imports page, click on the ‘Start an Import’ button to begin your import – you will want to import one file with one object type. You can follow this guide on how to do so.
During the import process, select the 'Update Object using 'Object ID' exported from Hubspot' option to de-duplicate the Object and ensure that the existing Objects are updated and no duplicates are created

Update existing contacts using Contact ID exported from HubSpot checkbox

Things to note:

Do note that you won’t be able to do this if the property values before the update were null. Instead, you can follow this guide up to Part 2. Here are the steps for objects with no value:

Copy only the Object ID and email or other identifiers into the new excel.
Import as per ‘Part 3’ - from the Imports page, create a list from these imported objects.
Go into the list and bulk edit your properties to a blank value.
You may not be able to do this with all properties - for the contact properties that you are not able to find under the bulk edit option, you will want to enroll the list into a workflow and use the ‘Clear Property Value’ action.

Clear property value action in a workflow

Hope this helps!

Re: Reverting Bulk Property Changes by Importing Historical Property Values

LizO — Tue, 14 Sep 2021 17:16:38 GMT

@jleow I just found this guide and want to say THANK YOU! I've been opening each object record and clicking property history for years. Part 1 is a GAME CHANGER! maybe you didn;t build the functionality but please thank that team.

I can see this being supper helpfull exporting the history of deal stage or deal ammount. I'm constantly asked what deals have moved or why our forcast went drastically up or down. This export can come up with why and how MUCH faster than my old method.

Re: Reverting Bulk Property Changes by Importing Historical Property Values

lucasfmsarmento — Fri, 19 Nov 2021 20:42:19 GMT

Hi LizO,

Came accross this post, and thought I could help.

The need to know what happened with the forecast on a certain period is definitely legimate and Hubspot does provide reports on that.

You can see a list of Hubspot Created Sales Reports here, under Forecast & Pipelines. More specifically the report that would give you the insights you need is called Deal Pipeline Waterfall

Let me know if this helps, or if need any further help reach out!

All the best,

Re: Reverting Bulk Property Changes by Importing Historical Property Values

laurentl — Mon, 24 Jan 2022 20:49:57 GMT

Thank you for this tip! I've been banging my head against the desk since I found out the intern bulk-edited a property by mistake... Looks like I'll be able to fix it in minutes rather than days thanks to this.

Re: Reverting Bulk Property Changes by Importing Historical Property Values

xanbo — Thu, 03 Mar 2022 22:31:49 GMT

This info just saved my life. Thank you!!!

Re: Reverting Bulk Property Changes by Importing Historical Property Values

PEvans — Wed, 27 Apr 2022 18:08:58 GMT

Portuguese version here! 🙂

Re: Reverting Bulk Property Changes by Importing Historical Property Values

kvlschaefer — Thu, 28 Apr 2022 15:36:41 GMT

Thanks for sharing, @PEvans!

Obrigada! 🙂

Re: Reverting Bulk Property Changes by Importing Historical Property Values

AB20 — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 06:57:21 GMT

Thank so much, very helpful.

Important question: Once contacts are reverted to an older value in a crtain property, and that value is associated to a workflow, will they be re-enrolling in that workflow?

For example: A contact reverts back to a "rejectd " status, which was originally attributed to him 6 months ago, and being rejcted he was enrolled in a workflow that sent him at the time a rejection email.
If now, dur to the bulk edit, he is again back to the rejcted status, does it mean he will again get an email? (which, of course, I want to avoid).

Many thanks

Re: Reverting Bulk Property Changes by Importing Historical Property Values

NDerak — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 20:56:35 GMT

when I hover on the "More" there is no "Export property history" and it only has "export"

Re: Reverting Bulk Property Changes by Importing Historical Property Values

jleow — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 16:53:40 GMT

Hi all! It's been some time since this post was updated, and the screenshots of the UI are now out of date. I recommend referring to these KB articles for reference:

I also wanted to give a heads up that we now have a new feature that restores workflow property changes without going through the export and import process - Restore workflow CRM property changes (Enterprise only). Or, you can also restore your overall CRM changes up to 14 days ago!

Hope this helps!