Appending during a merge

CRM & Sales CRM
1

Hey folks,

I’m doing some data clean up and need to merge some company records. We have a custom property that is bringing in data from a Wordpress site and when I merge two companies together, it keeps the primary record’s information for that property and delete’s the merged record’s information. Is there a way to tell the merge to append the property instead of only keeping the information from the primary record?

Thanks!

2

Hi @JessMeyer ,

When merging two company records, HubSpot prioritizes the primary record’s property values. So if a custom property (like the one syncing from WordPress) has a different value on the secondary record, it will be overwritten or discarded, unless:

  • The property is of type multi-checkbox, and
  • The value on the secondary does not yet exist on the primary

If your WordPress-linked property is a single-line text, number, or field allowing only one value, HubSpot will not automatically preserve both values during a merge.

A few questions to better understand your use case:

  1. What type of field is this WordPress-synced property? (Text, Number, Multi-select?)
  2. Are you merging records manually or using automations/API?
  3. Is the data in the secondary record always valuable, or only in specific cases?

If you’re on Ops Hub Pro, you could set up a workflow using a custom code action that:

  • Captures property values from both records pre-merge
  • Combines or appends them intelligently
  • Updates the final record before the merge finalizes

Official Reference

You can also check the reference article → HubSpot Help: Merge records

If this reply helped clarify your issue, feel free to mark it as a solution, it helps others in the community too :raising_hands:

3

Hi @IohranAraujo
Thanks for asking those clarifying questions. It’s a single-line text field and we always want to preserve both values assuming each record has a value. I’ve been manually merging these records to prevent the overwriting of data. We’re not on Ops Pro unfortunately.

4

Hi @JessMeyer,

This is unfortunately not possible at this stage. However, other users have requested this before: https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Append-values-when-merging/idi-p/489369

These requests submitted to the HubSpot Ideas section of the community are reviewed by the HubSpot product team, based on their popularity and the assumed demand. I’d recommend commenting and upvoting.

You can also help other HubSpot users find this request more easily (and drive traction) by accepting my reply as a solution. I’d appreciate it, too.

For now, workarounds could look as follows:

  1. (not optimal) in the manage duplicates tool, click the company names to open the right sidebar, edit the values manually there (so that the future primary record has all values), then merge
  2. challenge your overall process (can duplicate creation be avoided by redesigning your process?)
  3. look into third-party solutions like Koalify – @JonasDeMets can comment on Koalify’s capabilities here :slightly_smiling_face:
  4. design your own deduplication ‘mini-app’ using a custom-code action in a company-based workflow, working with the HubSpot CRM API: Workflows | Custom Code Actions - HubSpot docs

Have a great day!

5

Hi @karstenkoehler
Thanks for the reply and the suggestions. I actually just added Koalify and found it incredibly useful for deduplicating but hadn’t considered using it for this use case yet so I’ll look into it some more. I’ve mostly been manually deduplicating because this single-line text field is being sent via API from our Wordpress site and because it’s a text field, sometimes the values being entered aren’t close enough even for Koalify to identify the duplicate. I think, as you suggested, our process just needs some reworking.
Thanks again!

6

@karstenkoehler thanks for suggesting Koalify!
Appending values is now possible with our new Merge Rules feature.
These are some options that are available now:

Hope this helps @JessMeyer!

Append Appends all values for multi-select properties.
First updated Keeps the property value that was updated first.
Last updated Keeps the property value that was updated most recently.
Is known Retains the value if one is known and the other is empty.
Is unknown Keeps the unknown value if the other is populated.
Contains exactly Retains the value that contains the specified text.
Does not contain exactly Excludes values containing the specified text.
Is any of / Is equal to Retains the selected values.
Is none of / Is not equal to Retains values that are not selected.
7

Yes @Jonas_De_Mets I saw that you released merge rules and was SO excited. Thank you for providing such an excellent tool.

8

Maybe if you can provide more information about how these records are created and why the information ends up on two duplicated records, while being different, we could provide solutions on how to streamline the process to reduce the number of duplicates.

Another way could also be to actually create a multiple checkboxes property (as mentioned by Iohran) and a workflow that collects the information from the single-line text field and categorizes it into the multiple checkboxes one. Then you wouldn’t have to worry about merging the two records, as the information category would be combined into this new field.

Or, you could also use a tool like Stacksync, our product, to sync your HubSpot data with a database where you can save all these records and have an automation that concatenates the two property values when a record is deleted (through merge) from HubSpot.