Hubspot needs to understand that there are so many ways to work around this without increasing the number of digits in the Company and Contact IDs. When you only use 0-9 as your digits, you can easily run out of numbers. So with a field with 10 placements, Hubspot only has 10^10 possible IDs to use, and that’s why they have to keep adding digits.
Why not introduce letters? With letters, you now have A-Z or 26 additional possibilities for each of your digits, so now you have 26^10 before you run out.
Better yet, for each of their customers, they could internally append a special code for every customer, so Customer A’s Company and Contact IDs have nothing to do with Customer B’s. Right now, it seems that they are across all their customers, and they will run out of digits again as they grow, and we customers have to keep dealing with extra digits to our Company and Contact IDs. It is getting very painful for us to use Hubspot because we import and export our Hubspot data to other systems, and these large numbers are causing us extra work. I like Hubspot, but they need to figure this out before customers leave them due to this issue.
Thank you for sharing such detailed and thoughtful feedback on this issue, and I’m genuinely sorry for the pain these evolving Company and Contact ID formats have caused your workflow.
I’ll be sure to pass your feedback directly to our product and engineering teams.
In the meantime, I have created a new thread for more visibility.
For reference, here is the related thread: “10 vs 11 digit Company ID Data Integrity Issue”.
We truly value your insights and are here to help however we can.
Thanks and have a great weekend!
Bérangère, HubSpot Community Manager
Hi @BReynolds6, I hope that you are well!
Haha, you got us there! We’re so grateful to have community members like you who are eager to help others and keep things spirited around here.
Your contributions are always appreciated, and it’s wonderful to see your feedback shared with such good humor.
The team was curious about why you are experiencing pain points around id length:
Specifically, is it due to users manually entering IDs? Or are you exporting these IDs into systems which support <=10 character ids?
Looking forward to hearing from you!
Thanks,
Bérangère
The Contact ID is Hubspot’s key ID, we cannot update contact information with a spreadsheet without the correct Contact IDs.
When we export contact info from Hubspot to a 3rd party software, we use the Contact ID as the key ID. When we want to reimport the contact information from that 3rd party software, the 3rd party software treats large number as a scientific number and truncates it to “xxxE10”. This means, we now lost the actual Contact ID. To retrieve it, we have to export ALL our contacts from Hubspot, use another field (usually the email address) to find the original Contact IDs, before we can reimport that the info to Hubspot. It is 2 extra steps for us, not to mention confusions if our contacts change their email addresses.
The best practice for dealing with a unique identifier is to not set it as a number-only field. Open one of your contact lists in Excel, and you will see what I mean. Thanks.
Hi @BReynolds6,
Thank you so much for taking the time to share your experience and feedback around Contact and Company ID handling.
I have shared it internally.
I checked for you and at this time, there aren’t any plans to change how contact IDs are generated in HubSpot, but it’s always helpful to keep these conversations going in the Community in case things change down the line.
I understand this may not be the answer you were hoping for, but I’d recommend reaching out to your third-party software provider to see if they can offer a different way for handling larger integers.
If you have any other questions or need further assistance, please feel free to ask. We’re always here to help!
Bérangère
We’re so grateful to have community members like you who are eager to help others and keep things spirited around here.