A diamond may be forever, but in real life, people get divorced, quit their jobs, and generally change their associations. These changes happen on specific dates, and when someone left can be valuable information (i.e. was this person I met at the happy hour an exec at the company I’m trying to make a deal with ten years ago, or last year?)
I’ve been thinking through how to capture the history of associations, and Association History in Hubspot has the key weakness that it captures only the dates the Association was changed in Hubspot, not when the contact left the company, etc., in the real world. The only way to capture “former executive at company” or “former point person for company” is to create an association label. But this will not capture the start and end dates of when someone was associated with a company, because you would have to create a different custom label for each date and it would be text and might not work in automations/calculations based on that date (such as auto-labelling someone a “former employee” if the association end date < today).
The use case here is trying to capture association history from before we migrated to HubSpot; there is organizational memory there that would be valuable to keep, such as who was the point person at our company for a given contact or company in the past. This will not be captured with accurate dates in the Association history, even if we associate the former contact person and then remove the association.
I think a start date and end date property on the Association itself would solve this and probably a lot of other problems, because in the real world, associations are time-bound, and changing the Association in Hubspot as soon as it changes in real life is not a realistic expectation, causing valuable data about relationships and organizational memory to be lost.