# Form submissions overriding current information

**URL:** <https://community.hubspot.com/t/form-submissions-overriding-current-information/95501>\
**Category:** Lead Capture Tools\
**Tags:** enterprise\
**Created:** [December 6, 2023, 2:48pm UTC](https://community.hubspot.com/t/form-submissions-overriding-current-information/95501 "2023-12-06T14:48:22Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![KatyLewis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/e56c9b/32.png) [@KatyLewis](https://community.hubspot.com/u/KatyLewis)\
**Post date:** [December 6, 2023, 2:48pm UTC](https://community.hubspot.com/t/form-submissions-overriding-current-information/95501/1 "2023-12-06T14:48:22Z")

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Hello - we would like to use forms to have our customers sign up to recieve different newsletters but are running into a problem. When someone who already exists in our CRM fills out a form, HubSpot automatically updates their Contact recrod with the information entered and overrides whatever information we have.

While in theory this would be a good thing, we are running into situations where people have typos in their submissions (e.g. meaning to type “MI” for their state and typing “MO”) and/or use an abbreviated version of their company name (e.g. KFC rather than Kentucky Fried Chicken) which then makes reporting and creating distrubtion lists very difficult.

Has anyone else run into this problem and found a solution that isn’t a manual one of having to check each form that is submitted for accuracy?

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**Author:** ![karstenkoehler](https://d10pqhm3lwygmk.cloudfront.net/user_avatar/community.hubspot.com/karstenkoehler/32/68554_2.png) [@karstenkoehler](https://community.hubspot.com/u/karstenkoehler)\
**Post date:** [December 6, 2023, 2:53pm UTC](https://community.hubspot.com/t/form-submissions-overriding-current-information/95501/2 "2023-12-06T14:53:27Z")

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Hi @KatyLewis,

There are workarounds but they come at the price of complexity. Specifically, you would have to create copies of the fields you don’t want to have overwritten. You would use these copies (e.g. ‘Company name – for use in forms only’) in forms only and set up workflows to copy their value into the actual field (e.g. ‘Company name’) but only if that field is empty.

That way, you would know for sure that a ‘good’ and valid value remains untouched.

The big problem however would be that contacts don’t have any means of updating their contact data anymore. Depending of how important this is in your industry, the manual effort of having to review and compare the two fields is worse then having to clean up the occasional typo.

Let me know if you have any follow-up questions!

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**Author:** ![EmmaAtKiwi](https://d10pqhm3lwygmk.cloudfront.net/user_avatar/community.hubspot.com/emmaatkiwi/32/78422_2.png) [@EmmaAtKiwi](https://community.hubspot.com/u/EmmaAtKiwi)\
**Post date:** [December 6, 2023, 2:53pm UTC](https://community.hubspot.com/t/form-submissions-overriding-current-information/95501/3 "2023-12-06T14:53:38Z")

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Hey @KatyLewis! One thing you can do to **prevent** this problem is toggling on the “Pre-populate contact fields with known values” option under the Settings portion of the form.

 ![](https://d2qpr2jzcazej7.cloudfront.net/original/3X/f/0/f00588ff6f5deaa642689553b12992516470869e.png)

This option will auto-populate the email address with values you already associated with that contact in HubSpot. This isn’t a 100% guarantee, but folks won’t usually change the values that are already there.

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**Author:** ![karstenkoehler](https://d10pqhm3lwygmk.cloudfront.net/user_avatar/community.hubspot.com/karstenkoehler/32/68554_2.png) [@karstenkoehler](https://community.hubspot.com/u/karstenkoehler)\
**Post date:** [December 6, 2023, 3:00pm UTC](https://community.hubspot.com/t/form-submissions-overriding-current-information/95501/4 "2023-12-06T15:00:46Z")

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Hi @EmmaAtKiwi,

I find that this creates more problems than it solves, unfortunately. Contacts sharing a device or just one forwarded email can mean unwanted merged contacts.

Best regards!

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**Author:** ![HVogt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/e68b1a/32.png) [@HVogt](https://community.hubspot.com/u/HVogt)\
**Post date:** [May 30, 2024, 3:55pm UTC](https://community.hubspot.com/t/form-submissions-overriding-current-information/95501/5 "2024-05-30T15:55:57Z")

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Yep, learned this lesson the hard way. I do not recommend ever having this turned on!