It is great that we now have this beta (related community post here too)that allows us to use workflows to create associations, apply association labels, and update and remove association labels.
However, with this beta, it is still not possible to remove the association label for “Contacts with Primary Company” that is set by default if we have the “Create and associate companies with contacts” setting turned on in the account. In a workflow (both contact-based and company-based), when we add the action to “Remove association labels”, under “Select existing label to remove”, the “Contacts with Primary Company” association label does not currently appear as an option there for us to select to set the action for.
My customer is looking to remove this default association label in bulk because it’s bringing irrelevant contacts to the top right-side when viewing a company record with a number of associated contacts.
I concur,
In fact I believe that the biggest use cases of updating,removing and changing association labels, are in majority regarding the primary label, the default set label… atleast in my CRM usage. So it feels kinda weird that this wasn’t considered in the Beta.
We definitely need this for tickets, as I explained in my recent post: using a workflow to remove company association from ticket in servicehub. We don’t really use custom labels at this time, just the out-of-the-box association labels that already exist in HubSpot, so this “remove association” option currently in workflows is useless to us.
Yes I agree this is needed (in my case specifically for tickets), you should be able to use workflow actions (no-code) to move the primary association label from one record to the other. AND/OR make it possible in the Customer portal settings to show all company tickets based on association label(s) or filter criteria. Because now it will only show the tickets associated with the Primary company. The “Parent” company needs to be able to see all tickets of their and their child’s company related tickets. Child companies submit their own tickets and are therefore Primary by default, so now the Parent cannot see their child’s tickets in the customer portal, unless the primary association on the ticket in manually changed.
Please expose a CRM “remove association” action. We have an alerting system that emails tickets on behalf of various customers. The ticket gets associated to one company based on the sender’s generic email address. We’re trying to replace the ticket’s primary company association based on email contents but can’t remove the original company association nor remove that association’s Primary label. Both are valid actions in the Helpdesk GUI.
It seems atm Hubspot provides a “Remove Association Labels” action but not a more generic “Remove Association”.
So instead, add a new association label, I used “Disassociater”.
Then in the Hubspot workflow use the “1.Apply association labels” aciton to add the “Disassociater” label. Then the next step should be “Remove Association Labels” and select the “Disassociater” label and the trick is to make sure you tick “Apply selected label to all associated records” - and that should do it.
Yes, the ability to remove associations or to set as primary via a workflow is much needed.
Thank you @NickMc for the workaround idea. I was able to accomplish changing the primary company on deals via a workflow using your idea.
To set it up:
Create a property on deals to hold the record ID of the current primary object. We’ll call this “Previous Primary Company.”
Edit available records in the workflow, creating a record for the current primary company based on the “Primary” association label.
Current primary needs to have a unique association label to remove (in addition to Primary). This was the key (hat tip to NickMC). Add one at the start of the workflow if needed.
The workflow looks like this:
Edit Record
Set “Previous Primary Company” (your new custom deal property) to the record ID of the primary company.
This is a placeholder so you know what record ID to reassociate later.
Remove association labels
Select the unique association label on your current primary company.
Check the “Remove all associations between records that have this label” box. (That removes the association completely, not just the label.)
Apply assocation label
Add Primary association label to your remaining company. I do this via a match with a property value we already have in place.
Create associations
Associate the original primary company with the deal again using matching property values.
Use the “Previous Primary Company” value you set in step one, and match that to company record ID.
So the end result is that you have the same associated companies you started with, but with the correct one set as primary. It would be much cleaner if this was a single “Set primary company” action like the option in the UI, but in a pinch the above workaround will get it done. Sharing here to try and save the next person looking to do this some time.
I haven’t been able to remove the “Contact with Primary Company” label using a workflow.
Here’s why this matters:
We work with Agents (set up as Companies) who bring in customers. These customers (Contacts) must be associated with the Agent.
However, when we create invoices, HubSpot automatically uses the associated Company as the billing company — even though we actually sell directly to the Contact.
If we could remove the “Contact with Primary Company” label automatically, HubSpot would stop adding the Company to the invoice, and we could send invoices automatically without manual fixes.
With the current setup, we have to manually remove the Company association from every invoice, which is both time-consuming and error-prone.