Edit lifecycle stage history to correct funnel reports?

[LSadowski]

Hi, (hope this is the correct place to post this question/topic)

I've encountered an issue with contact funnel reports:

When the lifecycle stage of a contact has been mistakenly advanced, for example from Opportunity to Customer, they will always be included in the 'Customer' conversion stage of a funnel report, even if the Lifecycle Stage property (and by doing so, also the became a customer date property) is cleared and set to the correct one (Opportunity in this case).

It seems that this is because funnel reports look at the property history data of the Lifecycle Stage property rather than became a [lifecycle stage] property values?

Is there any way to correct this, as otherwise it seems to me that a funnel report becomes irreversibly incorrect when a contact is included that has been mistakenly advanced on Lifecycle Stage.

Any help appreciated!

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @LSadowski,

This is a notoriously annoying challenge in HubSpot, unfortunately.

The short of it is the following: If contacts skip lifecycle stages, you cannot clean up those skips historically or fill them without resetting all dates of previous lifecycle stages. If you decide to create custom date properties, with the intention of being able to edit those, the funnel reports cannot be customized to reference those custom properties.

There is currently not satisfying answer to this challenge, only compromises, a lot of which require Enterprise subscriptions:

1. Make the lifecycle stage view only via property permissions in Enterprise portals, deactivate all automatic lifecycle stage settings (e.g. do not set contact to opportunity when deal is associated), maintain lifecycle stages sequentially through workflows only.
2. Use the customer journey reports (Enterprise only) to visualize skipped stages: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/reports/create-a-journey-report
3. Use workflows to clear the property value for lifecycle stage, then use 'Set property value' to set all lifecycle stages in order, but lose the correct historical dates
4. Work with custom date properties and report on conversion rates outside of HubSpot

In free, Starter or Professional subscriptions, there is currently no native way to backfill skipped dates, unfortunately.

Best regards!

[MCarlson99]

This is a major gap—full stop.

Given how easy it is for a rep to accidentally push a contact too far forward in the lifecycle, there has to be a way for Super Admins to manually edit the native Date entered and Date exited [Lifecycle Stage] properties. The current lack of editability locks bad data into reports, forcing teams to choose between convoluted workarounds or completely abandoning HubSpot’s native reporting tools.

Most of the suggested fixes—custom properties, rebuilding reports outside of HubSpot, Enterprise-only workarounds—are either too brittle, too manual, or too expensive to scale. Worse still, trying to explain these limitations to stakeholders (especially senior ones) undermines trust in the data and the platform. Not a good look for HubSpot administrators—or for HubSpot itself, especially when those same stakeholders are involved in renewal conversations.

Let Super Admins make these edits. If they break reporting by editing willy-nilly, so be it—that’s on them. But right now, there’s no good path forward, and that’s bad for everyone.

[WolfofTryon]

Encountering the same issue that @LSadowski is highlighting here. Funnel conversions (whether it be lifecycle stages or pipeline deal stages) are seemingly tied to the 'entered X stage' property that Hubspot automatically timestamps. This proves problematic in cases whereby a user mistakenly advances an object too far along in its respective lifecyle stage/pipeline.

Taking a deal funnel as an example, a rep hypothetically can create a new deal and then move the record directly to the 'closed deal-won' stage, thereby irreversably "stamping" a time in the 'Entered Closed-Won Stage' property. As a result, any win-rate KPI or legacy funnel report (the 'any' stage type) are ruined. This leaves zero margin for administrative error. 

@karstenkoehler Surely I'm missing something here?? 

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @LSadowski,

This is a notoriously annoying challenge in HubSpot, unfortunately.

The short of it is the following: If contacts skip lifecycle stages, you cannot clean up those skips historically or fill them without resetting all dates of previous lifecycle stages. If you decide to create custom date properties, with the intention of being able to edit those, the funnel reports cannot be customized to reference those custom properties.

There is currently not satisfying answer to this challenge, only compromises, a lot of which require Enterprise subscriptions:

1. Make the lifecycle stage view only via property permissions in Enterprise portals, deactivate all automatic lifecycle stage settings (e.g. do not set contact to opportunity when deal is associated), maintain lifecycle stages sequentially through workflows only.
2. Use the customer journey reports (Enterprise only) to visualize skipped stages: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/reports/create-a-journey-report
3. Use workflows to clear the property value for lifecycle stage, then use 'Set property value' to set all lifecycle stages in order, but lose the correct historical dates
4. Work with custom date properties and report on conversion rates outside of HubSpot

In free, Starter or Professional subscriptions, there is currently no native way to backfill skipped dates, unfortunately.

Best regards!

[MCarlson99]

This is a major gap—full stop.

Given how easy it is for a rep to accidentally push a contact too far forward in the lifecycle, there has to be a way for Super Admins to manually edit the native Date entered and Date exited [Lifecycle Stage] properties. The current lack of editability locks bad data into reports, forcing teams to choose between convoluted workarounds or completely abandoning HubSpot’s native reporting tools.

Most of the suggested fixes—custom properties, rebuilding reports outside of HubSpot, Enterprise-only workarounds—are either too brittle, too manual, or too expensive to scale. Worse still, trying to explain these limitations to stakeholders (especially senior ones) undermines trust in the data and the platform. Not a good look for HubSpot administrators—or for HubSpot itself, especially when those same stakeholders are involved in renewal conversations.

Super Admins should be able to make these edits. If they break reporting by editing willy-nilly, so be it—that’s on them. But right now, there’s no good path forward, and that’s bad for everyone.

[Chinmayy]

Hi Karsten,

We’re facing a similar issue with our company’s customer journey funnel reporting. Our lifecycle stages at the company level are: Target -> Prospect -> Awareness -> MQA -> SAA -> SQA -> Customer. We also have workflows in place that can revert companies back to the Awareness stage if they don’t meet certain criteria in our operations.

The challenge is that when we generate funnel reports to track the conversion percentages through these stages, the report only considers the original progression through the lifecycle stages. It doesn’t account for instances where companies move back to an earlier stage. For example, if I want to track conversion rates specifically for the last quarter, the report includes all lifecycle movements in the timeline rather than just the recent changes, which isn’t ideal.

To address this, we’re considering the following approach:

1. Custom Date Properties: For each lifecycle stage, we plan to create properties to capture both the "Original date company entered [stage]" and the "Most recent date company entered [stage]."

2. Time Calculation Properties: We’ll set up properties to calculate the time spent between key stages, such as "Time between Awareness and MQA," and similar intervals for each transition.

3. Manual Conversion Rate Calculation: Using these custom date properties, we can manually calculate conversion rates for any specific timeframe by focusing on the most recent entries into each stage.

We think this might be a good solution, though it will require some manual work for calculations. Do you have any thoughts on this approach, or would you suggest an alternative that might streamline the reporting? Any insights would be much appreciated.

Thank you!

[LSadowski]

Hi Karsten,

thanks for your quick reply. The issue you describe in your answer is a slightly different one than the one I'm referring to here, albeit none the less annoying yeah.

What I meant here was the observation that a contact will still show up as a Customer in a contact funnel report even when their lifecycle stage has been cleared and reset to a stage that comes before Customer. In other words, in these funnel reports HubSpot ignores this manual cleanup effort and will still show a contact as having converted to a specific lifecycle stage if there is any point in time of the contact's history where they were set to that stage. Not sure if it always used to be this way since I did not encounter any discrepancies in funnel reports until very recently.

I hope we can somehow bring this issue (a bug it seems?) to HubSpot's attention, and for the time being it looks like I cannot really use any funnel reports which contain contacts that were mistakenly advanced, and will have to rebuild such funnel reports outside of HubSpot..

[nodral · Accepted solution]

I am Facing the same issue. I asked Hubspot if there is any solution because Off course I cant use the funnel report. They said You can create a Custom Contact Report and filter it by Lifecycle Stage to show the progression between MQL Lead, and Opportunity. Add the property 'Lifecycle Stage History" to track how
contacts move through the stages over time. To make it more specific, you can filter by "Date Entered Lifecycle co Stage"to see when the contacts entered these stages.

Not sure above it