Importing historical objects and dealing with create date

[s-stringa]

Hi everyone,

I’m new to hubspot and to CRM in general.

Since few months I am trying to set up and configure hubspot (free tools) for my company in order to test it in our reality and convince the management, who is skpeptical, to adopt it.

However, I encountered an obstacle while importing data from our current archive (excel sheets) of contacts, company and deals. The create date of each object is automatically set to the import date. This causes all predefined reports and calculated fields, based on create date, to give wrong data (historic objects are not new objects for my business).

I know I can create a custom field, but firstly this can not automatically be set on the newly created objects and it would be not possible to set filters that work both on historic data and on new data. Second all the predefined reports and calculated fields give unuseful and misleading data.

I am sure I am on the wrong way.

Is there a way to set the real create date during the import of historical data in order to be able to use the default reports and calculated fields?

Thank you in advance,

Simona.

[AdamLPW]

Hi @s-stringa,

Nope, you're not doing anything wrong.  Create Date will always be the date of your import. 

If you have a date in your data to be imported (e.g. "Date became a customer") you can map this to one of the other, customisable lifecycle date fields during the import process.  

Frustrating, but you should be able to modify your reports to look at these alternative date fields.   

[s-stringa]

Thank you @AdamLPW for your quick and precise answer.

Unfortunately I don't see how to modify the reports within free tools.

[AdamLPW · Accepted solution]

Hi @s-stringa,

Which report, in particular, are you trying to amend?  

There are SOME free reports that aren't based on create date (https://knowledge.hubspot.com/dashboard/customize-your-dashboards).  If you click "Add report" in the top-right, then filter to show Deals reports...

I refuse to pay for the reporting module (!) - what I've taken to doing is exporting contacts and deals to .csv.  I then have an Excel template (.xltx) on OneDrive with a "data" tab (tab 1) and some charts on tabs 2 & 3.  I create a new spreadsheet from my template, copy and paste the exported data into tab 1, then my charts automatically update.  

It's not ideal, but it's free and very easy really!

I suppose we should expect limitations to free software...?

[s-stringa]

Thanks @AdamLPW I really appreciate your help!

I've already planned to export data and make my own reports other than the free ones. I can do the same also for other reports. This increases the amount of work to be done "manually" and moves away my goal of convincing management to replace excel sheets

For filtering, I can import my data with a custom date field, for contacts created by a form I can use hidden fields (not sure how to set current date with contact form 7) and for offline sources I can fillin it manually

I totally agree that a free version should have limitations but this one seems to me a conceptual mistake: this makes historical object as if it was a new one.

I wonder why the hubspot team developed a funcionality that is completely unuseful also for payd users, since even they have to find a workaround.

Probably, to make this field "untouchable" (even during setup and import), there is a strong reason that I can't see.

Thak you again,

Simona.