Migrating Contact Source Data Without Losing Historical Accuracy

[TVaz]

Hi community! 

We currently use a custom property to track the source of our contacts, but it was set manually in the past, leading to some inconsistencies due to poor selection. To address this, I’m considering creating a new property and building a workflow to migrate the data to more accurate options.

However, I’m concerned about losing the “evolution over time.” Specifically, once the workflow is activated, the dates in reports would reflect when the workflow was applied rather than the original create date.

Does anyone have advice on how to handle this while preserving historical accuracy in reports?

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @TVaz,

Regular properties don't capture the evolution over time, at least not in a way that would be accessible in a report. (Only special properties like lifecycle stage properties do that automatically.) You would have to use a custom date property and make sure to maintain this also.

Once you have a new custom date property, along with your source property, you could export the property history of your old property and reimport the date information from that export file into the new date property: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/properties/export-property-history#export-a-property-s-historical-data

In the context of a source however, I would challenge this a bit. Typically, the date information that goes along with a source would be the Create date and that is maintained automatically.

If you want to carry over the property history from the old to the new, that's unfortunately not possible.

Best regards!