Display most recent note in a report - activity property workaround

[TYuan4]

I had a need to display the most recent note as pulled from the "Note Body" field. I wasn't able to find a workaround that didn't show duplicate contacts and all notes associated with that contact, vs just the most recent one. A few other posts didn't quite solve the problem (for example, https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Dashboards-Reporting/Last-Updated-note-or-Most-recent/m-p/1033619) but got close. Additionally, you can't use activity properties as triggers, so you can't use the notes field directly as a trigger to update.

However, I think I may have found a workaround below. Let me know if you all find this helpful.

When creating a workflow, select Deal and then "When an event occurs", "Property Value Changed" as the trigger type. Set Property Name as "Last Activity Changed" and "is known". This will set the trigger to any time there is any activity in the deal, but when activity is not related to the notes, the recent note won't change because it will be the same as before.

• In actions, select "CRM", "Edit Record" and create a new property called "Most Recent Note" (or whatever you choose). Make sure it's in Rich Text format since Hubspot by default applies some HTML formatting that I haven't been able to remove.
• When choosing the the data variable, select "Edit available data", then "add records" in the popup. I named the record type "Note" (you can use whatever you want), and select the object type as "Note" in the drop down.
• Once it's created, you can go back to choosing the data variable, and under the first dropdown, select "Note" instead of the default "Enrolled deal". 
• Expand the "Text properties" group, and select "Note Body". Save and close.

You can run a test by updating a note within a deal you have, then checking to see if the "Most Recent Note" property has updated. You can then use this property in reports and it will only pull the most recent value (as it only stores one note at a time). When deal notes are updated, it will overwrite this property, but you will still be able to see a full history of notes in the deal. Hope this is helpful for those that might be looking for a solution.

[BNorberg · Accepted solution]

Thank you, this solution worked for me as well!

[TYuan4]

Awesome, glad it works for you!

[kennedyp]

@TYuan4, Thank you so much for sharing this with the Community! I am sure plenty of community members will find this helpful. I encourage you to link to this post in a reply on any threads you find with similar use-cases. 😊

Best,

Kennedy