Betreff: Only merging associations and activities when merging companies

[FrederikLindum]

Hi

I've looked into this and it is my understanding that what I'm asking for is not possible. Never the less, I wanted to share my thought/frustration here to see if I'm missing something or if anyone have a workaround that I'm not familiar with myself just jet. 

What is the problem?

We've done several M&As and have therefore imported data from three different CRM-systems into Hubspot. When doing so, my collegaues didnt account for, that the CRM-database we imported in many cases already had a duplicate value for companies already existing in our CRM before the import. Or they did, but they missed quite a lot. Hence, we unfortunately are in a position where we, for several years, have had probably around 500 duplicate Companies in Hubspot. 

Due to this, everyone in Operations have been working on different Companies for many years. 

Why not just merge then?

Well, what we see is that the duplicate Company in many cases have had its Company properties updated after the same property on the correct Company and this is where the challenge presents itself: The way merging works is that the property with the last updated value, will overwrite the same property on the Company we merge to, and because we also have set up an integration from Hubspot to Netsuite (ERP-system) we cannot have untrue Netsuite ID values on the Company (this is what the integrations uses to update both systems with relevant data) and/or untrue Billing Information from the duplicate Company. This will corrupt our integration and billing information will be updated to be incorrectly, meaning we are not able to invoice customers from Netsuite. 

What I need

What I need is the option to decide, when I merge, what data and properties I want to merge and what I do not want to merge. I.e in our case it's most often the associations (Contacts, Tickes, Deals, attachments, etc) that we want to merge, while not merging any of the Company properties. 

Workaround

I've thought of two solutions:

1. Export all companies from Hubspot (today 7000+). Manually map the duplicate Companyt with the right one --> Update the Company properties on the duplicate Company with the properties from the correct Company --> Import that file into Hubspot to mass-update all the duplicate Companies so that Company properties are 1:1 with the right Company, and then find them again in Hubspot and do the merge. 

2. Instead of merging the companies we manually move all Contacts, Tikcets, Deals, etc. from the duplicate Company to the correct on by removing assocation with duplicate Company and association with the right Company, but because I must do this 1 by 1, it takes so much time. We could have 100 Tickets, 25 Contacts and several Deals that I need to manually open, remove current association and then add the new assocaiton. With attachments I need to download all attachments and upload them to the new company, also 1 by 1. This could easily be 30min per company, which as you might understand, is way too long. 

Bot suggestions are massive tasks that would probably take me several months to complete, and that is not possible for me. 

Is it really so, that this is the only way to do it? Or does another solution exist?

[MiaSrebrnjak]

Hi @FrederikLindum,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community! We appreciate the details you've included in your post and the workarounds you've thought of so far, they make a lot of sense.

I found feature requests in our Ideas forum where other customers have requested a similar function: 

• Change rules of merging
• Merged Record History

It'd be great if you could support the ideas by giving them an upvote and sharing your use case in the comments. Thank you!

I also wanted to invite a couple of HubSpot experts to this thread to see if they can share their insights: 

Hi @jolle, @franksteiner79, @Katherinegavin1, do you have any advice for @FrederikLindum? Thank you!

Cheers
Mia, Community team