Last updated: June 26, 2020
In HubSpot, there are four standard objects you can create: contacts, companies, deals, and tickets. To keep track of the relationships between these objects, you can associate these records together. Associations are always two-way (i.e., if record A is associated to record B, record B is also associated to record A) and can be seen in each record in the right panel.
Examples of when you'd associate records include:
- When making a sale, you communicate via email to three individuals of the same company. In HubSpot, you associate the deal to the three contact records and their company record.
- When handling a customer complaint, you communicate via email to two individuals. These individuals are also in the midst of a sale with your company. In HubSpot, you can associate the ticket record to the two contact records and the deal record.
Apart from associating records with each other, you can also associate the activities in a record's timeline to appear in another record. If the records are already associated together, some activities will automatically be associated to the associated records.
Please note: a contact record can be associated to only one company record. Other associations have a limit as detailed in the Technical Limits section in HubSpot's Products & Services Catalog.
There are different ways to associate records:
- To bulk associate records, you can import two files and associate the records, both new and existing, in those files together. The records in those files can be existing records or new records. Learn how HubSpot identifies existing records through its deduplication process.
- If you have developer resources, you can also bulk associate records using this API.
- You can set contact records to automatically be associated to company records.
- You can also manually associate a record to another.
To manually associate a record with another:
- In your HubSpot account, navigate to your contacts, companies, deals, or tickets.
- Click the name of the record you want to associate with others.
- In the right panel, locate the relevant object section and click Add [record]. For example, if you want to associate a deal with the record you're in, look for the Deals section and click Add Deal.
- You can either create a new record to associate to the contact, or associate an existing record to the contact.
- To create a new record to associate the ticket to, in the Create a new [record] tab, enter information into the fields, and click Create.
- To create a new record to associate the ticket to, in the Create a new [record] tab, enter information into the fields, and click Create.
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- To associate an existing record, click the Add existing [record] tab, search for the record you want to associate to the current record, and select the checkbox next to the record in the search results. Click Save.
- To associate an existing record, click the Add existing [record] tab, search for the record you want to associate to the current record, and select the checkbox next to the record in the search results. Click Save.
