Orange Marketing
The start of a new year is when teams set goals, reset dashboards, and swear this will be the year the CRM stays clean.
Then someone leaves.
Or an email domain changes.
Or IT tightens security.
Suddenly, dashboards disappear, records are owned by “Deactivated User,” workflows stop firing, and no one is quite sure what broke, only that something did.
Migrating a HubSpot user account is one of those unsexy but essential housekeeping tasks. Do it right and nothing changes. Do it wrong and you are untangling issues for months.
Here is the clean, current way to handle it, and why it is worth doing early in the year.
Why This Is a New Year Problem (Even If Nothing Is “Broken” Yet)
User changes rarely cause immediate problems. They surface weeks later as reporting gaps, automation that mostly works, or sales teams questioning why deals feel harder to track.
That is because HubSpot ties critical functions to people. Ownership, reporting, workflows, meeting links, and integrations all depend on users. When someone exits without a clean handoff, those connections do not disappear. They degrade over time.
This is why user migration belongs alongside pipeline cleanup and dashboard reviews. It is preventative maintenance, and January is when teams are most likely to do it.
Start by Putting the Replacement in Place
Before you deactivate anyone, make sure their replacement exists and is fully configured.
Create the new user, confirm their email domain is approved, and intentionally match permissions. This matters even more if you use SSO or stricter security controls. If the new user lacks access to the same objects, reports, or automation, ownership transfers will feel incomplete even if they technically work.
This step sets the foundation. Everything else depends on it.
Dashboards and Reports: The First Red Flags
Dashboards are usually the first thing people notice because they are highly visible.
They do not automatically transfer when a user leaves. The same is true for saved reports and views.
Go to Reports, filter by the outgoing user as owner, select the relevant assets, and reassign them to the new user. If you have many dashboards, you may need to repeat this step across pages.
This is also a good time to ask a simple question: does anyone still use this? New year cleanups make it easier to reduce clutter without friction.
Transfer what matters. Archive what does not.
The Big One: Transferring Record Ownership
This is where most migrations either succeed quietly or fail slowly.
Contacts, companies, deals, and tickets owned by the outgoing user all need to be reassigned. HubSpot offers a few ways to handle this, depending on your portal.
Option A: One-Time Migration Tool
Some Professional and Enterprise portals offer a built-in ownership transfer option during user deactivation. When available, this is the simplest approach since it reassigns ownership across objects in one step.
Not every portal has this feature. Test it with a dummy user or confirm availability with HubSpot Support before relying on it.
Option B: Workflows
If the migration tool is unavailable, workflows are a reliable alternative. Create workflows for each object type, set the owner property to the new user, and enroll records currently owned by the outgoing user.
This approach is controlled, visible, and repeatable.
Option C: Export and Re-Import
For complex or messy data, exporting records, updating the Owner field, and re-importing can be the safest option. It is manual, but it gives you full confidence in the result.
The key point: ownership should always be intentional. Never assume deactivation handled everything. Verify the work.
The Quiet Breaks: Automation, Meetings, and Tasks
Most CRM issues do not surface as errors. They simply stop working.
After ownership is handled, check the details that are easy to miss:
- Email and calendar integrations tied to the old user
- Workflows or sequences that send from a specific person
- Meeting links connected to deactivated calendars
- Tasks, which do not always follow record ownership
Have the new user reconnect integrations, recreate meeting links, and confirm workflows are sending from the correct address.
This is often where “everything looked fine” turns into “why has nothing fired in weeks?”
A Final Sweep Before Deactivation
Before deactivating the old user, do one last audit.
Create a view filtered by the soon-to-be inactive owner. Spot-check dashboards, workflows, and records. Make sure nothing critical still references the outgoing account.
This step is quick, but it prevents months of slow cleanup.
Once that is done, deactivate the user.
When Housekeeping Reveals Something Bigger
If migrating a user account feels more complicated than expected, that is usually a sign of a larger issue.
The portal has grown faster than it has been reviewed. Ownership is scattered. Workflows overlap. No one is fully confident in what is being used versus what is just still there.
That is where a HubSpot audit becomes valuable.
Not to rebuild your system, but to understand it. To see how your tools, data, and processes fit together today, and where small changes could create clarity and stability.
If a simple user migration raised questions, that is often the right moment to take a closer look under the hood. And can help!
