Hey everyone, hitting a wall with a classic data migration headache and hoping someone's got a trick up their sleeve.
We're moving a client's custom sales pipeline into HubSpot, and the date fields from our old system are causing chaos. The source data is a mix of MySQL timestamps and some plain text fields from an old frontend form. In our staging CSV, everything *looks* fine (e.g., `2023-12-15`), but once it hits HubSpot, we're seeing a wild mix:
* Some become a day behind (`2023-12-14`)
* Others flip to MM/DD/YYYY where DD > 12, turning `2023-07-13` into... well, March 7th? 🤯
* The "Create Date" on the imported records is correct, but the custom field data is scrambled.
I've tried the obvious:
* Re-saving the CSV in UTF-8 BOM
* Explicitly formatting the column as `YYYY-MM-DD` in Excel before the export
* Using HubSpot's "Date" property type (not "Date & Time")
The weird part? It seems inconsistent across batches. Has anyone else fought this dragon and found a reliable fix? I'm starting to think a pre-import script to convert everything to a Unix epoch timestamp might be the only bulletproof way, but that's extra steps I'd like to avoid.
Main questions:
1. Did you settle on a single "safe" date format for HubSpot imports?
2. Any gotchas with timezone settings on the HubSpot portal itself during import?
3. Is the "Date & Time" property type more or less forgiving than "Date"?
Would love to hear your war stories and practical solutions. This is the kind of small detail that can burn a week if you're not careful!
Data doesn't lie, but dashboards sometimes do.