Migrate from Customer Database App to Pipedrive

Customer Database App contact records map directly to Pipedrive Person records. The contact name, phone, email, address, and any free-text fields from the CSV export map to Pipedrive's standard Person fields. We infer field types from the exported content (numeric strings become number fields, ISO dates become date fields, short text becomes short text) and create Pipedrive custom fields for any field that does not have a standard equivalent. The Person's primary email is stored in the email_addresses JSON field and must be de-duplicated against existing Pipedrive Persons before insert using name-and-email as the dedupe key.

If the Customer Database App export contains a company or organization column — which some users populate despite the app not enforcing it — we extract those values and create Pipedrive Organizations. Each Person is then linked to its parent Organization via the org_id field. If no company field is populated in the export, we skip Organization creation and map all Persons without a parent org, which is valid in Pipedrive and common for small teams migrating from flat contact tools.

Every Customer Database App installation has a unique field set with no canonical schema. We infer the active field list from the CSV column headers and assign Pipedrive field types by content sampling: numeric-only values become number fields, ISO 8601 dates become date fields, Y/N or boolean strings become checkbox fields, and free-text values become long text or short text depending on character count. Custom fields are pre-created in Pipedrive before any Person import so that the import payload includes valid field IDs. Fields with comma-separated multi-value strings are split and stored as Pipedrive label associations or multiselect custom fields depending on the customer's preferred structure.

Customer Database App stores pipeline stage as a text property on each contact record (for example, 'Lead', 'Qualified', 'Proposal', 'Won', 'Lost'). We extract the distinct stage values from the export, create a Pipedrive Deal pipeline with the corresponding stage names in the same order, and assign probability percentages that we agree upon with the customer during scoping. For each contact with a pipeline stage value, we also create a Pipedrive Deal record linked to the corresponding Person, carrying the stage and any associated value field from the export.

Customer Database App users who track a monetary value or score as a custom field can have those values migrated into the corresponding Pipedrive Deal's amount field. We map the field by column name during scoping. Pipedrive Deals carry currency, close date, and probability alongside amount; we set these from the corresponding export columns where they exist. If no value field is present, we create Deals without an amount, which is valid and common for early-stage pipelines.

Customer Database App exports groups and tags as comma-separated label strings on each contact record. We split each comma-separated value into individual labels, create the Pipedrive Label record if it does not already exist, and associate all labels to the corresponding Person record via the label_ids array. Labels used for customer segmentation (for example, 'VIP', 'Referral', 'Enterprise') migrate cleanly; labels used for workflow routing are documented separately for the admin to recreate in Pipedrive's automation builder.

Birthday stored as a date field on the Customer Database App contact record maps to Pipedrive's Person birthday field (birthday). We parse the date from the export and insert it into the birthday field on the Person record. If the date format in the export is non-standard (for example, a free-text field containing 'January 15' rather than '1985-01-15'), we flag the record for manual review before inserting and document the discrepancy in the migration report.

Customer Database App exports contact images and PDF record exports as separate files alongside the CSV. We bundle these into a ZIP archive during extraction, map each file to its corresponding Person record by contact name or email match, and attach them as Pipedrive Files linked to the Person. File attachment to Persons is supported via Pipedrive's API and renders in the Person detail view. We handle filename encoding issues that arise from non-ASCII characters in the source filenames during the archive extraction step.

Vouchers are a standalone app-specific object with no direct equivalent in Pipedrive's data model. Voucher balances, usage history, and voucher codes are not exported via CSV and cannot be migrated. We deliver a separate supplemental export of any voucher-related data the customer can provide, formatted as a CSV for manual re-entry or a separate tool. This limitation is documented in the migration scope before work begins.

Caller-ID logs and call history are transient device-level records that are not exported via CSV or VCF from Customer Database App. These records are not migrated. We recommend that the customer documents their call-handling procedures and inbound routing setup separately so that the Pipedrive telephony integration (native or via a provider such as Aircall, JustCall, or HubSpot's built-in phone) can be configured post-migration to capture future call history.

Customer Database App has no multi-user ownership model — all contacts are stored in a shared database without per-record owner assignment. Pipedrive requires an OwnerId on each Person and Deal record. During scoping, we confirm whether the customer plans to provision Pipedrive user accounts for each team member. If so, we create a mapping from a designated owner field (for example, a custom 'assigned_to' field populated before export) to Pipedrive User. If no owner field exists in the export, we assign all migrated records to the customer's primary Pipedrive admin user, and the admin distributes ownership after migration.