Moving fifteen years of broker records from FileMaker to HubSpot

The situation

A commercial finance brokerage had run its business on a FileMaker database for years. It was the firm’s institutional memory: every company spoken to, every contact, every deal written. But it could not drive the workflows the team now needed, from automated follow-up to pipeline reporting, and the data had drifted. Companies appeared several times under slightly different names; contacts were attached to the wrong records; deals had inconsistent stages.

What we did

Profile before moving. We exported the full database and profiled it: record counts, field usage, naming variants, orphaned contacts and deals without companies. The findings became the migration rules, agreed with the client before anything was imported.

De-duplicate with the business, not for it. Matching rules identified duplicate companies and contacts. The brokerage reviewed the proposed merges, so the decisions about which record survived were theirs.

Rebuild the pipeline to fit the firm. Rather than force the brokerage into HubSpot’s default stages, we rebuilt the sales pipeline around the stages the team already used, and carried the historical deals across with their stage history intact.

Migrate everything. 17,530 companies, 27,353 contacts and 1,257 historical deals were loaded into HubSpot, with custom properties for the data that had no standard equivalent.

The result

The brokerage now works from a single CRM that reflects its full history and supports the automation that comes next: lead routing, sequences and reporting. Delivered in April 2026.