How we built a scalable process for managing deactivated HubSpot users at scale and automatically reassigning records.
As SaaS teams grow and evolve, so do their HubSpot user lists. It's common for past employees or contractors to be deactivated, but their ownership of contacts, companies, and deals will remain.
While supporting a SaaS client, we identified over 130 deactivated users still tied to active records. This created confusion during handoffs, impacted reporting accuracy, and led to inefficiencies.
HubSpot doesn’t automatically reassign records when a user is deactivated, so the client needed a reliable process to manage these transitions without disrupting workflows or data integrity.
We implemented a streamlined user management process inside HubSpot that automates how deactivated users are handled. Here's what we built:
To help us trigger automation to reassign records owned by deactivated users, we created a team called “Deactivated Users” that users would be moved to before being marked as deactivated. This would allow us to trigger automation that would check for users within this team to reassign their owned records.
We designed workflows that automatically reassign records—like contacts, companies, deals, and tickets—when a user is added to the “Deactivates Users” team and is marked as deactivated. This workflow would go through a series of logic checks that would reassign their records to the correct active user.
The result was a consistent, automated user management process that kept the client’s user list and record ownership up-to-date. Active users always had visibility into who owned what, and leadership could trust that reporting wasn’t skewed by inactive user data. This process was designed to scale, ideal for SaaS companies managing large or frequently changing teams.
With a proactive user management strategy, SaaS teams can maintain CRM hygiene, prevent reporting errors, eliminate wasted seats, and streamline record ownership—even as roles and teams evolve.
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