You've built 5,000 contacts in Affinity. You've tagged them as investors, partners, referral sources, and board members. You've mapped who knows whom. You've logged three years of coffee meetings, term sheets, and handshakes. Now you're moving to a new CRM, and you're about to discover that Affinity's beautiful relationship graph does not export cleanly. Some data rebuilds in minutes. Most of it requires manual intervention or gets flattened into unusable fields. This guide maps exactly what survives an Affinity export, what breaks, and the fastest way to rebuild it. If you manage wealth advisory relationships, business development pipelines, or investment networks, this matters. A lot. The core problem: Affinity's relationship graph doesn't have an export format Affinity stores relationships as a visual graph—connections between people, organizations, and deals. When you export, that graph collapses into rows and columns. A single person record might have been connected to 47 other people through seven different relationship types (introduced by, manages, invested in, reports to, etc.). The export gives you a flat list. The relationships either disappear or get crammed into a single text field. Here's what actually happens: Primary contact data exports cleanly: Name, email, phone, title, company, location. CSV standard. No loss. Relationship metadata flattens: "Bob introduced me to Sarah" becomes a text note or a many-to-many table that your new CRM might not read the same way. Interaction history gets summarized: Affinity logs every email open, every calendar invite, every note. The export gives you a subset—usually just date and subject, not the full timeline. Custom relationship types vanish: If you've built custom tags like "warm intro from 2019" or "passed diligence", they either export as tags (if your new system supports them) or disappear entirely. Organization connections lose hierarchy: Affinity tracks which contact works at which company and in what role. Exports often flatten this to a single "company" field, losing portfolio company relationships and cross-holdings. The graph doesn't export. The data does. That's the gap you'll spend 60 days closing. Field-by-field mapping: what survives, what requires work Here's the practical checklist. If you're migrating 5,000 contacts from Affinity, use this to audit your export before you commit: Imports cleanly (no action needed): Name, email, phone, mobile: Standard CSV fields. Direct map. No loss. Title and company: Exports as text. Your new system should auto-match companies if they exist. Location: City, state, country. Some systems parse it; others need manual cleanup. Tags: If your new CRM supports bulk tag import, Affinity exports these as a delimited list. Check the delimiter—Affinity usually uses comma or semicolon. Notes/Description: All text notes export as a single field. Timeline order is lost; you get a concatenated blob. Imports with loss (needs cleanup): Interaction history: Affinity tracks email opens, clicks, calendar events. The export CSV gives you a summary: last touch date, total interactions, maybe a list of subject lines. You lose granularity. If you need a complete email timeline, you'll need to reconstruct it from email logs or accept the loss. Relationship metadata: "Bob is an investor in Company X" or "Sarah was introduced by John" exports as a note or as separate records if your export settings support it. Most don't. Plan for manual remapping in your new system. Custom fields: Affinity allows custom contact fields (e.g., "Investment stage", "Expected decision date"). These export as CSV columns if they're populated. But if your new system's schema doesn't match exactly, they'll import as generic custom fields or not at all. Check schema alignment before export. Deal associations: If you track which contacts are tied to which deals, Affinity exports these as separate deal records or as linked rows, depending on your export method. Cross-check that your new system has a many-to-many contact-to-deal mapping. Exports with known gaps (plan for manual work): Organization hierarchy: Affinity tracks portfolio companies, parent-subsidiary relationships, and corporate structures. Standard CSV export flattens this. You'll lose the "Company X owns Company Y" relationship unless your new system has a dedicated org chart field. Wealth and PE teams: this is a 40-hour rebuild. Relationship directionality: Affinity records who introduced whom (A introduced me to B). The export gives you both names, but not always the direction or the date of introduction. You'll need to manually clean this or lose the context. Interaction sentiment: If you've marked interactions as "warm", "cold", "interested", these export as tags or notes, not as a structured field. You lose the ability to pivot on sentiment at import. Document attachments: Affinity lets you attach PDFs, contracts, and emails to contacts. These do not export in the CSV. If you need them,