When you export Affinity, you get a flat CSV. Each row is a contact or interaction, but the relationships between them —the company a person works for, the deal they're tied to, the email thread that context lives in—those connections are compressed into text fields or stripped entirely. A contact export won't show which emails matter most. A deal export won't name the people inside it without manual lookup. A company's touchpoint history becomes a single "notes" column. By the time you paste that data into a new platform, you've lost the relationship graph that made Affinity valuable in the first place. This playbook walks you through what breaks, how to recover it, and the 60-day rebuild sequence that gets you back to deal velocity on the other side. What Affinity's export actually gives you (and what it doesn't) Affinity's strength is relationship density: every person is linked to a company, every email is threaded to a deal, every interaction surfaces in context. The export honors some of that—but not all. When you export contacts, you get: Name, email, phone, job title, company name Custom fields you created Interaction count and last interaction date Tags Organization ID (reference, not embedded) What you don't get: The full email body or attachment history (only count and date) Deal stage or deal name in the contact row Call notes or meeting transcripts (only that they happened) Relationship type (who referred this person, who they reported to) Opportunity owner or deal stage association When you export deals, you get: Deal name, value, stage, close date Owner, created date, last activity Custom fields You don't get: The list of people attached to the deal (you have to cross-reference by hand) Email thread content from deal interactions The interaction chain that led to current stage Relationship depth between people on the deal (who owns it, who influences it) And company exports are similarly hollow: name, industry, size, custom fields—but no roll-up of active deals or the richest contacts at that account. The core problem: Affinity's export is denormalized —optimized for bulk extract, not for preserving the graph. Your new platform won't know that Sarah at Acme is the economic buyer on the ₹50L deal, or that the deal stalled because her email bounced on Tuesday. You have to rebuild that knowledge manually or re-create it through integration. Step 1: Audit your export fields before you leave Affinity Before you hit export, map what you need to preserve and what you can afford to lose. Most teams don't know what they're about to lose until it's gone. Run this audit: Export your three core tables: Contacts (with all custom fields), Opportunities (deals), Organizations (companies). Set date range to "last 12 months of activity." Spot-check five active deals. For each deal, manually list: deal name, stage, value, all people attached , and the primary contact. Now open the deal export. See what's missing? That gap is what you'll rebuild. Check for relationship fields. Do you have custom fields that encode relationship type? (e.g., "Relationship: Economic Buyer," "Influence: High.") These must become custom fields in your new platform before import. Count your interaction types. Emails, calls, notes, tasks, meetings. Affinity's export gives you a count and date, not the body. If interaction content matters to your reps, export email threads separately from the CRM export—Gmail takeout, Outlook archive—and plan to re-link them manually or via API after migration. List your active deal owners and their deal counts. You'll need to re-verify ownership after import; Affinity's export won't catch reassignments that happened outside the CRM. Document this in a spreadsheet: Field Name | Affinity Field | Exported? | Critical for Deal Velocity? | Rebuild Plan. This becomes your migration playbook. Step 2: Prepare your target platform schema before import Whether you're moving to Orin, Pipedrive, or another CRM , the platform must have fields ready to receive Affinity's data and accommodate the relationships you're rebuilding. Create these fields in advance: Relationship type (dropdown or text): Economic Buyer, Technical Champion, Influencer, Blocker, etc. This is not built-in; you must add it. Company association (lookup or link field): Every contact must link to a company. Most modern CRMs have this; check that the import mapping includes it. Deal linkage (multi-select or related records): A contact can be on multiple deals. Affinity doesn't export this natively, so you'll rebuild it in step 4. Interaction history rollup (text or long field): A summary like "5 emails, 2 calls, last touch 2025-01-15." Affinity's export gives you count and date; populate this field from the export and enrich it manually. Email thread archive link (URL or text): If you're archiving email outside the CRM, store a link to the thread here. Affinity ID (text, hidden): Keep the original Affinity ID for cross-reference during rebuild. Us