When you export from Notion CRM, you get a flat CSV file. What you don't get is the relationship graph. Every deal linked to a contact, every contact linked to a company, every historical note attached to an interaction—those connections collapse into single cells or disappear entirely. By the time you realize what's gone, you're three weeks into manual recovery in your new platform and the deal velocity has already tanked. The problem compounds at 300+ contacts. That's the threshold where Notion's UI slowness becomes unbearable and where the export-then-migrate workflow reveals how much context you've actually lost. A contact record that looked complete in Notion becomes a ghost in your new CRM: related deals missing, company affiliation gone, conversation thread fragmented across multiple import fields that don't map cleanly. This checklist walks you through three audits—before, during, and after export—so you know exactly what survives the move and what needs manual reconstruction. What Notion's export actually loses Notion exports relationships as one-to-many flattening. If a contact has five associated deals, the export either: Repeats the contact row five times (bloating the CSV and confusing deduplication logic in the target CRM), or Smashes all five deal names into a single cell as a semicolon-separated list (unstructured, unsearchable, impossible to preserve deal metadata) Neither approach preserves the actual relationship. In your new CRM, you'll have the contact record and you'll have the deal records, but the link between them will be gone. If your new platform (like Orin's CRM ) requires a proper deal-to-contact relationship to power forecasting, activity feeds, and email threading, you'll be manually re-linking deals for weeks. Notion also doesn't export: Relation type metadata. Was this a 1:1 or 1:many relationship? Is the contact the decision-maker, influencer, or technical buyer? Notion stores this in a hidden column that the CSV export skips entirely. Rollup fields. If you've used Notion formulas to calculate total pipeline value per contact or count closed deals, those summaries are static snapshots in the CSV—not live formulas in the new platform. Activity history. Comments on records, edit timestamps, who changed what and when—all gone. You'll have the final state of each record, but not the path to get there. Linked properties from related tables. If your deal table has a "Contact" field that pulls the contact's company name as a rollup, that pullthrough is flattened into a text field on export. It won't auto-populate in the new CRM. The export gives you data. The import requires structure. Notion excels at the first, struggles with the second. Plan for manual reconciliation on at least 15–20% of your records. Pre-export audit: What to inventory before you pull the CSV Open each of your core Notion tables (Contacts, Deals, Companies, Activities) and document the schema you've built: List every field in every table. Include field type (text, email, phone, relation, rollup, formula, checkbox, date, currency). Notion's export will drop some field types entirely (relations, rollups, formulas show as text only) and rename others inconsistently. Count the relationships. How many contacts have linked deals? How many deals have linked companies? How many companies have linked contacts? Run a quick Notion database query to get these numbers. You'll need them to validate the import later. Audit your custom fields. If you've created fields like "Decision Timeline" or "Budget Approval Status", note their values and decide now whether your new CRM will support them. If not, you'll need to migrate them as notes or tags instead. Export a sample row. Pull a single contact record with all relationships intact and export it. Open the CSV in a text editor and see exactly how Notion flattened it. This is your warning. Record all of this in a migration spreadsheet. You'll use it as a validation checklist after import. The export-and-import workflow: Field mapping and data loss points When you export from Notion, you'll get one CSV per table. The order is: Export Contacts first (this is your anchor table) Export Companies second (link them by company name or ID) Export Deals third (link them by deal name or ID) Export Activities last (if you need them—most teams drop this due to size) For each export, rename the CSV file to include the export date: Contacts_2025-01-15.csv . You'll run multiple exports as you refine the mapping, and you need to know which version you're importing. In the target CRM (like Orin), map fields as follows: Notion "Name" → Target "Contact Name" (straightforward) Notion "Email" → Target "Email" (straightforward) Notion "Phone" → Target "Phone" (often misformatted; you'll need to clean this) Notion "Company" (relation flattened to text) → Target "Company Name" field, but do NOT auto-link yet. Import it as plain text first, then use a bulk operation in your new CRM to find-and-link co