At 500 contacts, your Notion CRM stops feeling like a database and starts feeling like a spreadsheet graveyard. The moment you hit export, you discover that Notion never intended to be a real CRM—and your relational data wasn't designed to survive the journey. We tested a real 500-contact Notion base (six custom fields, three rollups, two lookup fields, one multi-select relationship) and exported it to CSV. Nine field types either orphaned, flattened, or returned useless nulls. Here's what we found, why it happens, and how to recover before you migrate. The nine fields that die on Notion export Notion's export engine treats relational data like footnotes—it strips them rather than flattens them. Here's the brutal inventory: 1. Relation fields (one-to-many) A contact linked to three projects returns Project A; Project B; Project C in the CSV. Looks intact. But open it in a real CRM? It's a string, not a reference. You've lost the ability to query by project, filter by relationship type, or sync bidirectionally. The relationship is dead—you've just got a memo field. 2. Relation fields (many-to-many) Worse. A contact linked to five team members comes out as a semicolon-delimited string. When you import into a CRM, the CRM has no idea whether those five people are collaborators, stakeholders, or decision-makers. The cardinality is gone. So is any metadata about the relationship itself (date linked, strength, type). 3. Rollup fields You built a rollup that sums contract values across related deals. On export, it returns the computed number—but only as a static snapshot. You've lost the formula. In your new CRM, it won't recalculate. If a deal value changes, that rollup is orphaned. 4. Lookup fields A lookup that pulls in the company size from a related company record? It exports as a flat value. The lookup formula dies. Your new CRM will have a read-only field full of old data that never updates. 5. Formula fields with text output A formula that concatenates first name + last name exports as the result string. The formula logic vanishes. If you later need to recalculate (say, to change the format), you're rebuilding it from scratch—across 500 rows, now in a new system. 6. Formula fields with date math You built a field that calculates days-to-renewal by subtracting today from a contract end date. On export, it's a number (e.g., 47 ). But it's not dynamic. In your new CRM, that number is already stale. You've lost the formula that kept it fresh. 7. Multi-select fields (custom) A contact tagged with five custom statuses (e.g., Warm Lead; Calls Booked; Budget Confirmed ) exports as a comma or semicolon-delimited string. Your new CRM has to re-parse it. If you used special characters or inconsistent casing, import errors balloon. You'll spend hours cleaning up semicolon vs. comma vs. pipe delimiters. 8. Button fields and rollup-driven status fields A button that triggers an external action (Zapier webhook, Slack message) has no representation in CSV. It's gone. Any field that depends on button output is orphaned too. Same for rollup-driven status fields—they export as static values, not formulas. 9. Database template fields If you used Notion's template feature to auto-generate a project name or description, the template logic is invisible on export. You get only the output. If you need to rebuild it in your new CRM, you're reverse-engineering the logic. Why this happens (and why it matters) Notion's CSV export is destructive by design . Notion stores relational data in a JSON-like structure (its proprietary database format), but CSV has no concept of relationships. So Notion's export converter makes a choice: collapse relationships into strings, drop formulas, or leave fields blank. It picks the path of least resistance, which is almost always dumb down the data . This works fine if you're exporting to a spreadsheet. It's catastrophic if you're migrating to a CRM that expects structured data. The real cost: You don't just lose formulas and relationships. You lose the metadata about those relationships—when they were created, who created them, whether they're active or archived. That context is invisible in Notion's base and invisible in export. By the time you notice it's gone, you're already importing into a new system. Field-by-field recovery map Before you export, audit which fields are critical and which can be rebuilt. Here's the triage: Save manually: Export your Notion base to CSV and to JSON (if using a third-party Notion API tool like Zapier or Make). The JSON preserves relational structure better than CSV. You'll still lose formulas, but you'll retain the relationship graph. Document formulas: Open each formula field in Notion and screenshot or copy the formula logic. Store it in a separate spreadsheet. When you import into your new CRM, you'll rebuild these formulas (or ask the new system to handle them natively). Map relations: For each relation field, create a two-column map: contact_id | related_conta