Moving Notes & Activity History from Affinity to Attio
The notes your team typed after every call are the part of Affinity you cannot afford to lose. A partner's read on a founder, the reason a deal stalled in 2022, the intro that came through a shared board seat. That context lives in three places inside Affinity: manual Notes, the auto-logged interaction timeline, and the email and meeting history Affinity captured from connected inboxes. Each one moves differently when you switch to Attio, and knowing which is which saves you from assuming everything transfers as a clean copy.
This page covers what Dialed carries over as structured data, what Attio rebuilds the moment you connect inboxes, and how we attach every note to the right Company or Person so nothing lands on an orphan record.
What an Affinity note actually is
Inside Affinity, a Note is a timestamped text entry written by a user and pinned to one or more Organizations, Persons, or Opportunities. That note carries an author, a created date, and its links to those records. Affinity Notes map directly to Attio Notes, so the text, the author attribution, and the timestamp all come across. We preserve the link so a note written about Acme Capital still opens on the Acme Capital company record in Attio, not in a loose pile.
The auto-captured interaction history is different. Affinity builds a timeline of emails sent and received, plus meetings, by reading connected Gmail and Outlook accounts. That timeline is derived data. Affinity generated it from the underlying messages, so the cleanest way to reproduce it in Attio is to point Attio at the same inboxes and let it read the source again.
What carries over as data versus what gets rebuilt
| In Affinity | How it moves to Attio |
|---|---|
| Manual Notes (text, author, date) | Migrated directly to Attio Notes, attached to the matched record |
| Note-to-record links | Preserved so each note opens on the right Company or Person |
| Email logs and interaction timeline | Rebuilt by connecting the same inboxes to Attio's email sync |
| Meeting history from calendar | Rebuilt through Attio's calendar sync |
| Files attached to records | Migrated to Attio record attachments |
| Who-knows-who relationship signals | Re-derived from email and calendar frequency once sync runs |
The split matters for one reason. If you treat the email timeline as a file to export and re-import, you fight the format and lose attribution. If you reconnect the inboxes, Attio reads the original messages and reconstructs the same contact history, often with cleaner threading than a flat export. We run both halves in parallel so the manual notes load while the sync backfills the timeline.
Attaching notes to the right record
The hard part of any note migration is matching. A note in Affinity points to an Organization record with a specific ID. Attio creates new records with new IDs. Dialed matches on domain for companies and on email address for people, then falls back to name matching for records that lack an email. Before we load anything, we run a test migration on a subset and check that notes landed on the correct records. You review the sample. We fix any mismatches in the mapping. Then we run the full load.
This is also where we catch duplicates. Affinity firms that imported lists over several years often hold two records for the same company. We flag those during the test so your notes consolidate onto one record in Attio instead of splitting across two.
Rebuilding the who-knows-who context
Affinity's relationship strength scores come from reading email and calendar frequency between your team and outside contacts. Those scores are calculated, so they do not export as a column you can drop into Attio. Once you connect the same inboxes and calendars to Attio, Attio reads the same signal and surfaces interaction history per person. Your team keeps the answer to "who at our firm knows this founder" without you copying a single number. We cover the full mechanics of that rebuild on our relationship intelligence page.
The objects Dialed maps in a standard migration are People, Companies, Lists and saved views, Notes, Opportunities, and Files. Notes ride along with that set, which means your activity history arrives as part of one coordinated cutover rather than a separate project bolted on later.
See what your firm saves switching to Attio →FAQ
- Do my Affinity notes keep their original author and date?
- Yes. We migrate the note text, the author, and the created timestamp, and we preserve the link to the Company or Person the note was written about.
- Will my email history transfer or do I have to reconnect inboxes?
- You reconnect the same Gmail or Outlook accounts to Attio. Attio reads the source messages and rebuilds the interaction timeline, which produces cleaner threading than a flat export of logged emails.
- What happens to notes attached to a deal that no longer exists?
- Affinity Opportunities map to Attio Deals as records on a List or Object. Notes pinned to an opportunity follow the deal record, so historical context on closed and lost deals stays intact.
- How do you stop notes from landing on the wrong record?
- We match companies on domain and people on email, then run a test migration on a sample so you can confirm placement before the full load. Mismatches get fixed in the mapping first.
- Can I see the activity rebuild before I commit?
- Yes. A free test migration loads a subset of records and notes into a sandbox Attio workspace so you review attachment and matching quality before any cutover.