Import no longer guesses Stage or Assigned To from a generic column

What’s Fixed

The Map Columns step tries to match each column in your file to a contact field. Three of those guesses were wrong often enough to do real damage:

• a column headed Status was mapped to the pipeline Stage
• a column headed Owner or Agent was mapped to Assigned To

Those headers rarely mean what the importer assumed. In an MLS export, Status is the listing’s status and Agent is the listing agent; in an export from another CRM, Status is that system’s own lead status. The result was a brand-new contact filed under a stage it had never reached — the default pipeline includes a Closed stage — or assigned to someone who had nothing to do with it. Follow-up automations, reporting and lead routing then treated those contacts accordingly, and re-importing the file could not put the stage back.

The only signal was a dropdown that looked right. Unlike a column whose data is dropped, nothing sat on Skip and nothing was flagged, so there was nothing to notice unless you happened to read every row of the mapping screen and disagree with it.

Bug Fixes

• A column headed Status, Owner or Agent is no longer matched to Stage or Assigned To. In most files it now arrives on Skip in the Map Columns list, where you can point it at the right field — including Stage or Assigned To, if that is genuinely what it holds. This applies to both contact and company imports.
• Your file’s own specific column is no longer crowded out. A file with both a Status and a Stage column, or both an Owner and an Assigned To column, used to let the generic one claim the field first and quietly skip the specific one. The specific column now wins, because the generic header no longer competes for the slot.

One case where the column is still mapped automatically

If your team has a custom field whose name matches the column — a custom field called “Status”, say — the column is matched to that custom field rather than skipped.

Two things worth knowing about that, because it is a change rather than a return to old behaviour:

• It is a different destination than before, not the one you had. Previously a Status column went to the pipeline Stage even for teams with their own “Status” custom field, because built-in fields are matched ahead of custom ones. So that column has moved from Stage to your custom field.
• It is still an automatic write. On a row that matches an existing contact, the custom field’s current value is overwritten. That is deliberately a far less damaging place for a misread column to land than a pipeline stage or an owner — but if you do not want the column written at all, set it to Skip on the Map Columns screen before starting the import.

What still maps automatically

Columns that name the field unambiguously are unchanged. The two importers accept slightly different sets — this was already the case and has not changed here:

Contact import

• Stage — Stage, Pipeline Stage, Lead Stage, Stage (by name)
• Assigned To — Assigned To, Assigned User, Lead Owner, Assigned To (user email)

Company import

• Stage — Stage, Pipeline Stage, Company Stage
• Assigned To — Assigned To, Assigned User, Account Owner

Every other column continues to map exactly as it did before.