How Paazl Moved a Decade of CRM History from Pipedrive to Freshsales with 320K+ Records Intact

TL;DR

Customer: Paazl (E-commerce delivery management platform, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Now part of Wuunder.)

The Move: Pipedrive to Freshsales

The Scope: 320,307 total records: 8,405 contacts, 3,770 organizations, 899 deals, 20,399 emails, 41,822 activities, 17,778 notes, 221,815 file attachments, and 4,657 tasks. Spanning ~10 years (2016 to 2026).

The Roadblock: Two uncooperative APIs. Pipedrive's API refused to return emails marked as private. Freshsales' API overwrote original creation timestamps on import. A looming deadline to terminate Pipedrive added urgency.

The Outcome: Full CRM history preserved in Freshsales across three migration passes. Independent email backups created before Pipedrive termination. Every organization-to-contact-to-deal relationship intact.

By the Numbers

• Total records migrated: 320,307
• File attachments: 221,815
• Activities (calls/meetings): 41,822
• Emails: 20,399
• Notes: 17,778
• Contacts: 8,405
• Tasks: 4,657
• Organizations: 3,770
• Deals: 899
• Leads: 558
• Data span: ~10 years (2016 to 2026)
• Migration passes: 3 (main CRM load + two follow-up email pulls)

The Challenge: A Decade of Sales Data and Two Uncooperative APIs

Paazl is an Amsterdam-based SaaS platform that powers delivery logistics for e-commerce brands worldwide. Now part of Wuunder, the company connects online retailers to hundreds of carriers, handling everything from checkout delivery options and shipping labels to track-and-trace notifications and returns management.

With a sales operation running on Pipedrive since 2016, Paazl's CRM contained a decade of institutional knowledge: thousands of contacts, organizations, deals, and over 20,000 emails that mapped out the full history of their customer relationships. When the team decided to consolidate onto Freshsales, the migration carried real stakes. Losing any of that history would mean losing context on relationships built over 10 years.

The complexity came from three directions:

• Relationship density. CRM data is inherently relational. Every contact links to an organization. Every deal links to contacts. Every note, activity, and file attaches to a specific deal or contact. Break one link, and the data becomes noise rather than context.
• Pipedrive's private email blind spot. The Pipedrive API did not return emails that users had marked as private. The team only discovered this after the initial migration, when they noticed gaps in their email history.
• Freshsales' timestamp limitation. Freshsales does not preserve original creation timestamps during import. Without a workaround, years of carefully sequenced notes and activities would arrive in the wrong order, making it difficult for sales reps to read a deal's history chronologically.

"We don't know what we don't know, so we don't have any additional examples found yet, while it could be that other records that are 'in private' mode within Pipedrive could suffer the same issue."

Tim Paijralbe, Paazl

The ClonePartner Solution: Three-Pass Migration with Dependency-Ordered Loading

ClonePartner structured the migration as three coordinated jobs: one main CRM load followed by two additional passes for mailbox email history.

• Dependency-ordered loading. The full Pipedrive account was pulled into a staging database. From there, Freshsales was loaded in strict dependency order: organizations first, then contacts linked to those organizations, then deals, notes, activities, tasks, and finally file attachments. Each new Freshsales record's ID was written back to the source record, so every subsequent step could relink correctly. Re-runs were safe because the mapping was persistent.

• Chronological ordering workaround. To compensate for Freshsales overwriting timestamps, the team merged emails, notes, and logged activities into one chronological timeline per record and pushed them oldest-first. A checker then identified and re-ordered any notes that arrived out of sequence. When the Paazl team flagged remaining ordering issues, ClonePartner resynced the affected notes within 48 hours.

• Private email recovery. When Dirk Schermerhorn flagged that private Pipedrive emails were missing, ClonePartner investigated and confirmed the Pipedrive API was simply not returning them. The team set up a synthetic test environment to identify a workaround, then coordinated directly with Paazl to convert private emails to visible across user accounts.

• Independent backup under deadline pressure. With Paazl's Pipedrive termination date approaching, ClonePartner created a complete backup of all email accounts independent of Pipedrive. Three team members, Dirk, Tim, and Lucas, connected their individual Pipedrive accounts through secure Truto links. Within hours, every email was cached and preserved.

• Creative email mapping. Emails that were not associated with any entity in Pipedrive posed a separate problem. ClonePartner mapped them as Sales Activities in Freshsales, placing the email content in both the description field (making it searchable via global search) and the notes field (preserving readability). This gave Paazl's team instant access to orphaned emails without manual re-association.

"Thanks for your prompt reply. It worked!"

Tim Paijralbe, Paazl, after connecting his account through the secure backup link

The Results: A Clean CRM with 10 Years of Context

After three migration passes, all 320,307 records were in Freshsales with full relational integrity. Every organization-to-contact-to-deal chain was linked. Notes were in chronological order. All 221,815 file attachments were connected to their parent records.

The independent backup meant Paazl could terminate their Pipedrive subscription on schedule without risking data loss. The private emails that Pipedrive's API had initially hidden were recovered and preserved before the account was closed.

For Paazl's sales team, the result was a Freshsales workspace that carried forward a full decade of customer context: searchable, linked, and ready for day-one operations.

"Perfect, many thanks Abdul!"

Dirk Schermerhorn, Paazl, after confirming the independent backup was complete

What Made This Migration Different

For teams planning a CRM migration with similar complexity, three aspects of this project stand out:

• API limitations exist on both sides. Most teams anticipate export challenges, but import-side limitations (like Freshsales overwriting timestamps) can be equally disruptive. Testing for both source and destination API behavior before go-live avoids surprises.

• Private data is a hidden risk. Pipedrive's API silently excluded private emails. If the Paazl team had not manually audited their records post-migration, those emails would have been lost when the account was terminated.

• Backup before you terminate. ClonePartner's decision to create an independent backup of all email data before Pipedrive's subscription ended meant the team could proceed with termination confidently. The backup was completed within hours of the team connecting their accounts, and the migration continued from cached data with no further dependency on Pipedrive.