Cleaning up duplicate deals in HubSpot is an important step toward accurate reporting and reliable revenue data. But if your deals include line items, there’s an important behavior to be aware of:
👉 When HubSpot merges deals, line items from both deals are retained.
That default behavior can cause real problems, especially when duplicate deals represent the same opportunity with identical products attached.
By design, HubSpot treats line items as valuable historical data. When two deals are merged:
All line items from the primary deal are kept
All line items from the secondary deal are also kept
Identical products are not deduplicated
For teams managing large volumes of duplicate deals, this can result in:
Inflated deal values
Duplicate products on a single deal
Incorrect reporting
This is a common challenge for organizations that want to automate deal deduplication while keeping clean, trustworthy line item data.
Koalify gives you granular control over how duplicate deals are identified and merged, including:
However, today:
HubSpot does not support selectively retaining line items during a merge
Koalify cannot modify line items as part of the merge action itself
That means a different approach is needed if your goal is to keep the line items from the primary deal only.
The safest and most reliable approach is to delete line items from non-primary deals before the merge happens.
Here’s how the process works.
First, configure Koalify to:
Detect duplicate deals using your preferred criteria (e.g. deal name, amount, close date, company)
Mark one deal as the primary
Mark the others as non-primary (secondary)
Koalify automatically exposes these flags as properties, which you can then use directly in HubSpot workflows.
Within the same workflow, you can first remove line items from secondary deals and then merge them into the primary deal using Koalify’s workflow action.
Before merging, you’ll need to clear line items from the secondary deals.
At the moment:
HubSpot does not offer a native workflow action to delete line items
This step requires either:
A custom-coded workflow action
Or a third-party line item management tool
Common tools used for this purpose include:
The workflow logic is straightforward:
Enroll deals where Koalify: Is Primary Deal = false
Remove all associated line items from those deals
Once the secondary deals no longer contain line items:
Trigger the Koalify merge action in the same workflow
Merge secondary deals into the primary deal
Because the secondary deals are now “empty,” the merged deal:
Retains only the primary deal’s line items
Avoids duplicate products
Preserves clean revenue data
All without manual intervention.
This setup combines the strengths of both platforms:
Koalify handles accurate duplicate detection and controlled merging
HubSpot workflows orchestrate the process safely
Line item tools or scripts handle a limitation in native deal merges
The result:
Clean deal records
Accurate line items
Scalable automation, even for tens of thousands of duplicate deals
Most importantly, this approach lets you automate deal deduplication without compromising revenue integrity.
HubSpot’s merge behavior is intentionally conservative and that’s a good thing. But when duplicate deals contain identical line items, a simple merge isn’t enough.
By removing line items from secondary deals before merging and letting Koalify handle the deduplication logic you can safely clean up your pipeline while keeping your deal data accurate and reliable.
If you’re managing deal duplicates at scale and want full control over how merges happen, Koalify gives you the flexibility to build a process that fits your data, not the other way around.