Case Study

Cleaning Up 71 HubSpot Workflows Without Breaking a Single Automation

Written by Shubham Mishra | Aug 8, 2026, 2:45:57 PM

The Client

A subscription-based SaaS platform serving short-term rental (STR) hosts, offering onboarding, listing management tools, and a paid membership tier. The client runs its customer journey, trial, onboarding, upgrade, cancellation, and win-back, almost entirely through HubSpot automation, with a single Account Lifecycle contact property acting as the source of truth for where each contact sits in that journey.

The Challenge

Over several years, the client's HubSpot portal had accumulated 71 active and inactive workflows that read or wrote to the Account Lifecycle field. New automations had been layered on top of old ones rather than replacing them, and nobody on the team had full visibility into:

  • Which workflows were still doing meaningful work vs. quietly running with zero enrollments.

  • Where two or more workflows were writing conflicting values to the same field for the same contacts.

  • Which workflows referenced Account Lifecycle option values that had since been deleted from the property -causing contacts to silently fall through incomplete logic.

  • Which automations were duplicating data the client's billing platform (Chargebee) could already supply directly.

Our Solution

  1. Full Inventory

    Catalogued all 71 workflows touching the Account Lifecycle field, capturing status (on/off), purpose, and the team's own working notes on each one.

  2. Classification Framework

    Sorted every workflow into one of eight categories — Working Fine, Needs Optimization/Merge, Needs Stakeholder Discussion, Waiting for Approval, Delete (Confirmed), Delete (Pending Review), Broken Field Logic, and Chargebee-Dependent, so each workflow had a clear, actionable next step instead of a vague "review this."

  3. Conflict & Risk Flagging

    Identified workflows silently failing because they referenced Account Lifecycle values no longer available in the property, a data-integrity risk affecting live contacts, prioritised for immediate fixing.

  4. Merge-Not-Replace Consolidation Plan

    Rather than building a new master workflow, mapped each redundant smaller workflow to the existing, larger workflow it naturally belonged to - reducing total workflow count without introducing a new point of failure.

  5. Priority Roadmap

    Sequenced the cleanup: fix silent failures first, resolve the Chargebee-dependent workflow, route unclear-ownership workflows to stakeholders, then merge and retire in order, so the client's team could execute in phases instead of all at once.

Where the 71 Workflows Landed

Every workflow was sorted into one of eight clear categories, so the client's team could see at a glance what needed action, what could be merged, and what was safe to leave alone. 

Outcome

  • 33 of 71 workflows (46%) identified as safe to delete — 8 confirmed outright, 25 flagged for a quick usage check before removal.

  • 8 redundant workflows mapped for merging into existing automations, cutting overlapping logic without adding a new workflow to maintain
  • 2 silently failing workflows caught and flagged for immediate repair, closing a data-integrity gap the client didn't know existed
  • 1 workflow (and its associated custom property) identified as fully replaceable by the client's existing Chargebee integration
  • A reusable classification framework the client's internal team can apply to future workflow reviews, not just this one-time cleanup.

Why It Matters

For a portal this size, the risk isn't just clutter; it's contacts silently getting the wrong lifecycle stage because two automations disagree, or a deleted field option leaves a branch dead. This audit gave the client a prioritised, low-risk path to a leaner automation setup: fewer workflows doing the same job, no new single point of failure, and a clear record of why every workflow that remains is still there.

 

About Code Accelerator

Code Accelerator is a HubSpot Solutions Partner agency specialising in CRM implementation, CMS/module development, RevOps consulting, and marketing automation for growing SaaS and service businesses. We help teams get more out of the HubSpot they already have through audits, cleanup, and custom builds before recommending anything new.