Auto association of deals

[CDP2023]

Hi!

I am facing a weird issue in Hubspot were when I create an association of a Hubspot call (created through API) to contacts and companies, it auto associates to the deals which are not closed and linked to the contact.
Now I went ahead with this documentation and configured to set the automatic association to deals to None.contact default associations set to Nonecompany default associations set to None

But I still see them getting associated. I saw under Settings -> Calling , another option for AI automatic associations and also turned that down but to no success.
Am I missing something? Is there another setting that needs to be disabled in addition to the two above?

Regards,

CDP

[CarolinaDeMares]

Hey @CDP2023! 

In HubSpot, activities created by an integration will always follow HubSpot’s default activity association logic, even if you’ve adjusted the automatic association settings in the UI. So if you’re seeing a call appear on an open deal “even though the contact has no deal,” the usual cause is that HubSpot is associating the call to a deal through another path, most commonly the contact’s associated company (or the contact’s “primary company”) that does have open deals, and HubSpot then attaches the activity to those open deals by default.

What I’d do to confirm quickly:

1. Check whether the contact is associated to a company, and whether that company has any open deals (that’s often the hidden link).

2. Check your integration payload for the call creation to ensure it’s not unintentionally sending a deal association in the associations section. (Calls v3 supports explicitly associating to records at create time.)

Workaround if you need strict control: after creating the call, explicitly remove any deal associations your integration doesn’t want (using the Associations API). This is currently the most reliable way to prevent “association pollution” when activities are created via integrations.

Hope this help!

Carolina De Mares

ZUID.
Goirkekanaaldijk 12 
5046 AT Tilburg 
Nederland

[CDP2023]

Hey @CarolinaDeMares !

Thank you for sharing the insights — they were very helpful.

That said, I wanted to clarify something that still feels inconsistent from our end. Even though we have explicitly configured the auto-association logic to not associate calls with deals (except when associations are explicitly provided via the API), HubSpot continues to automatically associate these calls with all open deals linked to the customer/company.

In our setup, calls are tracked in Zendesk and then synced to HubSpot via the API, with the intention of associating them only to specific deals. However, HubSpot’s default association logic seems to override this behavior and links the calls to all open deals, which appears unintended.

From our perspective, this looks like a platform issue, and the approach you suggested — removing the associations after call creation — feels more like a workaround than a true resolution.

Please let us know if there is a way to fully disable this default association behavior, or if this is a known limitation/bug.

Regards,

CDP