Migrate from Insightly to Thawly

Move your lost opportunities from Insightly to Thawly in 10 minutes. Insightly's export workflow is built around saved filters on the Opportunities module — once you've narrowed to your lost stage, the Export action ships you a CSV.

What you need#

• An Insightly user with Export permission on the Opportunities object. Default Admin and Manager roles include it; sales-rep roles often have it too. If you can see the Export option under the More menu on the Opportunities list, you're set.
• A modern browser. No Insightly API key, no integration setup.
• About 10 minutes.

If your admin has restricted export, ask them to flip the Export Records permission for your role under System Settings → Permissions.

Step-by-step extraction#

1. Log in to Insightly at crm.insightly.com. Make sure you're in the right instance if you have several.
2. From the top nav, click Opportunities. [Screenshot: Insightly top nav with Opportunities tab selected]
3. In the saved-filter dropdown (top-left of the list), choose + Create new filter. Build the filter with these criteria:
   • State → Lost (Insightly uses State for the won/lost/abandoned outcome rather than a stage name).
   • Pipeline → your sales pipeline (skip the partner or onboarding pipelines).
   • Optionally Actual Close Date → In the last 3 years.
4. Add the columns you need from the column-picker. Tick at minimum: Opportunity Name, Organization, Bid Amount (or Forecast Close Date Amount), Actual Close Date, Loss Reason, Description, plus any custom fields for competitor or notes. [Screenshot: Insightly opportunity list with column-picker and filter editor]
5. Save the filter as Lost deals for Thawly so you can re-run it later.
6. With the filtered list visible, click the More menu (top-right of the list) and choose Export → Export Filtered Records.
7. In the export dialogue, choose CSV as the format. Tick Include all columns from the current filter so you get the columns you set up, not Insightly's full default list.
8. Click Export. Insightly emails you a download link, usually within a minute. For larger exports, the file lands under System Settings → Data Management → Exports.
9. Download the CSV. Open it in Excel or Google Sheets to sanity-check the row count before uploading.

Field mapping#

Thawly's importer auto-maps any reasonable header. For reference:

• Organization → name (best column for Companies House matching)
• Bid Amount → deal_value (GBP)
• Actual Close Date → lost_date
• Loss Reason → lost_reason
• Custom Competitor field → lost_to
• Description + custom long-text note fields → notes

If your Insightly setup doesn't use Organization consistently and your team puts the company name on the Opportunity Name itself (e.g. Brackenfield Estates Ltd — Q3 expansion), Thawly will use the Opportunity Name and run Companies House matching on it. Either column works.

What to do with the Notes column#

Don't pre-clean. Insightly stores notes against opportunities in the Description field plus the related-list Notes entity. Paste the raw Description field straight in. Thawly's AI summarises long activity logs and extracts structured signals (objection type, decision-maker title, competitor name, budget threshold) on its own.

If you want to bring across the related Notes entries (separate from the Description field), the cleanest workflow is to add a custom long-text field on the opportunity called Latest note and populate it with a workflow rule, or do a separate Notes export and concatenate in Excel before uploading. For most teams, the Description field alone is enough.

Common gotchas#

• Duplicate companies. Insightly allows multiple opportunities against the same Organization (Tewkesbury Group Ltd lost three times across 2024). Thawly de-duplicates on lower-cased company name on import, so duplicates in the CSV are safe.
• Currency mismatches. Insightly supports multi-currency on the Bid Amount field. The exported value is in the opportunity's local currency. Filter to Currency = GBP before exporting, or post-process the CSV in Excel to drop non-GBP rows.
• Multi-pipeline issues. Insightly lets each team set up multiple pipelines, often a sales pipeline plus a project-delivery pipeline. Filter on Pipeline = your sales pipeline rather than relying on stage names — stages can be reused or renamed across pipelines.
• Stale "won" or "open" deals. State = Lost is the safe filter. Don't rely on a stage filter alone — Insightly lets a deal sit in a stage like "Negotiation" indefinitely with State unchanged. The State field is the canonical won/lost flag.
• "Abandoned" State. Insightly has three closed states: Won, Lost and Abandoned. Some teams use Abandoned for "we never followed up" rather than "lost the deal". Decide whether to include it depending on your team's convention — usually Abandoned is worth resurrecting too, since it's the same "frozen deal" pattern.

What happens next#

Drop the CSV at thawly.co.uk/upload. We auto-map the columns, run a Companies House lookup on every Organization name and show you a per-row preview before importing.

After import, monitoring runs on the next signal-source pass. The first digest only lands when there's a real signal — see Reading your digest.

Coming from a different CRM?#

• Migrate from Capsule CRM — similar lightweight-CRM export workflow.
• Migrate from HubSpot — common landing place for teams moving off Insightly.
• Migrate from a spreadsheet — if you've already cleaned the data in Excel.

For the bigger picture, read Dead deal recovery and Buying signals in B2B sales.