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Immediate Value

After this tutorial, your import will be verified clean, obvious duplicates merged, and your team will be in Affinity with appropriate access. You’re ready for Tier 1.

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Prerequisites

  • You’ve completed Tutorial 0.4 — your data is in Affinity.
  • (Admin tasks) You’re an Admin — or an Enterprise Admin on the Enterprise plan.

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Quick-Start Roadmap

  1. Review your import history
  2. Spot-check imported data
  3. Undo if something’s wrong (act fast)
  4. Merge obvious duplicates
  5. Plan your roles and permissions structure
  6. Invite your team
  7. (Optional) Configure list-level permissions for sensitive lists
  8. (Optional, admin) Review your AI and data-access settings
Admins: check Affinity AI while you’re here. Ascend and AI Chat are managed for the organization at Settings → Automations & AI → Affinity AI (Scale, Advanced and Enterprise). Ascend has been on by default since August 5 unless your firm opted out. Having it on for the org does not switch the background agents on for each person — every member turns Monitoring on for themselves under Ascend → Agents. See Put Affinity AI to Work.

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Why Verification Matters

The window between import and team invite is your last chance to catch problems while undo is still clean. Once your team starts editing records, undoing becomes much harder — manual edits don’t get reverted, and dependencies build up. Spend an hour here so you don’t spend a week recovering.
See How to undo imports in Affinity for the time-sensitive details.

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Task 1: Review Your Import History

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Context

Affinity logs every import: who ran it, when, how many rows, and the outcome. The history view is your single source of truth for what happened.

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Action

  1. Go to Settings → Manage Imports.
  2. Confirm each import you ran appears in the log with the expected row counts.
  3. Check the number of rows added against your CSV.
  4. Download View Skipped or View Errors where they appear, to see exactly which rows or cells didn’t import and why.

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Expected Outcome

You have a verified record of every import, with row counts matching your expectations.

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📚 Help Center

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Task 2: Spot-Check Your Imported Data

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Context

Don’t trust counts — verify content. Open actual records and confirm the data looks right.

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Action

  1. Open the destination list. Sort by Date created (descending) to surface newly imported rows.
  2. Open 5–10 random profiles. For each one, check:
    • Is the name spelled correctly?
    • Is the email / domain the right one?
    • Are fields populated with the values you expected?
    • Are company associations correct (for people) or person associations correct (for companies)?
  3. Spot-check from both ends of the import — first rows AND last rows of the CSV. Encoding issues sometimes hit only specific rows.
💡 If everything in your first 10 spot-checks looks right, you can confidently assume the rest is too. If anything looks wrong, expand the check before deciding undo vs fix-in-place.

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Expected Outcome

You’ve personally verified that the import landed correctly.

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Task 3: Undo If Something’s Wrong

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Context

If the spot-check surfaces problems, undo is usually cleaner than fixing in place. You can undo an import yourself within three days; after that, contact Support.

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Action

  1. Open the list you imported into.
  2. Open List Options (the gear icon, top right) → Manage imports.
  3. Find the import you want to reverse and undo it.
  4. Fix the problem in your source CSV, then re-run the import.
Don’t delete the list to get rid of a bad import — undo it instead.
Undo doesn’t revert manual edits made after the import. If a teammate edited an imported row before you undo, that edit may be lost. Communicate before undoing if your team has been working in the data.

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Expected Outcome

The bad import is reversed and you can re-import cleanly.

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📚 Help Center

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Task 4: Merge Obvious Duplicates

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Context

Even with careful prep, some duplicates will slip through (e.g., the same person already existed from your email sync, then got created again by the import). Affinity gives you two ways to merge: one pair at a time from a profile, or in bulk from the Duplicate Management center (admins).

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Action

Right after an import (admins): use Duplicate Management.
  1. Go to Settings → Duplicate Management and pick Organizations or People.
  2. Filter the suggestions — for example Identical Domain for organizations, or Intelligent Matches for people.
  3. For each suggestion, choose Merge, Manage to compare the two side by side, or Remove from List (in the ⋯ menu) to dismiss it. For identical-domain organizations and intelligent-match people, Merge all handles them in one go.
One pair at a time (anyone):
  1. Open the profile you want to keep.
  2. Click the dropdown button, then Merge duplicate, and choose the duplicate to merge in.
Merges from a profile can’t be undone. Merges made in Duplicate Management — people or organizations — can be reversed from its Merged tab, so it’s the safer tool for bulk cleanup.
💡 Don’t try to dedupe everything in one session. Focus on the obvious ones — exact name + same company. The rest can be cleaned up over time in Tutorial 11 (Data quality).

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Expected Outcome

Obvious duplicates from the import are merged. Your data is clean enough to bring teammates into.

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📚 Help Center

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Task 5: Plan Your Roles and Permissions

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Context

Before inviting anyone, decide on the role each person will get. Affinity has account-level roles — Admin and Standard, plus Enterprise Admin on Enterprise — and per-list roles: Basic, Standard, and List Admin, with the list’s creator as List Owner.

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Action

  1. List everyone you’ll invite: name, email, role, which lists they need access to.
  2. Default most teammates to the Standard account role. Reserve Admin for the 1–2 people who manage workspace settings (on Enterprise, the Enterprise Admin holds the most permissions).
  3. For each list, decide who needs which list role: Basic edits field values; Standard also edits dropdown options; List Admin also manages triggers, shared views, and who has access.
  4. For people outside the firm — LPs, board members, advisors — plan to invite them as Collaborators, who get read-only access to specific saved views (Scale, Advanced, and Enterprise). Collaborators always see lists in Classic.
Being an account Admin doesn’t automatically make you a List Admin on every list.
Enterprise customers have additional permission tiers including team-level permissions. See Affinity enterprise permissions.

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Expected Outcome

You have a written plan for who gets what access.

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📚 Help Center

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Task 6: Invite Your Team

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Context

With your data verified and your roles planned, invite teammates.

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Action

  1. Go to Settings → Users and Permissions.
  2. Click Invite User.
  3. Enter the teammate’s email, select their role, and (optionally) pre-assign list permissions.
  4. Click “Invite User”. They’ll receive an email and follow the same flow you did in Tutorial 0.1.
  5. Repeat for each teammate. For large teams, paste a comma-separated list of emails in the invite modal — it handles bulk invites in one go.
💡 Stagger your invites if you have a large team. Bringing 50 people in on the same day means 50 people asking you setup questions on the same day. Phase by team or role.

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Expected Outcome

Your team has access to Affinity and can start their own Tier 0 + Tier 1 progression.

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📚 Help Center

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Task 7: Configure List-Level Permissions for Sensitive Lists (Optional)

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Context

Some lists shouldn’t be visible to everyone — e.g., a fundraising pipeline visible only to partners, or an LP relationship list restricted to IR. Every list is private by default when it’s created, so the job is to share it with the right people and no one else.

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Action

  1. Open the sensitive list.
  2. Click Share in the list toolbar. You need to be the list’s owner or a List Admin.
  3. Search for the users (or, on Enterprise, teams) who should have access, tick them, and choose their list role — Admin, Standard, or Basic.
  4. Leave General access off. Setting it to Basic would open the list to everyone on the account.
  5. Click Add, then Save.
People without access won’t see the list at all. That’s intentional — but tell anyone who expected to find it, so they know to ask.

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Expected Outcome

Sensitive lists are properly gated.

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📚 Help Center

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Task 8 (Optional, Admin): Review Your AI and Data-Access Settings

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Context

A few org-wide settings are worth a deliberate decision before your team starts working — especially what Affinity’s AI can do and keep, and which deals are visible to whom.

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Action

  1. Notetaker (Scale, Advanced, and Enterprise): on the Affinity AI settings page (Settings → Automations & AI → Affinity AI), open the Notetaker card and click Edit. Decide on Notetaker access, Internal meeting notes creation, Meeting note language, Transcript retention (whether transcripts are kept once the summary note exists), and Summary email recipients. Admins can also bulk-export transcripts from Settings → Data & Privacy → Export Data.
  2. Affinity MCP: at Settings → Affinity MCP, choose which OAuth AI clients your organization allows — Claude, ChatGPT, and Notion are on by default. API-key clients can still connect. On Enterprise, the Manage MCP Agents permission controls which roles can change this setting. MCP can also delete and merge records; every delete and merge shows you what it will affect and waits for explicit confirmation, and users can switch the delete tools off in their AI client. See Connect AI Tools to Affinity with MCP.
  3. Restricted Opportunities (Enterprise): if you handle sensitive deals, an Enterprise Admin can allow restricted opportunities at Settings → Opportunities → Allowed Opportunity Types. Turning it on disables the legacy Basic Reporting.
An AI tool connected through MCP sees everything its user can see, and can update, delete, and merge whatever its user can. Grant broad list access carefully to people who will connect AI tools.

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Expected Outcome

Your AI and data-access settings reflect a decision, not a default.

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📚 Help Center

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Common Questions

Q: I invited someone but they didn’t get the email. Check their spam folder first. If it’s still missing, go to Settings → Users and Permissions, filter to Invited users, and resend the invitation. Q: Can I change someone from Admin to Standard later? Yes. Go to Settings → Users and Permissions → Users, click the user, and change their role. The change takes effect immediately. Q: What’s the difference between Basic, Standard, and List Admin? Basic can edit field values, create reminder triggers, and set up private saved views. Standard can also edit dropdown options. List Admins can also create status and opportunity triggers, set up shared views, and decide who has access. For read-only outside audiences, use Collaborators. Q: How many users can I invite? Depends on your plan. Check Settings → Billing to see your seat count.

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Where to Go Next

🎉 You’ve finished Tier 0. Your account is set up, data is in, team is invited. ➡️ Head to Tier 1: Foundation and start with Tutorial 1: Your First List.