CRM Owner Sync — Feature Overview

This guide explains, in plain terms, everything Topo does to keep record ownership in sync with your CRM.

In one sentence: Owner Sync makes sure that whoever owns an account, contact, or task in Topo is the same person who owns it in your CRM, and it keeps them matched automatically, in both directions.

1. What "ownership" means

Every important record in Topo can have an owner, the person responsible for it. Owner Sync covers three kinds of record:

The goal is simple: the owner in Topo and the owner in your CRM should always be the same person. If a rep owns "Acme Corp" in your CRM, they should own it in Topo too, and the other way round.

Where an owner can come from

Topo remembers how a record got its owner, so it can make sensible decisions:

• User, someone assigned it by hand inside Topo.

• CRM Sync, the owner came from your CRM.

• Sequence assignment, Topo assigned it automatically as part of a sequence.

• System, Topo set it automatically. Today this happens when a teammate is removed from your organisation: Topo clears them off every record they owned, so nothing keeps pointing at someone who has gone. This clear-out stays inside Topo and is never pushed to your CRM.

2. Mapping your users

Topo users and CRM users are two different lists of people. Before ownership can sync, Topo needs to know which Topo user equals which CRM user. That is the user mapping.

You will find it under Settings → Organization → Integrations → your CRM → Advanced settings → Owners → User mapping.

Automatic matching by email

When you connect a CRM, or click Refresh owners, Topo pulls the full list of owners from your CRM and matches each one to a Topo teammate by email address, ignoring capitalisation. Matching also refreshes at the start of every sync cycle.

Manual overrides

Sometimes the emails do not line up, for example a rep uses a different address in the CRM. An admin can set the mapping by hand from the dropdown on each row. Manual choices always win and survive future refreshes, including a deliberate "No user" clear, which Topo will never quietly re-match.

Mapping statuses

The screen has a search box, All / Mapped / Needs attention filters, and a summary telling you how many owners need attention.

When one teammate matches two CRM users

Occasionally a single Topo user is linked to more than one CRM owner record. When Topo pushes an owner out it has to pick one, so an admin must choose which mapping is the default. Until that choice is made, affected records are held as Blocked mapping rather than being guessed at. If a user has exactly one mapping, that one is the default automatically.

What happens with owners that cannot be matched

• Coming from your CRM: an unmapped, archived, or departed CRM owner is treated as "no effective CRM owner". It never clears the owner in Topo.

• Going to your CRM: a Topo owner that cannot be resolved to a CRM user puts the record into Blocked mapping. It is held safely, never dropped. As soon as an admin fixes the mapping, blocked records clear automatically.

Permissions: if the CRM connection does not have permission to read users, the Owners tab shows a reconnect prompt instead of the mapping table, and owner sync cannot be switched on until you reconnect. Topo only ever reads your CRM users, it never modifies them.

3. Turning Owner Sync on

Owner Sync starts off. An admin enables it from Owners → Sync behavior, using the "Sync owners with your CRM" switch. The same screen shows your last sync and next sync times, and warns you if any owners are still unmapped.

The first-run question

If Topo already holds ownership data when you enable sync, you will see a one-time question: "How should existing owners be resolved when sync starts?"

• Trust your CRM's owners, Topo updates its records to match the CRM.

• Trust Topo's owners, your CRM is updated to match Topo.

This is important, and it is the part people most often misread: this answer applies to your existing records only. It is completely separate from the ongoing source-of-truth setting described below. You can trust your CRM for history and still let Topo drive ownership going forward, or the other way round.

If Topo holds no ownership data, there is no question to answer and sync simply starts.

What happens next

Topo then sweeps through your existing accounts and contacts in the background and, for each one, compares the Topo owner with the CRM owner. For every record it decides one of:

• Push, send Topo's owner to your CRM.

• Adopt, pull your CRM's owner into Topo.

• Aligned, already matching, nothing to do.

• Blocked, the CRM owner is not mapped to a Topo user yet.

Owner Sync needs exactly one active CRM integration, and Topo checks it can read owners before starting.

4. Choosing how ownership syncs

Two settings govern everything, and you set them separately for accounts and for contacts. Your CRM can decide account owners while Topo decides contact owners, if that suits how your team works.

Source of truth

The single rule behind it:

• The winning side changed the owner, the change carries over to the other system.

• The losing side changed the owner, it is always flagged as a conflict. Never silently applied, never silently discarded.

• Both sides changed since the last sync, always a conflict.

When the two sides disagree: Automated or Manual

Blank owners are never conflicts

An empty owner is resolved by direction rather than flagged, with one deliberate exception:

5. Two-way sync and how quickly it happens

Owner Sync works in both directions. Change an owner in Topo and Topo pushes it to your CRM. Change it in your CRM and Topo picks it up.

Safeguards so nothing breaks

• No echo loops. When a change arrives from your CRM, Topo updates its own record but does not bounce the same change straight back.

• Rapid changes are settled first. If someone reassigns a record several times in quick succession, Topo waits a short moment and applies only the final value.

• Out-of-date messages are ignored. Topo stamps each record with the time of the latest change it has seen, so a late-arriving old update cannot undo a newer one.

6. When does the owner actually reach your CRM?

Working out the owner and sending it to your CRM happen at different moments, and this catches people out.

1. At import, the owner is worked out in Topo only. Nothing is written to your CRM yet.

2. On the first activity after the sequence is approved, the record is created or updated in your CRM and the owner goes with it.

So a lead sitting in "waiting for approval" has an owner in Topo that has not reached your CRM. You will see this on the lead as the Partial sync badge. Once the first sequence step runs and the record exists in your CRM, owner sync becomes two-way for that record.

7. Task owner sync

Task ownership has its own switch, "Set the task owner to its assignee", in the Task owners section of Sync behavior. It is independent of account and contact owner sync, but it needs task sync to be turned on first.

When it is on, every task Topo syncs to your CRM is owned by the assignee's mapped CRM user. Reassigning a task in Topo, or reassigning a whole sequence, updates the owner on the CRM task that already exists. A reassignment made in your CRM flows back to the Topo assignee.

Task owner sync only covers to-dos that are actually syncing, so the To-do task type must be turned on and the to-do linked to a contact.

Tasks never get stuck in a manual conflict. Topo treats itself as the source of truth for task ownership, so when a task's owner changes in your CRM, Topo will either adopt it onto the assignee, push its own assignee back out, or leave the task alone if the incoming owner is not mapped to a Topo user. Topo never wipes an assignee because of an unmapped owner.

An assignee that cannot be mapped never blocks the rest of the task from syncing. The owner is simply left off and the task is listed under Issues.

8. Ownership when you import leads

When you import leads, ownership can be set automatically from your CRM, but only when there is an active CRM connected, Owner Sync is on, and your CRM is the source of truth.

If those hold, then for each imported lead:

• Topo looks up the lead's contact in your CRM and finds its owner.

• If the contact has no owner of its own, it inherits the company's owner.

• The matched Topo user is set as the owner, marked as coming from CRM Sync, and pinned, so round robin cannot take the record away from the rep who already owns it. Round robin only fills leads with no CRM owner.

Under Topo source of truth, the CRM owner is ignored and Topo's assignment rules decide.

This never blocks an import. If the CRM lookup fails for any reason, the lead is imported without a CRM owner and normal assignment rules take over.

9. Where you will see all this

Settings, for admins

Settings → Organization → Integrations → your CRM → Advanced settings, with two tabs:

• Owners, holding User mapping (the CRM user to Topo user table) and Sync behavior (the master switch, the per-object source of truth and Automated/Manual settings, the owner field, and the Task owners section).

• Issues, the queue of records whose owner is out of sync, split into Accounts, Contacts, and Tasks.

On a lead, for everyone

The Owners card on a lead shows the account owner and the contact owner, each with a dropdown to reassign and a sync status badge. When both are the same person the rows collapse into a single "Owned by" line.

Changing an owner here pushes to your CRM straight away. If your CRM is slow to respond, the change still saves in Topo and finishes on the next sync, and you will see "Owner saved. The CRM sync is queued and will finish shortly."

If your change collides with one made in your CRM at the same time, a dialog shows you both and lets you keep yours, take the CRM's, or cancel.

Sync status badges

For what to do about a Conflict, a Not mapped, or a Sync error, see Resolving owner sync issues.

10. Choosing which owner field to sync

By default, Topo reads and writes your CRM's standard Owner field. If your team tracks prospecting ownership in a separate custom owner property, for example "Prospecting Owner", you can point the sync at that instead, separately for accounts and contacts.

Worth knowing:

• Only owner-type properties can be chosen, because those are the ones holding the user records the mapping is built from.

• Custom fields sync every few minutes rather than instantly.

• Changing the field after sync is running starts the alignment over. Every record is re-checked against the new field, and you will be asked the first-run trust question again. If your CRM is the source of truth, an empty value in the new field will unassign the Topo owner rather than leave the old one in place.

• Calculated properties can be read but never written. Topo will read owners from them and flags this in the settings screen. Owner changes made in Topo are not pushed for that object, so assign owners in your CRM on whichever record feeds the calculation.

11. Defaults at a glance

12. FAQ

Does Topo ever modify our CRM users?

No. Topo reads your users and owners with read-only access, purely to build the mapping.

Will enabling this overwrite our CRM ownership data?

Not without an explicit choice from you. If Topo already holds owners, the enable flow asks which side to trust for existing records, and the default direction means Topo mirrors your CRM. One-sided blanks are only ever filled in, and genuine disagreements are flagged rather than overwritten.

Why does a record show "Not mapped"?

Its Topo owner has no matching CRM user, or two CRM users map to that teammate and no default has been picked. Fix it under Owners → User mapping and the record syncs automatically afterwards.

Why didn't my change show up instantly?

If your organisation uses a custom owner field, changes arrive on a check every 10 minutes or so rather than in real time. The daily full check catches anything missed.

Can accounts and contacts have different rules?

Yes. Source of truth and Automated/Manual are set for each, independently.

What happens to owners when a lead is imported?

With your CRM as the source of truth, the lead's existing CRM contact owner is adopted, falling back to the company owner, and protected from round robin. With Topo as the source of truth, the CRM owner is ignored and Topo's assignment rules decide.

Can we run owner sync with two CRMs connected?

No. Owner sync supports one active CRM integration per organisation, and it will not start if a second one is connected.

13. Glossary