Picture this: one fine morning you decide it’s high time to organize your business information, so you get up and drive to the local office supply store in search of the Perfect Filing Cabinet.  There, in the window of your local store, is a gleaming cabinet called Method!  The Method cabinet comes pre-loaded with lots of file folders, already labeled and ready to be filled up – one labeled Customer, one labeled Invoice, and much more.  It also comes with a whole bunch of file folders that haven’t been labeled, but they’re ready to be used for whatever you want.  You figure this looks like a pretty great deal (because it is!) so you buy it and take it home.

When you get into your office, you take Method out of the box. As promised, you see all your stock files pre-labeled and ready to be filled.  On the other side of the room you have another filing cabinet, this one marked QuickBooks, and it contains files stuffed with papers containing all your business information - customers, invoices, and more.  Thanks to the magic of the Method sync engine, all those papers are pulled out and copied from your QuickBooks cabinet into your Method cabinet.  Great!

Now all your papers are available in your Method cabinet as well as your QuickBooks cabinet.  You notice there are a bunch of labeled file folders that still don’t contain any papers - one marked Activities, one marked Opportunities, and so on.  These are CRM-specific file folders, which means your QuickBooks cabinet didn’t have corresponding file folders.  Depending on the kind of business you’re running and how you use a CRM, you may or may not fill up those folders with papers later on (but you probably will!).  For the moment, however, all your QuickBooks papers can now be accessed in your Method cabinet.

This little story is meant to paint you a picture not only of the Method sync, but of the building blocks of customization: namely, databases, tables, and fields.  As we explain these concepts, we’ll refer back to this narrative to help explain some pretty challenging ideas in a visual way.