A customer is anyone who pays you for goods and services. A customer has accounting information (e.g. an invoice) and will therefore sync to your QuickBooks file.

A lead is a CRM-specific term that refers to a potential customer: someone who might do business with you but hasn’t yet. A lead doesn’t have accounting information (because there have been no transactions) and therefore does not sync to your QuickBooks file. 

A contact describes a person associated with a lead or customer, for whom you have contact information (like a phone number or email address). Each lead or customer can have multiple contacts related to it. For more information on contacts and how they are related to customers and leads, see our article "What is a Contact?"

A table is a collection of related data. For example, Method has a table called the contacts table which stores all the contacts. Below is an image of this table when exported to a spreadsheet.

A record refers to a piece of information being saved in a table. For example, Sofia Garcia and all the information associated with her is considered a record. In our spreadsheet example below, an individual row is considered a record.

The record ID is a number assigned to every record in every table for the purpose of keeping track of it. Within each table, the record id is unique and automatically assigned when a new record is created. In the image below, Sofia Garcia's information has an assigned record ID of "11". 

A field defines what information is stored in a record. Getting back to our example, the fields are the spreadsheet columns: Record ID, Name, Email, and Phone. There are many different field types you will use in Method. 

A required field is a field which is not allowed to be empty. If you were to try and import data with an empty required field, you will get an error. See our article Field Attributes for more information.

A unique field is one that must have a unique value in order to save the record. A value is unique when compared to all other values in the same column for that table. For example, the RecordID field is always unique in the Contacts table. Only Sofia Garcia's record has the record ID of 11. See our article Field Attributes for more information.

A tag is a way to assign a label to your record to make it easier to search for groups of records (e.g. you could search for all leads tagged as “influencer”).