Hi there again, it’s Adam from the Support Team. Today, I’m going to talk about Sharing.

Now I don’t mean the sharing you were taught in school, like sharing your Halloween candy. You should always share your Halloween candy - especially with me! The sharing I’m talking about relates to how you share your Customers, Transactions, Activities and other records in Method. As an Administrator for your Method Account, you can determine how your Method users access and share records with each other. Isn’t that great?

In Method CRM, most records contain an “Assigned To” or a Rep field. These fields designate who these records belong to and are used to determine how they are shared throughout the Method Account. When you edit your Users (found under Customize > Users), in Step 6 of 10 of the Edit User wizard, you can determine which Users can see which records. Also note that your Customers are assigned Sales Reps, and in order to assign them to a Method user, you must first link your Method users to a Sales Rep. This can be done on Step 1 of the Edit User wizard.

To explain the options available, let’s assume we are setting up our Method account with 4 Users. Firstly, we have an Administrator, let’s call him Adam, who can access all records. Secondly, a Manager (Joe) who can access Adam’s records as well as those of his two staff members, and the two staff members (Sidney and Tim) who will only see their own records.

Let’s first look at the setup for Sidney and Tim. Each member will have nearly identical settings. See the screen below for staff member Sidney’s setup:

I’ve set Sidney to see “Empty Records” and “Missing Assignments”. This will allow her to assign Customers and other records to herself or another user if the records are unassigned. I’ll set the other Users with these options also. I’ve also left “Share All Records” unchecked. If this was checked, Sidney would be sharing all of her records in Method with every other User.

Below are the sharing permissions I’ve set for each Method user as they relate to Sidney. Notice that Adam, the Administrator, can access Sidney’s records since he can access everything as an administrator; however, Sidney (staff) cannot access Adam’s. Next we have Joe, the Manager, who can also access Sidney’s records, and again, Sidney cannot see Joe’s records. The last user is Tim. He is set to share “none”, so that he cannot see Sidney’s records and Sidney cannot see his.

To set Tim up as a User (the other Staff member), the same settings would apply.

Let’s next look at Joe. Since Joe is a Manager, we want him to see his two staff members, Tim and Sidney, as well as Adam’s.

Notice that the setting for Adam says “Full: Joe and Adam share with each other”. This means that Joe and Adam can see each other’s records. Next, for Sidney and Tim, Joe can access their records, but they cannot access his. This is likely already set, since you have previously configured this step when setting up Sidney and Tim.

Finally, let’s take a look at Adam, the Administrator. We want Adam to access everyone’s records, but only have Joe access Adam’s. See below:

For the three users, Adam is set to access their records, with only Joe set to Full Access. Again, this will likely already be set while you were setting the permissions for the other Users. Remember, as an Admin, you can change these settings any time, as your business needs change.

If you have any questions, please post in the comments, our Forums, or send us a tweet @MethodCRM!

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Until next time!

Adam