# What Types of Records are Usually Synced?

# Contacts

Contacts are a vital part of any business growth and operation. All communications and sales depend on the information you have about your clients (or potential clients). And if your business takes advantage of more than one business app, having your contacts and their data synced and up to date is crucial.

It's not a good idea to do this manually. And it's practically impossible to sync it manually without missing, overriding or losing any important data. This is why many companies try to automate it using various tools. Some CRM systems provide their built-in integrations with 3rd party tools, but very often those integrations are one-way, manually triggered, or simply not advanced enough.

There are some fields that contacts across virtually any business tool have:

  • First and last names (sometimes combined in one field)
  • Primary email address, or the list of email addresses
  • Work phone, home phone, or the list of phone numbers
  • Description or notes (regular or HTML)

It is important to make sure your sync solution covers as much of those fields as possible.

# Meetings and Tasks

Synchronization of meetings, appointments or tasks across various calendars is also very common. In the most popular use case, a customer wants to sync meetings between their work calendar (for example Office 365 Outlook) and their private calendar (e. g. Google Calendar).

Here are some fields that are usually mapped:

  • Meeting subject or title
  • Start time/end time (or due time in case of tasks)
  • Description/invitation (often in HTML)
  • Participants or attendees (as a list of emails)
  • Location

Some advanced calendars support recurring meetings, and it's particularly hard to sync those as they usually have things like recurrence exceptions, deleted or modified occurrences, which can be in different formats and hard to keep track of.

# Products

Products are another vital part of many business operations. If your company sells a lot of products or variations of products it's important to be able to keep the information about them consistent across your systems.

Some common fields across different business tools include:

  • Product name
  • Description
  • Price (list price, cost price, etc)
  • Quantity

# Opportunities and Orders

One common use case of this type of sync is to automatically convert an opportunity into a quote (or a quote into an order) while preserving as much information as possible.

This type of synchronization often needs to be customized to fits customers specific needs, as very often they have their own idea of when to convert opportunity in a quote or an order.

# Files

This is probably the easiest type of record to get synced (in general). This is because there's basically no need to implement any type of field mapping. Instead, you simply copy a file from one place to another, making sure that the newest version is not overridden.

# Conclusion

As you can see, there are many different types of records that business tools manage, and it's important to be able to sync as much data as possible regardless of the way and format it's stored in.

SyncPenguin is a tool that provides synchronizations across different business apps. It covers all types of records, not just contacts. This gives you the possibility of organizing your business tools communication in a way that exactly fits your needs.

Contact us if you'd like to learn how SyncPenguin can improve your business productivity with reliable two-way synchronizations.