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Using Opal? If you’re using Opal, Method’s embedded UI, liability account discovery is handled for you — users complete a soft credit pull and see their accounts inside Opal’s Connect flow. You’ll still work with the resulting Account objects in your backend for payments, monitoring, and ongoing display in your app. The rest of this section is most relevant if you’re building a custom integration or want to understand the underlying data model.

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What a Method Account Represents

An Account in Method is a connected financial account that belongs to one of your users (Entities). Accounts are the objects your product primarily interacts with. You pull data from accounts, monitor accounts for changes, make payments to accounts, and build your user-facing displays around account information. Every Account belongs to an Entity, the person whose financial life you’re working with. An Entity can have many Accounts (a typical consumer has 5–15 liability accounts). You’ll interact with Accounts through the Entity that owns them: create an Entity, verify their identity, run Connect to discover their liabilities, then work with the resulting Account objects. Every account in Method falls into one of two categories, and understanding this distinction is essential for designing your product’s payment and data flows:
Represent debts and financial obligations. These are the credit cards, auto loans, other obligations that your users owe money on. Liability accounts are typically discovered automatically through Connect and serve as the destination for payments, this is where money goes when your user pays down debt.
Every Payment moves funds through a Method-managed FBO Account to a liability. The configured funding flow controls whether you fund the FBO balance or use destination-specific Payment Instrument instructions.

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How Accounts Are Created

Liability accounts are typically discovered automatically through Connect. When you run Connect for an Entity, Method pulls their credit report and creates Account objects for every discovered liability. You can also create liability accounts manually via the API if you have the account details. In the Method Debit (pull) Model, Method pulls funding for a batch of Payments. Payments created before the 1:30 PM CT processing cutoff enter that banking day’s batch. Method initiates an ACH debit from your verified disbursement Account, then disburses eligible Payments through the Method-managed FBO Account. Your team creates and verifies the disbursement Account through the API. See Funding Accounts for the setup steps.

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Account Products: What You Can Do With an Account

Every Account carries two arrays that control what operations are available:
  • products: Capabilities currently available (e.g., balance, payment, update, card_brand, payoff, sensitive, payment_instrument.card, payment_instrument.network_token)
  • restricted_products: Capabilities the account could support but require additional steps (like elevated verification or team-level enablement), or capabilities the account does not currently support
Always check products before attempting an operation. For example, not all liability types support payment — attempting to create a payment on an account without payment in its products list will fail. See the Products reference for the full list.
For the full Accounts API, including all fields, endpoints, and expandable resources, see the Accounts reference.