4/16/2020: With all of the current need for e-commerce, the need for buffers on the item level has come in to play and is wanted. In order to beef up needs to be location specific. 

Buffers do exist in e-commerce.

There is a category based buffer in the shopping cart (two of them). The one in the shopping cart can be configured on a per category level and even on a per item level.

Super high level- needs to be on a per item/per location basis.

////// new notes on 1/6/2020 - Meeting with Brandon, Steve, and Cory

- Steve wants to get this inventory engine built into a reordering system. There is more than just mins and maxes, we have to deal with sales, quantities, how fast/slow things move, lead times, things that need to be sold, restocked, and even never stocked again. Lots of ideas of algorithms and building in logic to these pieces.

- We would like to create a good game plan (what are we going to build and how will it benefit our users) and get it funded.

- Steve also wants to get Alan and other developers involved.

- As a sales happens, we will start hitting a special weighted function (algorithm) that helps us see what a sale means. The weighted portion of the puzzle would help us know what is moving, what is effective, and other virtual marketing and sales matrix options. Getting the real meanings bubbling up to the surface. Kinda like a performance level or batting average (sports analogy).

- There were some talks about building out ways to catch this weighted value and what steps would come after that (refinement of that process).

- There is a still a human element that needs to play into the mix. There is also a maintenance level to keep these things (numbers, values, and settings) updated.

- In order to really to this correctly, we a really need to build it out on a per location basis. Winter boots sell much better in the North than they do in the desert.

- To do reorders, you almost need a way to pour over sales reports and past order forms in order to get an idea of what is needed.

This idea came from Cory Warden. She would love to be able to copy user permissions from corp to corp (say, when bridging a user between corps) or when setting up a new user. For example: Say you have Sally in corporation A - if you bridge Sally over to corporation B, there could be an option that says, apply all permissions from corporation A. That would save tons of time. Another option might be something like this: Say you have Amy in corporation A and she already has a certain number of permissions. What if you could point to Jenny and say something like, give Jenny the same permissions as Amy (both users are in the same corporation). That would be huge as well.

As a side note, we are seeing more and more companies getting setup with multiple corporations. That copy and/or apply permissions option would be super cool.

We have had some requests from different users and consultants to increase the search options for sub inventory. These requests came from Cory Warden via email:

- We need a way to bulk close out packages that have reached a 0 quantity. Basically, a sub inventory clean-up process.

- When viewing the subs... we need a report that will show the prices of the subs vs the parent item pricing.

- Not from Cory, but still a sub inventory request - We need to have a sub inventory look-back report. The report would be date specific and would flex as it gets rolled back in time. This would allow for look-ups to be done to see where things were, back in time. The parent items can already do this... The subs can't at this time. That would be really cool and would help with look-backs.

Doing code sign-off with Russell. He is getting better and better at running tests and creating his own components. Coding once and using many. Wayne jumped on and had a few questions as well. After that, Steve and Wayne were talking about smaller functions and using getters, setters, and smaller functions.

Cory jumped on and was talking about inventory thresholds and buffers for inventory levels. We talked about simple maxes, mins, and buffer levels for single items and single locations. To really do it well, we need to get it to a full on multi-location level so that we can play the game. They also talked about some bulk print options on the PO side of things (ad the users bring the items in to inventory). That would really help them save some time. The other request was dealing with really small barcodes and really small labels.

Cory and Steve then talked a ton about custom check in/out flow, sub queues, ecommerce, personal devices, and getting people and items into the system as quick as possible. We have tons of these features built out, we just need to know how to combine them. It is interesting that each client needs a slightly different mix of how they want to organize and control the flow of both customers and products. Very interesting.

While they were talking, I was working on adding in rotating and revolving password for the contact us pages (email forms). We had someone go in and try to hack things and use our contact forms for sending spam. We live in a crazy world.

Jumped on the morning meeting with Steve and Dustin. We briefly talked about some topics for the upcoming Denver training (9/11 to 9/14) Some of the recommended topics were things like: new cultivation processes, production and packaging processes, Metrc Specific topics, new sales tax stuff, new discount stuff, normal and advanced POS (point of sale) stuff, ecommerce, my cart favorite buttons, sub inventory, labels, loyalty points, etc.

We also talked about getting the graphical homepages into place and even starting with sales tax and invoice homepages. We would also like for the adilas developers to be able to present to us while in Denver... (merging in technology and live classroom stuff).

People who could help out: Cory from Pagosa Springs, Kelly Whyman, Steve Mitchel, Shannon, Russell, Alan, and other adilas developers.

After talking, we broke into a work session type scenario. We were all working on our own projects. I went back to working on the developer's notebook stuff and showing the historical listing of elements of time (for web indexing and web crawlers). We got back together for random questions throughout the morning session.

Cory has taken on this project as of early 2019. As projects are completed new updates will be added online.

Brandon Cory and Steve have been working on this as of 8/12

Bryan and I were looking over some code to show/hide an additional vendor/payee address on different PO's and PO pages. After looking into it, we decided to go a little bit deeper and wrapped the new settings and data look-ups with some conditional logic. It will make the whole thing look and perform on a tighter playing field. We were almost done but ran out of time. We will merge and push up things tomorrow. Today is Halloween and we both have plans with our families and it would still be another 20-30 minutes to fully wrap things up. It will have to wait until tomorrow.

9/9/19: Cory has completed customer tax categories in the cart, customer purchase histories from advanced add to cart, reoccurring eots, alt text for barcodes. 

Drea is going to complete new corp wide show email contact settings, Louisiana metrc update.

Waiting on delayed inventory counter (wasn't totally working- need Alan to take a look), also waiting on sub inventory updates as Bryan is still working on these...

Cory is working on most of these updates and will check with Drea on her status. 

Customer tax categories going through the cart, customer purchase histories being available as a quick look-up from the advanced add to cart, and update for inventory counts and new delayed inventory counter (check with Alan to make sure everything is uploaded on this one). Reoccurring elements of time, alt text for barcodes, discount engine for Josh, labels for Calvin, loyalty points for Eric, sales tax update, etc. Bryan had some new ones for 15 new flex grid fields, new corp-wide show email contact settings, maybe check with him as time goes by.

2/26/21: This has been resolved with the updates to the transitional invoice.
4/27/2020: Brandon is spending a couple hours every week or every other week on this.

2/3/20:Brandon and Steve need to take a look at this and schedule time together. They booked time on Tuesday 2/4/20 work on this.

1/23/20: Client is having trouble balancing due to end date on transitional invoices. Steve asked Cory to push to priority 0 and speak with Brandon at next meeting (2/3/20)

The variance in the BS is described through the COGS values (Inventory) of these three invoices.  If you convert these to Customer Invoices, then the Inventory reduction is properly reflected.  If you don't, then the Inventory is not reduced and generates an out of balance.

 
Can you please assist with why these invoices are different?  It is something we have seen throughout the past and are now raising due to the issues it is creating.
 
Also, there is a constant out of balance due to a duplicate Transition Inventory line item in the BS calculation.  This has been ongoing and I don't think anything is happening.  It is a constant adjustment we have to make to true up our balance sheet.Brandon has started working on this. Deeper than we thought. Only in backward direction and only when complete.

Eric came in on 9/24/19 and had some questions about the transitional invoices. We went over the existing code, database tables, and process. There are some things here that could be sped up and automated. He also has a need to be able to use those transitional invoices from ecommerce (orders with no money collected). We also need to be able to flip the transition period for a single day. Currently, the transition period for a Q.T.I (between a quote, a transition invoice, and a real invoice) value has to be a single day. We may want to speed that up and allow for things to be in a transitional period for just a single day or even add a time element to the mix. For example: The transitional invoice was created at 3:05 pm and then the person came and picked it up at 4:15 pm on the same day. Those time options might be nice.
As a side note, this project does have some reports and logic that ties clear out to the balance sheet level. We need to be aware of that.

Steve was out all week, last week. He gave us all a report on some of his outings and adventures. Good stuff and Steve is excited to be back in the saddle. Alan reported on his reoccurring payment stuff. We talked about more charts, eye candy, and other reports. Alan and I also talked about working on some code sign-off and trying to get back to some of those other projects.

I helped Steve with some code merging and pushed up some new files. I then got on a call with Eric and we touched base on his sub special account tracking project (loyalty points and gift cards). I told him that I was going to be pushing more on that this week. We also talked about an upcoming project to look at the adilas look and feel (over arching look and feel). This doesn't exist yet, but I was just talking with Eric about looking for ideas and making a plan. Anyways, he is interested in helping us out there.

I setup a time with Shawn to work with him. I recorded some bills, did some email stuff, and recorded some notes. Trying to push the ball forward.

Steve was on with Cory (an adilas rep) and they were going over some production and cultivation processes. Cory is going to be helping with some news and updates. After that, Wayne joined the meeting and we briefly went over the transition progress between Newtek servers (existing dedicated models) and upcoming AWS (amazon web services) stuff.

Reviewing a news and update (still in draft mode) for viewing customer history. Cory has been working on it and it looks good.

Got on with Bryan and went over the new show/hide email contact settings for printable invoices and quotes. We merged in new code, ran updates, and did some testing. Towards the end, we had to do a light little bit of bug checking and testing out in ecommerce land.

Meeting with Mike Rountree, Jim Dougal, Tim Lyons, Gannon, Steve Berkenkotter, and Brandon Moore - Team Herbo

- Looking at options to help do a white label and see what market share they could get to and/or grab

- From seed (starting) clear out to general ledger (full backend/frontend accounting and financials)

- Working with Cory as an adilas rep/consultant

- There are three different things that need to be implemented together

- They have clients in the CBD category - raw material providers, internal manufacturing, packing, distributing, retail, lots of supply chain things, marketing and sales

- They have a distribution category

- They have a retail category

- How do we scope a project? You start on paper. You make a plan, you know the tools that exists, you see what matches, what doesn't, where do you start, and what are the priorities? It comes back to a plan. This could be a flow chart, diagrams, whitepapers, other documentation. It really helps if you have someone who knows Adilas and what tools are available and what tools can flex and change by default. That really helps.

- Some of the tools are different corporations (different worlds), multiple locations within your worlds, what key players (12 main players) play into that model, etc. Steve was also talking about parent/child inventory relationships. Lots of mixing and blending between the things.

- Builds, transfers, phases, locations, sub locations, etc.

- White labeling allows for custom pages and custom code - We have white label theme levels (multi or group level) as well as custom black box code (per corporation or per world). We can customize almost anything. This includes show, hide, look and feel, logic, toggle switches, flow process, requirements, validation, reporting, ect. We use the phrase you dream it up, we'll help you wire it up.

- Cory is great consultant that really knows Adilas. At some point, you will need someone on your teams that really plays the other part of the puzzle. You have to know the client and the solution. Then you mix them together to get results.

- Bring up questions... they aren't good or bad, they are just questions. Get them out there and then see what is needed (easy, medium, more complex)

- Herbo will create some diagrams of what they need and how they want things to play (processes) - Here is the world and here is how the players need to interact

- Training and content - Who owns what, who builds what, who does what? Also, what about passing training and content back and forth? Adilas is willing to provide any thing that we have through database exports, Excel, CSV, XML, JSON.

- Tim had some great questions on the backend stack and server climate. We recommended that he get with Wayne Andersen to get all of the details. Tim has a vast knowledge of backend operations and servers.

- Herbo will be working on some flow charts, processes, etc. They will have a virtual meeting of the minds and making any plans that are possible.

- On the Adilas side, Steve will be working with Cory to help with any deeper consulting info. Steve is a master planner and knows the system front to back and what is possible.

I was supposed to work with Shannon on some user guide content but she got delayed. We did meet up, but very briefly. She has the go ahead to start working on glossary of terms with Cory.

I spent some time helping Alan with a database back-up project for a client. They (one of our clients) tweaked some settings and wanted to go back to a prior state. We have to do that through a manual database look-up and pulling data from a older back-up (manual process involving the server company). I also worked more on the special account tracking stuff. I was adding history notes for the manual updates of the special account transactions. This project is dealing with loyalty points, rewards, and gift cards.

Paying bills, recording notes, and following up on a possible project between Cory and Shannon dealing with a custom adilas glossary of terms. Spent the rest of the time back on the special accounts project (rewards, customer loyalty points, gift cards, and other special accounts).

10/7/19: Bryan has started working on this. Met with customer last week to confirm they like the direction Bryan will be taking this in. They contributed $2,000 to the project.

8/19: Molly, Brandon, Steve, Cory and Bryan met to work out the details. Brandon took note and recorded meeting.

Bryan has been working on this functionality. Molly, Brandon, Steve, Cory and Bryan need to get together on this.

8/13/19: Brainstormed with Molly. Choose a special live/mixed vendor PO to facilitate this process?

Should be able to associate vendor with item in the cart from originating corp, even though the item isn't on the invoice (all items are associated with vendors).

Perhaps in order to show up on a drop down list in the Special PO, must have item under the vendor in the receiving system and the original system exactly the same. 

This will be highly useful to Distribution companies.

Meeting with Steve, Dustin, and Alan. We all touched base and bounced some questions off one another. I started working on a bug fix for the shopping cart. After that, Cory popped in and worked with Steve and I on the adilas tick list (upcoming and current projects - aka the to do list). We spent a couple of hours inside of adilas adding notes, updating priorities, and crossing things off our list. We setup another meeting for tomorrow. Trying to get organized on the project tick lists.

https://data0.adilas.biz/top_secret/community_funded_projects.cfm

On the morning meeting with Steve and Alan. Steve had some JavaScript questions for a custom page that he is working on. We talked through a few things and got him going. Alan and I were talking about some other projects and small bug fixes.

Around 10 am, Cory Warden popped in and her and I worked more on the adilas community funded projects. We were setting budgets, ranking and setting priorities, adding notes, and trying to get that section more organized. We are thinking that one more good session should get us caught up for now. Always more to come, but we are making progress.

https://data0.adilas.biz/top_secret/community_funded_projects.cfm

Shannon and Cory and I spent an hour or so working on some glossary definitions. At first, we were just randomly recording words and phrases that we use in the adilas world. Our eventual goal is to make it more polished and allow people to use it as a normal glossary of terms.

Here is the link to what we have now:
Web link - time_web_gallery.cfm?corp=371&id=4030

Cory and I were on a meeting for a couple of hours. Lots of back and forth conversation about projects and pieces. We finished up our first round through the adilas tick list and adilas community funded projects. This was meeting number 3 for a total of 6-7 hours of going through projects and what was what. Currently, there are about 100 projects with an estimated budget of $2,500,000 (ish) and around $500,000 already contributed by Adilas and other outside parties. Pretty cool and fun.

Here is a link to the current adilas community funded projects:
https://data0.adilas.biz/top_secret/community_funded_projects.cfm

This is just for fun... I was looking through some really old graphics and I found one that was used at the starting of when we originally released the adilas community funded projects in early 2015. See attached for a funny blast back to the past. When we launched this, I literally felt like the guy with the worn out shoes, barely making it across the finish line. We are now sitting 4 years later and actually making progress on some of the projects. Kinda fun.

Steve and Dustin were on the meeting this morning. They were going over the need to keep picking up the virtual dust... (imagine an analogy of cutting boards and logs - eventually you end up with chips and saw dust after the main cuts have been made). We are pretty good at grabbing and dealing with the main transactions and main processes. We are seeing tons of sub, optional, or secondary processes starting to show up. Basically, how do we/they clean-up and deal with the smaller pieces and chips (virtual dust)? Interesting discussions. Everything keeps breaking down into deeper and deeper subs. Things are virtually fracturing into smaller and smaller details and sub routines.

Steve and I were talking about project management and helping to keep our guys and gals on track. We were also talking about core adilas projects, custom projects, and who is able to do and handle what. Lots of moving pieces. Steve and I are going to try to steer things a little bit better from the inside. We are wanting to use Cory as somewhat of a gate to help us get projects into the project queue. As a different analogy, image that we are all in the same boat. All of us are pulling and pushing pretty hard, but we are not fully organized and pulling and pushing in the same direction.

We briefly talked about an implementation bill to our clients for custom work. This could include things like planning, oversite, and implementation. This is just an idea right now, but we are spending tons of our time on custom projects and we don't get any value from them. We need to start charging for our time on the adilas side of things.

Multi-vendor cross corp invoie to PO. We had Bryan, Molly, Cory, Brandon, Alan, and Steve on the call.

Currently we can do cross corp invoices to PO's. The hiccup seems to be with multiple vendors and making sure that the mapping is correct.

Molly logged in and showed us some examples. The goal is to be able to move inventory between systems without creating or setting up the items on the new system. Basically, they want to grab the info from the system and then use that info as quick as possible. The main source is the outbound invoice. It contains, potentially multiple items from multiple vendors.

Mapping on the main vendor (at the corp level). This is where the main invoice comes in at.

Then mapping on a per line item level. Each line item needs to be mapped to a different vendor based on what the invoice has. They want the line items to default to the same vendor name as the source invoice line. There is already a custom map option. The new functionality just includes a possible vendor switch as part of the mapping. They are looking to get a vendor drop-down on a per line item level. Currently, there is only a drop-down that allows you to select the item category. They still want the mappings... to help speed things up, but they want a vendor assignment to be part of the new mapping process.

If the vendor doesn't exist, be able to add it in on the fly and set the vendor type to inventory.

There is a new vendor based flag called the default vendor type (created by Steve but not fully cascaded through the system). They want to be able to use those flags to show up as a possible vendor option, vs just checking to see what vendors do have real items. They would like the vendor list to either look-up existing items or be flagged as an inventory vendor. Another possible option is show all vendors or do a perfect vendor name match.

They are using this cross corp functionality to setup new systems. They basically have a master corporation, that already exists, and then they just start transferring and selling back and forth and the items get pulled from master corps to the new corps.

An idea was submitted by Steve to go into the existing systems and flip vendors and vendor flags as a background task to make sure that the new feature is fully used. We may also want to add some code to help flip that switch as a vendor is added and then used on a PO.

There were some discussions on conditioning the application to help protect the companies. Sometimes the deeper we get, the more we actually have to code in some protection and safety measures.

See attached for a video recording of the meeting.

8/19/19: Will has completed the Leafly integration.

Talking about delayed counters and working on phase 2 of that project. Molly, Cory, and Brandon were on the call.

Known needs:
- we need to be able to include subs
- we need to be able to scan subs - currently only scans parent subs
- we also need to be able scan and hold (scan every unit in a bin) and then have that count for you
- multiple locations and being able to scan and hold - not really real adilas locations - kinda like sub locations within the same location
- be able to ultimate review before submitting for processing
- on the review, you could see who scanned what

// ideas

- Maybe a new button that allows for multiple scans (scan to count) - Once it comes up, maybe a spreadsheet like column with multiple lines

- On the review and commit page, be able to search and filter by item and by person and by notes.

- You also need a way to remove and/or combine certain pieces. Kind of a fully functional master overview.

- They would like to see some new quantities such as total amount scanned, system count (on hand), and an open field for the real quantity. Maybe even show them the math before we actually do it, meaning another quantity called math adjustment quantity (non adjustable >> just a math calc).

- On the review page, they wanted a little bit more info without over doing it.

- We may need to change the database model and move from JSON text to real database entries. This would help with searches, show/hide stuff, and better ways to clear and/or delete things out of the process.

- Molly was talking about the importance of date filters and date/time stamps

- They don't want to see all of the sub information (too much). They would like to rework the normal update PO process. (update_inventory_count.cfm page). They would like to have all of the subs open by default, take off all of the extra sub info and sub inventory attributes. Keep it simple and easy. They like how simple the delayed inventory counter looks but even that one needs some new fields.

- Some of the people use this process every day. Many of them use it at least monthly. They really want it work on a Wearhouse type model. Lots of scans and less clicks. They want more of a barcode based model.

- There was some discussion on how to display the review and submit page. Some of the comments were grouped by parent item and then broken down by person who did the scans. They were talking about having a total summary line per item and then some sub details that could be showed if needed (collapsible like the show subs option for sub inventory).

- There was some talk about storing multiple steps in the session scope. Basically another way of delaying the inventory counting. Currently we submit each page... the question was raised about submitting multiple pages and then having a final review to do the real submit process.

- As a side note, the action page for the delayed count process aborts and shows a dump. We need to help and clean that up.

Web link - time_web_gallery.cfm?corp=22&id=1485 - community funded project for this piece.

See attached for a link to the video recording of the GoToMeeting session.

Cory and I spent an hour working on the adilas community funded project list. We had about 10 new projects that we added some small notes, budget info, and set the priorities. We will keep trying to stay up with this and keep it current.

The power of recipe/builds. Both Cory and Steve were talking about the potential and ways that the recipes could and do help the build process. They were even talking about unitizing some of the costs using certain recipes.

Cory and Steve wanted to see a demo on the rewards and customer loyalty points. We went through things and they made some comments and had a couple of questions. Mostly they were excited to see us get it ready for release.

Working on the project list and refining some requirements on the multi vendor, multi corp, invoice to PO - one of the time consuming pieces is bringing in bulk raw goods. On the subs being transferred in... could we keep the barcodes the same, both on the parent barcodes and the sub barcodes? The other time sucker is relabeling and printing the labels. Some of the clients are using complex labels (bring a sub package in and tie it to different units of measure). They, the client, are using the custom labels with qr_subId_quantity_price (label format) type thing. They really need mini conversion with the ability to do cross-corp barcode labeling. Mini conversions almost gets into the level of grand children and so on.

Steve would love to build out our internal project management stuff. We would like to build out project timelines and showing progress via timelines and check points. Helping our clients see the work that goes into some of these projects. Including funding, time, labor, check points, progress, etc.

Small talks about bulk check printing and using the keyword "bulk" to help the system assign check numbers on the fly. Steve had a number of be careful/got ya's - such as missing checks, printer eating or destroying a check, jumping out of the process, different check types - say 3 on a page vs single check per page (default). It gets deep on the got ya's. Calvin did some work on the bulk check printing project a couple years back.

Crazy sales tax stuff. We were talking about multi tax rates, buying and selling products and services and then being able to tax things based on where they were sold from and where the products were going to end up. Kinda crazy taxing stuff and mixing and blending special taxes. It seems like taxes are already complicated, and it seems to be heading even deeper. Special sales tax rates per zone, per city, per county, per municipality, per entity, per location. Invoicing, transferring products behind the scenes, special taxing, special reporting and the list goes on. Crazy, crazy stuff.

The deeper we go, the more we are seeing the usage of locations and stores and keeping things straight. That could be inventory levels, needs, sales, transfers, taxes, users, permissions, clients, vendors, etc. It get's pretty crazy. Locations are a huge piece of the puzzle.

We were talking about flex grid tie-ins and being able to expose certain things to the public and certain things internally based on show/hide on the web settings and the reflexive side of the flex grid (crisscrossing flex grid tie-ins and relationships). We are seeing a need for this (it already exists but may not be being used) and we may want to employ more of this type of function.

There was also a small discussion about ideas, limits, and setting up priorities. There are so many ideas... sometimes it gets tough to figure out what or where to jump first. Eventually it comes down to priorities and setting those priority levels.

Shannon was on earlier but we were still in a meeting with Cory and Steve. She was working on formatting a document that we were working on. We have another appointment scheduled for later this week.

Eric popped in and had some coding questions. We got him squared away and headed in a good direction.

Monday morning. Lots of action today. Steve and I were the only ones on the meeting to begin. By the time we were done, we had touched base with Dustin, Alan, Eric, and Josh. By around 11 am, most of the guys had moved on and were working on their own projects.

Steve and I were talking about a number of topics. The first one was dealing with a corp-wide setting that was setup way back but never had been fully operational. It was called show_tax_breakdown. After looking for a bit, we determined that it was setup in September of 2012. It has never been used. We did find however that a smaller version of it exists in a corp-wide setting called default_printable_invoice (option # 9 for that setting) on the mini invoice and showing a tax summary as part of the mini invoice (customer receipt). This question and subsequent look-up came from a client email that wanted to turn on the old show tax breakdown setting. It is funny how things keep circling around. Often, we do what we can, and then we know that we will have to circle back around again. We keep building out nubbins where we hope to tie things in later.

While we were looking up some history on the older corp-wide settings, we also talked quite a bit about master corporations, aggregated data, aggregated systems, and being able to move away from transactional data. We still need the transactional data, we just need a way to get to secure summed up and tallied data points. We talked quite a bit about posting, locking, and levels of being able to edit things. The analogy of water freezing into ice was brought up. Some users want us to go directly to ice and make things un-editable. Others require the options to be able to modify and edit data and values. We talked a bit about our data assembly line concept and having different permissions that allow certain levels of access in the flex bubble type model. Very interesting.

We also talked about VPS's (virtual private servers) and some times needing to go back into older environments or models with new features and/or needs. We talked about flagging data, maintaining known and trusted values, scheduled tasks, harnessing user clicks and actions, and even back filling data as needed. There were conversations about single logins, flipping between corporation, showing and maintaining aggregated totals, and validating the integrity of certain data points, sums, totals, counts, and grand totals. We are seeing bigger and bigger needs on first, sales data, and then on inventory tracking. Those seem to be the hot topics for now. Sales data tends to motivate all kinds of other sub functions such as cash flow, inventory levels, tax collection, repayment, etc. The list goes on.

Eric popped in and has a number of question about discount campaigns and how to set them up and track them. We went over ways in corp-wide settings, individual entries, and talked about the discount engine that Josh worked on. There were some talks about deciphering some data and exposing certain fields and values to outside 3rd parties through API socket connections. The users would have to agree to the 3rd party terms and turn thing on, but once completed, all discount information, campaigns, and calculated values and totals would be passed to specific 3rd parties for analysis (only if turned on).

More talks about circling back around and back filling and/or completing certain data values. There are tons of transactions, and certain records hold certain values. We may also need to expose how certain values are calculated, if it is not logical from the data itself. This gets clear into formulas, calculations, order of operations, etc. Discounts play along those lines. You can skip discounts, do standalone or dis-jointed discounts, in-line discounts, percentage discounts, dollars off discounts, mixed discounts, automated discounts, stacked discounts, etc. It gets pretty deep.

While we were talking to Eric about discounts, Josh joined in. We talked with Josh about getting with Cory and working on some concise videos and educational material for showing how to use the automated discount engine. We talked posting videos to help files, updates, and the news and updates page. We are seeing more and more of need to get the correct information out to our users. Basically, a number of things and features exist. However, due to how many there are... some times certain features are not used just because people/users don't know how and/or can't find any training on the subject. Some times they don't even know that certain tools and features exist.

Still talking with Josh, the topic started shifting towards more concise pieces. We have tons of things that are big and somewhat bulky. Those are harder to consume and digest. We need to get into smaller and smaller pieces. Along those lines, Steve chimed in and mentioned almost a marketing type approach. We need to be consistent and have some consistency between the info we are trying to share and how that is presented. We need to help people/users learn, but we also need to be putting our best foot forward. That takes things to a different level and almost adds a marketing level of showing off our stuff. There are pros and cons to that. A pro is it all looks super nice and makes sense. A con is that it requires still, time, resources, and a plan (one or more persons doing the same thing).

As we got deeper into some of the subjects, I kept thinking back to the word "teams" and what teams are we a part of? Certain people or certain teams need to handle certain parts. This really isn't a free for all, it is too complex and requires certain timing, skills, and resources.

After Eric and Josh were done, Steve and I worked with Alan. He helped me on some database query questions and then Steve worked with Alan on a project that both of them are working on for state compliance issues. A couple of other topics for the day were: directing towards teams and who does what. Using news and updates more for training and tech support, GPS tracking and delivery options, and using the right tools for the right job (talking about database and SQL query optimizers - built-in helpers for certain tasks with complex logic and tons of records).

Lots of moving pieces, all over the board. Towards the end of the meeting, I worked on some emails and then recorded a bunch of notes. Things are going so fast... the only way I feel that we can keep up is to record what is happening. We can't solve everything, but hopefully, we circle back around and get a sense and/or flavor of what transpires. Busy times.

Steve and I talking about projects and priorities. More and more pressure to get organized and get all hands on deck working in the same direction. Right now, we don't have a shortage of able body hands, we are just all over the place. We have guys on this project and that project, we have others on custom work, we have other on core projects, we have others that we don't know where they are at. We really want to keep focusing on the list, and adilas tick list. Along those lines, we setup another meeting with Cory for Thursday to keep going over the list and making adjustments as needed.

From Steve - "Not a lack of work... there may be a lack of organization."

Steve was also quoting my dad, "use technology to help you as you go along."

Anyways, we were talking about how hard it is to control certain timelines and the pull of other projects (almost distractions of sorts). Eric popped in and had a few questions. We setup some time later this week to work on special accounts (rewards, customer loyalty points, gift cards, etc.). Some times budgeting time to work on certain projects, with mixed participation, really helps. Some times if I plan time for me to work on a project by myself, it seems like a softer schedule than if someone else is committed to the same time. A buddy, on some of these projects, really helps.

Going over projects, priorities, and budgets for projects. Cory and Steve were on the meeting. We went over a few of the new projects and put some numbers to them. We also talked about and got updates on some of the ones that are in progress. We all wish we had more time, but all things considered, we are making good progress.

There were also some talks about news and updates, education, help, refining, circling back around and doing new phases and rounds on older projects, vision of the future, and working in teams. Good stuff. We talked about removing the name Adilas from some of our documentation and training materials. That is in preparation for white label companies using the same assets without having to revamp everything. We already have some projects that deal with changing out graphics and help files. We may also need some other projects that help clean-up educational assets.

More and more needs to work on user interfaces and helping our clients be able to filter and find the needles in the haystack. We have tons of great data, but sometimes it takes a little while and/or master users to get it out of the system. We need to simplify that process. All in all making good progress. As a side note, sometimes it really helps to get things released early (even potentially pre-mature) and then let people start beating on them and helping us refine the concepts and processes. I often get stuck on the mentality of get it done and do it right and then release it... that works well if I have enough time. If not, it never gets done and thus not ever getting pounded on and/or played with. We have to walk a fine line there, as there are certain things that never should be prematurely released, and other things that should be and/or no harm in getting it out there. Quite the balancing act at times.

On with Cory earlier today. She made a small comment about removing the word "Adilas" in the glossary of terms. She recommended that we use other more generic terms. We came up with terms such as system, platform, application, app, database, software, or any combo of these terms.

https://data0.adilas.biz/players_object_lesson.pdf - pulled up some older documentation for some terms. This deals with how the system is stacked and organized.

https://data0.adilas.biz/top_secret/time_web_gallery.cfm?corp=371&id=4030 - system software glossary - worked on letters L, M, and N's today.

9/16/19: Need to research on our side what coding has been completed already? We may have some code completed already for a Verifone.
We will need a model number as well for Cory to add.

Working with Next Paradigm to bring an enterprise solution to the SMB market using Verifone terminals with First Data merchant accounts. Not for cannabis or cbd markets.

Alan has been working on this.

Meeting between Russell Moore, Steve, and Brandon.

- From Steve - "Russell, we have missed you".

- Russell - Drawn back to the dream

- Like a beehive, everybody gets to play and the combined effort makes a difference

- All core adilas projects are going through our new gateway. Cory Warden is the gatekeeper for those projects.

- We have some snow owl CSS questions for Russell. We need the master back in the mix.

- Timeline views and other modern look and feel (flavor of the sites). These are things that we want to get back to.

- We want to focus on the Snow Owl Theme and get it all stabilized.

- Russell and Steve have had multiple conversations on the widget, app, pallet type interface - mix and blend different widgets and mini apps to help the users get their "space" setup. This is somewhat of a custom mini dashboard concept with lots of options and configurability.

Russell - wanted to pitch some ideas and things towards the adilas fracture project (future adilas project and plan). Making it a true core with an expandable platform type interface.

We started out in Postman (PHP based - API socket tool) and using Russell's auto generated API documentation - Tools with custom extensions for functionality, API sockets, classes, and view models. Core pieces all get add, edit, and view options for the data. Frameworks and then building on top of those. Russell was talking about core, custom core, themes, custom code, etc. These are ways that he could build on and virtually extend the core tool without hurting the main core logic.

Some of the concepts were dealing with the pallet type view (multi mini windows or widgets). They were talking about how to use tons of mini widgets, apps, views, and even third party tools - all mixed together in one app. We started talking beyond screen, and screen size, and going more to a canvas type view. A canvas is a layout design that may be bigger than a screen. They would like to be able to navigate to different sections, zoom in/out, call something into focus, and the background pieces would connect with both internal and external API sockets. Once the data structure is known, the building out of things becomes very quick. The goal is to create a robust back end engine that could be built out and modified on the frontend very quickly. Getting back to cores (internal core) and plug-ins or add-on's.

Both frontend and backend developer widgets and backend components - Russell was proposing a table component (just like the data tables, but more robust and configurable). Components are able to worry about their size vs screen size. Basically, you could make the components smart (know its own parameters). As you start mixing different components, make each one smart enough to mix and interface with other widgets without being overwritten and/or altered. Tons of self-contained mini apps all working together.

I was asking Russell about some of things that he is working on. One of them was what he was calling "Headless CMS (content management systems)" - All API socket connections but no real structure. Virtually a brain without a face. The face becomes the view model. We talked about how adilas uses a similar concept called "play at the wall" type concepts - All API socket connections without having a required view of that data. Russell was getting back to classes and specific tools and object oriented programming. If we use a tool too much (say elements of time), it can make the water muddy. That is both good and bad. In some ways, it makes it very flexible. In other ways, it may actually get abused because it may be used in so many different ways.

Lots of separation between database, views, logic, uses, tools, and data. Some of the new pieces (on the view model) could be scrolled, slid, collapsed, expanded, shrinks, etc. Kinda like the old Adobe Flash Rich Interface Environments but without the Flash wrapper. Beautiful interfaces with just in time data, fun navigation, built-in validation, etc.

At some point, we would love to allow our uses to use what pieces and features that they want and then working on charging based on what they are really using. Maybe thinking of being out on the AWS stuff for this. Still just ideas and concepts.

We also talked about running with two ships vs just one (different applications) - see screenshots (build on both apps and eventually have two separate products). Ideally, the new ship (say adilas fracture) would end up being a more powerful tool and a full remake of the original adilas model. Little by little, chipping away at the new system and new structure.

Steve and Cory were speaking of this in the context of SG&A's. Say a company is unitizing and they want to add their rent to their "inventory" every month and then pay it. Rent is $6500 every month so we could make it a reoccurring PO, so it would be ready to add to a recipe.

Cory jumped on the meeting and had some questions about the video for the preview for the special accounts and customer loyalty points. We went over a few of the questions and made a couple more notes for us to look at. We then started talking about some other topics and projects. One of the topics was how tight to tighten things down and/or give the user the power to control things at the source. It got into all kinds of scenarios and cases (what about this, what about that, etc.). It also goes clear out to settings, permissions, and checkpoints. You kinda need to have the flexibility at some point and then be able to tighten things down and/or have it pass through a valid checkpoint. It keeps coming back to the concepts of the data assembly line flow and process. Basically, little linked flex bubbles with checkpoints, permissions, sub pieces or layering (depth), and then track it all over time based on the flex bubbles and virtual phases.

Steve and Cory were talking about running mini manufacturing over time and even getting into different phases and WIP (work in progress) type interface. It all comes back to time and tracking what happens over time. That gets into subs - sub phases, sub locations, sub grouping, etc. They were talking about pros and cons of using recipes and doing all kinds of internal builds.

After that, Steve, Cory, and I went over a bunch of our projects and did some updates and setting budgets and priorities. We are going to keep pushing on this every week. We currently have all of our projects in a section called adilas community funded projects. It is still a work in progress, but we are making progress and trying to setup a good work flow.

Going over projects - sort and assign. We had about 5-6 new projects and also touched base on some of the existing projects that are being worked on. Good little session. Cory is really doing some awesome work.

1/21/20: More loyalty points functions needed. Brandon said he was aware of these:

1) Add a blue level permission for setting up and managing loyalty points program so that a manager can use it without accessing the balance sheet.

2) Automate voiding of loyalty points when invoice/sale is voided.

3)"Depositing loyalty points" This is on the radar- to map the payments not yet deposited to COGS so that owners can see what the loyalty points are costing them. Currently can leave undeposited or do a workaround and deposit with an offsetting deposit line to reduce revenue (other revenue-not from sales).

10/28/19: Both Molly and Cory have clients who would like to be able to limit loyalty points to customer types ie members, guests, etc.

Another client also wondered how to delete or edit points once allocated.= Brandon said you can make one negative transaction to offset the points accrued.

& Gift Cards

Right before the main meeting started, we had two developers jump on the meeting. We briefly met up with both Josh and Wayne. They reported on their projects and we talked about the next steps. Wayne is running into similar problems on Newtek and clustering serves as we were out on AWS. Lots of that has to do with storing images and uploaded user content. We talked about using the adilas content server as a good resource for those files and outside storage. We need a fixed location to both store and map back to for those pieces. Wayne, Alan, and Brandon will be meeting tomorrow to talk about where things are headed.

Brandon, Cory, and Steve met up to catch up on progress of current projects and any updates that need to be done. Some of the meeting was dealing with existing projects. We didn't really have time to get into new things. As part of the meeting, I did a small demo on how to edit auto generated loyalty points.

Cory joined us and we went over some basic tech support questions and clarification on some things. Light training on some of the newer features. She is building news and updates for some of the new features such as customer loyalty points and special accounts.

We switched gears and started working on the main adilas project list (adilas community funded projects) and went through a number of projects. We got to cross two bigger projects off the list and added 4 new ones. That seems to be the way it goes. Anyways, we are having weekly meetings to prioritize and set budgets for existing and upcoming projects. Our goal is to keep up with the requests and log them. This will also help us keep somewhat focused on the projects that are before us. We are trying to be more efficient.

Meet to continue pushing on projects list.

Our meeting today started with some light tech support stuff and some training. She had some questions about customer loyalty points, recipe/builds, and how to get sub inventory to work in and through the recipe/build process. We chatted about a number of ideas and options. She was taking notes and will be adding some of those things to the master to do list (adilas community funded projects).

A couple of my notes were about subs in recipes, being able to duplicate a recipe (new idea), and showing the subs just in time when the recipe is going to be used. We talked about the options between setting things up directly with certain subs (on the setup pages) or on the build prep (just before running things) and the pros and cons of both options.

We talked about some new corp-wide settings dealing with setting up subs only and also helping set those values when adding inventory. Helping to speed up the process.

We also talked about a mini project costing model and tying that out to a recipe/build (costing things out as they get made).

Completed on 11/26/19

11/25/19: Brandon, Steve and Alan are meeting on this issue Mon, Tues and Wed this week to make some headway.

From Steve: 11/8/19:I've cc'd in Cory so she can add a ticket and we will dig into this issue. Thanks for the awesome explanation and details.

We met and checked in with Cory about some projects and some needed quotes. Steve and Cory ended up talking quite a bit about payroll, taxes, cost accounting, etc.

- Options for bulk payroll calculations. Maybe be able to do 10/20 at a time and bulk submit for processing. We talked about some of the variables like hourly, salary, commissions, child support, 401K's, meal plans, etc. There are a number of variables that play into payroll and payroll calculations.

- We also talked about bulk printing checks and processing things in bulk. We do great one by one, however many of our users want to speed things up and play in bulk.

- Need for a cashflow statement

- Small talks about financials and plugging starting numbers. One of the topics was - yes, you can do it... but how much detail do you want along with it? We can plug numbers but if you want drill-down details, you need some more info.

- What about customer attributes and being able to add flags and tags to the customers.

11/20/19: Steve sent a note with data- please see attached.

Cory emailed Steve Mitchell asking for more data to demonstrate what exactly is being pulled from the CA DL to determine what needs to be fixed/edited.

From Steve Mitchell: We are trying to swipe in new customer info at Euflora Long Beach and apparently everything is jumping into the first data field.

From Brandon: One of the main pages will be top_secret/custom/process_drivers_license.cfm - pretty heavy in script and string manipulation.

Cory jumped in and we did some catch-up. She had a few questions about some projects that are either all the way done or almost done. We got updated on some of those pieces. We also did some light training on stock/units and opening up both ecommerce options and API socket options for stock/units. Lots of good things are happening.

We had to unlock an invoice to allow a client to go in and edit things. We unlocked it and recorded a history note that stated who did it and why. We don't normally do that, but it was a valid client request. We added the history note to cover our own rear ends. I'm super grateful that Cory is grabbing the ball and running with it. She is almost singlehanded running with the project list and keeping us on target. She is doing an awesome job.

11/25/19: Check with Bryan to see if they are looking at a custom solution.

Josh has had requests to connect e-commerce to discount engine.

11/20/19:From Paul:  I'm reaching out because we are running into a bit of an issue with our customers and Ecommerce. We currently do not post our weekly specials to our Ecommerce page due to the limited availability of certain products, etc. We would like to begin posting these online however what we will really need is the ability to set "maximums" for items that way customers can only take 1 unit, for example, if we only have 10 vs trying to order all 10 and others wont be able to purchase any which is pretty unfair. Does Adilas currently have this feature where we can set maximums for items in inventory or is this something that you would have to program for us?

Cory is thinking if there is a way to connect the discount engine to e-commerce then this could possibly solve the issue, as limits can be set in there to determine how many of one item can be sold per cart or per line item.

11/25/19: Drea's client had the idea to manually create a PO for the 5g and flex grid it back to the plant. That way the plant is still with its batch and available to be harvested with the rest of its weight.

11/20/19: Drea has a client who is non metrc who needs to pull 5 grams out of a plant but doesn't want to harvest the entire plant- wants to keep it with the rest of the batch. Currently there is no way to do this. Cory suggested harvesting the one plant, and keeping notes the entire way with the PO # for that plant to be able to track it and ultimately add its weight in on the final internal build. Not ideal, but that was what I came up with.

Cory jumped in and we started to go over the list of adilas projects. The ones on the call/meeting were Josh, Cory, Steve, and Brandon. We created a new priority of 11 and started putting in smaller projects and bugs into that area. We also created a new small bug report, just for Josh to look at and start chipping away. Lots of good talks and communication going on.

People have been asking for more simple interfaces. This deals with bringing in inventory and running things through the shopping cart. Super simple stuff. They either want super simple preset interfaces or a fully configurable interface where they could point and click and show/hide things.

towards the end of the meeting, both Josh and Cory were talking about projects and list and Steve and I were on different calls and meetings. That is super cool as well. We have a lot of really good people playing the game with us. That is awesome.

Wayne released the data 11 server to me earlier today. I went in and updated files, checked settings, and updated some shared database tables and ran some database updates. The data 11 server is now ready to go and I sent an email to Wayne, Alan, Steve, Cory, and Shari O. letting them know that they could start adding clients to that machine.

Cory and Josh were talking about the number of clicks, settings, and being able to show/hide certain fields. The two hot points were the shopping cart and the PO (purchase orders) page. Basically, getting items into the system and then being able to sell out those items quickly. We are leaning towards some shopping cart settings and also breaking down the needs into smaller steps as we know that some of the pieces may end up being really big.

We talked about sketching things out on paper/pencil and then moving things into a graphic mock-up, coding and then wiring things up.

We showed both Josh and Cory some of the new graphic mock-ups that are being done by both Jonathan and Chuck. We looked at some of their ideas and mock-ups to talk about options, layouts, and configuration options. We talked about showing them, meaning our clients, some of the mock-ups and graphics of where we are heading, that would be way better than having them design things from the ground up.

Managing customer expectations. That is always a challenge. As we were getting deeper and deeper, we are seeing more and more needs/wants of being able to configure and customize their own settings and such.

One of the projects that we talked about was dealing with updates and helping to let our clients know about certain updates before they get rolled out, especially if the updates may have consequences and/or possible issues. Some of the high traffic areas are carts, invoices, and state compliance stuff. We talked about delaying some of the updates instead of just pushing up new code.

Josh recommended a update log that could be searched and even have a small blame section - who coded it. Hopefully blame is the wrong word, but we all know what that means.

Maybe a different section, like the developer's notebook, where we could publish some of the updates and make announcements. We also talked about scheduling the code pushes and making sure that we aren't running faster than we are able.

Molly joined us towards the end of the meeting and had some great comments. Good stuff.

On a GoToMeeting session with Cory and Tim from Herbo. There was also another lady on the call, Jennifer. They have a project that deals with an auto roll-up between mother/daughter corporations. Somewhat of an aggregated system or enterprise system of sorts. The holding company needs and/or wants certain cross corp actions to be automated between the different systems. There is also another major piece that deals with reporting some of those same numbers and values back to the holding corporation (mother system).

Most of the meeting was going over ideas and making a small plan. As part of the plan, Cory was going to go over things screen by screen and pass them over to me. See attached for all of the scans and my notes. I worked on my notes on 12/12/19.

As of 1/6/19, this project has been started by Bryan. He had some downtime and Molly asked him to start. She knows to put these requests through to Cory in the future.

Would add it to normal advanced line item search and super advanced line item search through html, and need to be able to export both as well.

12/16/19: Currently when you pull an advanced invoice search, it gives you the option to specify a category, or you can leave it as all. But the data doesn't pull into the report. The tax category pulls into the report. Many clients would like to see the category as a column in the report. 

This would be core and simple to do.

Meeting with Cory and Molly on different projects. One of the topics was inventory threshholds and a virtual inventory engine. We talked pros and cons and discussed developers and who could do what. We also talked about some cross corp stuff.

Some of the projects are small and quick, but we tend to fall off the wagon by having so many things ready and virtually queued up.

Talking about new projects and who is doing what. We also talked about watching our costs and being able to get these new projects started. How much of the project is required before we get started? Sometime that is hard to know or fully qualify.

We were talking about a number of different projects. Delayed inventory counting, inventory engine, thresholds, location specific maxes and mins, reordering logic and options, and settings for sales (selling stock/units and bigger ticket items). We talked about some settings for the sales process and then allowing those steps and/or processes to be shown/hidden and even configured. As an example, say they didn't want to do any trade-ins and didn't want any warranties - or something like that. Turn the process into a set of configurable settings.

There was also some talks about how we could figure out how we can help our customers build out their own custom code base. Lots of talks about controlled testing environments, outside developers, project management, and other services (including head hunting and getting people in place). These services are for the other clients, because of that, they really need to help us fund the pieces to get those pieces going and in place.

There may be other opportunities to offer some of our services to outside parties. That could be custom code, project management, consulting, leg work, etc. We may even end up offering some of the core adilas players as options to help others. That could be a cool angle as well.

Meeting to discuss a couple of Herbo projects and funding a developer search and retention.

A few more items that need to be prioritized/quoted for clients.

Cory and I spent some time looking over custom projects and making plans. We decided, if it (the project) is big, we'll need to give the person a quote for the quote. Sometimes it just takes time and we have to cover that. Some projects are really quick and we can just suck that cost up internally. Other projects, it takes hours just to plan it out. Basically, if the project is big, we may need to give them a quote for making a quote, just to be fair and to do the real quote justice.

We did some training on elements of time and how that tool allows for data to be tracked over time. We got into light training about data assembly lines and how to set that kind of stuff up and use the existing tools.

We also did some training on doing corp roll ups (aggregated systems or enterprise systems). We looked at ideas for multiple corporations, a controller entity, and how to move financial data between those corporations. All of it is manual entry right now, but totally possible. Eventually, the goal would be to automate the whole thing and make it super easy and real time.

The other topic that we talked about and did some training was stacked accounts receivable. This is when more than one party is attached to an invoice. Say for example, a controller corporation (mother corp) has a number of daughter corporations. The daughter corporations extend credit to one another but the main mother or controller corporation needs to pay the actual bill. We talked about one-to-many relationships between invoices, customers, and even sub or secondary customers. All of these pieces already exist, we just needed to do some training to show Cory how it all works. Super fun meeting with a mix of planning and training. Good stuff.

1/10/20: Steve and Cory looked at code and couldn't determine what was missing.

1/16/20: Cory met with Brandon and explained "add/edit balance item body cfm lines 374-404. He explained that it is deeper than just looking at that code. There are most likely several things that need to be fixed. We need to make sure the fields are open. Something could have been disconnected or covered when the flex grid was expanded but need to dig deeper.

Cory and I went over some new items that are being added to the adilas tick list (community funded projects). We talked about a few, took some notes, made some assignments, and talked about costs for each new project. We are making progress, even though it feels slow sometimes.

Small work session. I fixed a small page for Cory (receivables homepage) and then switched over the to tax v5 branch for sales tax changes. This branch of code is from quite awhile back. It deals with customer tax fields 6-10 and dynamic naming for city, state, and county tax fields per location. The v5 means version 5. This will still take awhile to finish, but we already have 4 mini projects live and in use. This fifth one should help to finish things up.

Alan joined the meeting and was working on the tax v5 branch as well. After talking for a bit, we both went on mute and did our own work session.

11/10/20: There were glitches and now they have been fixed.

There is a menu board that was developed by Bryan Dayton for a client. Current clients would benefit from this function, and Cory has a particular client who is interested in using it. Is there still a monthly fee?

Work on sprucing it up.

We met and talked about a number of projects.

- There were some requests on the customer loyalty program stuff. They want a new permission, be able to handle voids, and also fully map and finish the backend accounting.

- Lots of talks about the ICC's (internal cost corrections) and getting that project going. Research on ICC's.

- Menu boards - take our existing pieces and push it to the next level.

- Talking about project costs vs helping with seed money and getting things started.

- We need to build a tool to help migrate customers, similar to part numbers or items. This is one system to another system on the same server. We already have a migration report for general inventory items. We will just build one for customers between corps.

Update: 2/3/20: Adding custom messaging to the queues. When you have delivery, you will have a certain message. We don't need to worry about the verbiage. We put the text field in and they can enter.

1/23/20: From meeting with steve regarding MI needs for e-commerce: See attachment for all notes from client/Molly. Below are Cory's notes on each item.

1)aQueue selection setting- required yes/no. Bryan could bring in queue code that already exists. (quoted at $1,000)

1)b Payment authorization= custom black box could be written by Bryan. Not sure on $ for this.

2) Back to consent check box: part of the black box above steve thinks- but isn't sure. Who else would want someone to have to check a box for consent to pay? Still discussing- no quote yet.

3)Another e-commerce setting related to queue. If using queue (yes) and queue is delivery queue, must hit a minimum dollar amount to be able to check out. Steve said it would be similar to disabling of checkout for having too many grams in the cart. Quoted at $500.

4) Currently can add a flat rate or use shipping matrix. Matrix can be set as 1-300= $10 delivery fee. $301-1000 (or whatever) = delivery fee= 0. This would need to be tied into delivery queue. Currently there is a box next to the shipping matrix that applies to all sales. There could be another box that that when checked applies to this logic:  If you use queue and it is set to delivery, then apply shipping matrix. Quoted at $500.

5)Could turn on signature fields one and two in corpwide settings. Create a setting for capturing enabled data. Customers could sign with finger or stylus or even type in that field.. This would show up after receipt is created. Quoted at $1,000.

6)Another setting in e-commerce, not sure how deep. You would assume it is their first time if the box isn't checked. Conversation stopped here, as Steve thinks liability is too high to control this, and that patients age and consent for data retention should be acknowledged/agreed upon when they become a patient. There could be consent forms that say "if you are going to shop/order online then you must read and sign this form..." get this prepared by attorney and have in each patient profile. Question: does MI say this has to be seen online or can this be achieved ahead of time? Seems more reliable than a pop up that says" Are you 21?" No quote- will need to discuss further if it's a must to have it online per MI regulations. Wasn't clear at this time. Would be custom if we go forward.

7) Setting in e-commerce to not allow to edit profile. Quoted at $500.

e-commerce
production homepage

7/6/2020:Total Time: about 91 hours

3/31/20: Progress has been made on classic homepage look and feel.

, Payee permission, corp wide settings and manage corp info pages

2/3/20: Brandon will relay this project to Russell, Chuck and John. The trio will have a budget of $1,000 to do the four pages. If it isn't enough we will determine at that time how to move forward.

1/30/20: Cory met with Charles and saw the mock-ups he and Russell have been working on (have 17 hours cumulatively into potential project). Quick and relatively easy way to make adilas look more updated/relevant. Start with Classic homepage- keep same functions but move around and simplify. Would be a relatively uncomplicated page. Payee permissions is much more complicated and more time consuming. Go through adilas one page at a time- open to customer feedback for direction. Hoping they see classic and get excited. 

Charles can work on this at the same time as his other projects. He can do front end design and development and code the front end. Needs someone ie Russell to wire up the back end. Russell is interested in working on this project as well.

** check with Brandon- has Eric started on duplicate permissions? If this project gets done is that as needed ie should he be focusing on something else?

Going over projects with Steve and Cory. Some of the topics were sub queues out in ecommerce, menu boards, small graphical homepage changes, PDF form changes, and a bunch of other projects, etc. Great session.

After the meeting, I uploaded a small page to help migrate customer data between corporations. This was an older file that was custom. I made some changes and pushed it up to allow other parent/child corporation to copy and migrate customer information. The address is hidden and only an admin adilas user (backend setup person) can use it.

Phone call from Russell - he went to a tech conference and wanted to share some of what he was learning.

- He went to a class on marketing and how new technology features are really helping with marketing. Some of the ideas were dealing with becoming the content masters (where do people learn about certain things), SEO (search engine optimization) and getting the traffic, and word of mouth and referrals. Great topics.

- MVA (minimal viable architecture) - What do you need to get what you want done? Do you need a tank when a smaller gun would work just fine? Do you need a semi trailer when a wagon or 4 wheeler will work? What pieces do you need and why? What is the minimal viable pieces that are needed?

- Why you do companies do a rewrite(s) - based off of needs and wants (growth). There are always time(s) and size(s) and trying to match those as you grow. Going back to the wagon vs the semi truck... do you need that yet? Keeping that balance. Some of the best tech giants out there have re-written their products over and over again. Once again, what is the best model for your time and your size?

- Lots of emphasis on word of mouth - there are pros and cons to that. We have to keep helping and maintaining our product and customer relationships.

/////////////////////////

Steve and I were talking...

- Adapting to the path as you grow.

- Keep pushing things over to Cory. She is and has been our project gateway for a couple of months. It's not perfect, but we are starting to get into a rhythm and figuring things out.

Steve and I jumped into the project that we had slated. We wanted to work on QTI (from quote to transition to invoice) flow on the blance sheet. See element of time # 1477 in adilas - transactional invoices. We spent the rest of the session going over things and looking into code and logic.

Steve and Cory were on the morning meeting discussing projects and options. Dustin popped in and reported and then bailed out. After that, Steve, Cory and I got back to talking about projects.

Wayne joined the meeting and was showing us some advanced database stuff. He has some servers that clone certain database tables, run procedures against that, sanitize the data, and then push the new data over to a private VPS instance where a client is paying for a private server to run their own analytics. Pretty cool. He was also showing us some stats based on the logging and built-in stats within the MySQL databases. We also talked about a known issue where we do a query, make a list of id numbers, and then filter another query by the list of id numbers. That works great if you only have a few hundred records. Once you get into thousands and thousands or hundreds of thousands of records. It fails at the higher level. Wayne is putting together a list of those queries and we'll circle back around and refine that code. Growing pains.

From Steve - "Using technology to help us grow." He keeps going back to that phrase. We want to keep building in the technology pieces to help us coordinate and manage the whole process. There was quite a bit more control extended to Cory to help us manage our projects. Lots of good talks and discussions. We are trying to get things going and flowing.

Cory has been doing a great job and we are really excited to be moving forward with that.

Meeting with Josh to complete projects and select new ones. We ended up chatting, talking, and deciding on some directions. Josh and I set up some other time to work and do some code sign-off.

Met with Bryan and Cory and went over some cross corp invoice to PO changes. We weren't able to finish everything up, so we rescheduled.

As a note for the future, we may be moving more and more stuff to settings (data controlled vs hardcoded controls).

Discussing AdilasWPShop (new e-comm solution) formally known as WooAdilas

MVP - minimal viable product/plan

- Competition and how we help get some of the pieces past the finish line

- Platforms and building on top of them - WordPress, WooCommerce, Adilas, etc.

- Online ordering platforms, showing inventory, full ecommerce, drop shipping, ordering and delivery orders

- In-store pick-up or delivery or shipping options

- Tons of talk about deliver options, scheduling, picking date/times, etc.

- Small talk about integrated systems vs trying to mix and blend tons of independent products and trying to marry them together. There is pain in some of those pieces.

- Plug-ins (plugins) and getting things all tied together

- You have backend apps, frontend apps, customer facing things, options, assets, etc. Lots of mixing and blending.

- Pricing options on parents vs subs (parent/child inventory and pricing tiers).

- Using adilas API sockets to populate WooCommerce stuff using custom plugins.

- Certain pieces are pre-built by other vendors. Other things would be nice. And yet other things are already done by adilas as pre-built or custom options. Where do you build? Where do you spend your time/money/resources.

- Molly needs a gram tracker, custom discounts (discount engine), and better integration options. Currently she has to manage multiple applications and have one do one thing and the other do something else. Sometimes both applications do the same thing and you either need to choose and/or pick one or the other (more integration).

- Versioning and who has the latest cookie and how do you distribute that?

- Multiple ways of dealing with tiered pricing inside of adilas. We need to help standardize things there. As we were talking, there are some know issues with some of the ways that we do it internally (smart group buttons, parent attributes, etc.)

- Shipping zones, different fees for different zip codes, etc. WooCommerce has a ton of different pieces.

- Updates, reports, and getting the needed information quickly. This deals with shipping, queues, sub-queues, reports, and even clear out to element of time or somehow track the shipping, delivery, and/or in-store pick-up. We need to link up the delivery aspects and the customer queue.

- Claiming quantity and on-line orders affecting inventory levels and availability - small talks about quotes, transitional invoices, and normal customer invoices.

- There were also talks about state compliance systems and how in-store pick-up vs delivery orders may need to be handled.

- Messaging and using emails, text, queue specific, or different stages (as things happen) messaging. Notifies  and reminders.

- Acknowledgement and approving payments. We may need a setting where they could fill in some verbiage, and toggle on/off settings to show/hide and require/not require those steps and pieces.

- Coupons, promotional codes, referrals, etc.

- People want something that is integrated, fast, flexible, powerful, and easy. They also want it to look awesome!

- Tying in custom messaging into the customer queue, sub queue, and ecommerce orders. The queues are a great start... we just need to tighten up a few pieces and make it go full circle.

- Being able to automatically add in a delivery fee as a line item on the invoice/quote from ecommerce.

Discuss project id #1599- secondary barcodes project. We met and recorded a number of new notes for that project. See this link for some more details.

Web link - time_web_gallery.cfm?corp=22&id=1599 - project details

Cory and I met to work on two copy and migration files. One was for customers from corp to corp and the other was for parts/items from corp to corp. We added in the abiltity to do updates as well. The original code just did new inserts (adding new data). Now it does both inserts and updates (changes). We also talked about some other questions and topics.

Touching base with Alan, Steve, and Dustin. After a little bit, Steve, Alan, and I were talking about where we can go and what would those positions look like.

- Alan was talking about helping to break up some of the bigger projects into smaller and smaller pieces. And how he could and would like to help with some of the project management. Almost having individuals being small scale specialist in certain areas. Lots of small victories.

- Steve had a question, what about all of the small little things that keep popping up? Bugs, fixes, updates, and small maintenance issues. Some of those little things are really tough to manage (shear volume and switching gears every second).

- Sometimes we lose a lot of ground if we have to switch back and forth between too many projects.

- Currently we are all spread so thin... we can't get anything done quickly. Small talks about small teams and small sprints.

- Setting up expectations, meeting times, etc. Then following through on those pieces.

- We can really get some great on the job training going on. This will really help all of the pieces as we go forward.

- Steve was saying... maybe we have Cory be the door (gateway), she then communicates with Brandon and Steve and Alan. These three work together and talk with Wayne (server stuff) and then help and deal with the rest of the developer pool (all of the other guys and how deep the water is).

- Putting in shields, bouncers, and processes to help us say no, not yet, yes, or maybe. Some of those answers are tough, but it you have a shield, it becomes easier. You can virtually hide behind the process in a way. Drawing lines and setting up expectations. Healthy boundaries.

- Gaining victories by having our guys get their own victories (helping others and helping them get their projects done). Basically, a management structure in some ways.

- Data assembly line - set the expectations, really spend the time to check things out and do good progress reports and sign-offs, and then move forward as possible.

- Helping to remove obstacles from each others path and shielding each other.

Towards the end of the meeting, we had Alex and Cory join us. Each of them reported in and we fixed a small bug for Cory and pushed up the file.

Steve, Brandon, and Cory talking about projects and options for development and outsourcing some of the code stuff. Lots of talk about processes and getting things setup. Here is a link a great article on processes and documentation.

http://www.sitepoint.com/process-and-documentation/ - document about getting control of processes - great project management article

Working with Cory on a possible tax calc bug. It ended up that it wasn't a bug, it just needs to be extended to some other with tax included scenarios. The question was dealing with sales tax calcs and settings from the store/locations, or the customer settings, or the cart settings. We just need to build it out a little deeper to handle the with tax included items if the customer is set to something different (say a tax category of government or something) and the items are set to with tax included. It removes the tax but it doesn't back the price down to what it would be without that tax. Sort of missing a step, but only for a certain scenario.

Towards the end of the meeting, Cory and I talked about getting other key players involved in certain projects. We were primarily talking about Kelly and Molly and other power rep/consultants. We talked about who is going to be the project manager and who would be the consultant on that project. We may need to define certain roles to help things flow better. Some of our projects will be built for our clients and some of our projects will be built for our power rep/consultants. There is a small difference as to who the client is. Somewhat internal or fully external.

We also looked at another project and some small bugs that need to be looked at on the general ledger stuff.

Cory ask Danny to take on this project to amend a report based on id number 1640 (time id inside of adilas - as a community funded project).

Working with Danny on the project. We did some code management stuff (Git and bitbucket) and then started in on the project. We wrote down requirements, questions, specs, cautions, etc. We then started working on the actual code pieces. Not sure, but I'm planning on working with Danny on this project all the way through from start to finish. It may be a bit deep for him to do on his own. Great training session.

Steve and I were going to be meeting with Kelly, but she ended up getting delayed while traveling and security in the airport. We ended up having our own little meeting. Good stuff. Here are a few of the notes from what we were talking about:

- Businesses need all of the deep functionality, they just want it as hidden as possible. Smooth and pretty just feels better, even if it doesn't do as much.

- What if we keep flipping our model? What we mean here is... as a client or a rep keeps asking for more and more, what if we help direct them in such a way that we can get it done? This could be done by meeting with them, planning out what needs to be changed, offering solutions, listening, and taking down notes. Lots of possible options and then we gain from the source vs being pushed away from the source.

- Steve and I talked about the concepts that we are built on vs the code we are built on. Straight up, the concepts that we have built on are 100 times more valuable than the code that we have built on. Our code set is 1 of 1,000's of possible solutions. However, the main core concepts, those will need to be used every single time that someone does what we are doing. Even though you can't touch some of the concepts, there is huge value there.

- We were talking about ways to get funding and the down sides to that. We talked about getting overextended and having huge amounts of debt. That is no fun either. Other talks about possible funding sources such as: grants, selling our services, getting partners, investors, loans, venture capital, donations, and leveraging other assets.

- MVP - minimal viable plan (the p could be plan, product, etc.) - I like the plan option for what we are doing and working on.

- What about the adilas marketplace (adilas world)? Lots of options out there as well.

- Everything that we see is fracturing into smaller and smaller pieces. Development process, permissions, settings, servers, API sockets, single tools vs bulk tools, tracking needs, etc. Fracture is the key word. Kinda like "Legos". We may need some blue ones, red ones, and some yellow ones. It just keeps going and breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces.

- Business management and who will take care of what

- Pain and virtual bleeding sometimes help to drive us towards change

- Somewhat of an open source type model

- What is our direction and our pace? Pick a direction and then let it grow. In some ways, it feels like we pick a direction and then plant the seeds, then in a day or so, we dig it up to see how it is doing. I think we need to pick a direction and let it grow a bit.

- Our model has always been slow and steady...

- We are only able to move forward as we get funding - we get funding from...
>> Reoccurring revenue
>> One time services
>> Seed money
>> Donations and other sources

- We are stable currently

- 3 things... from Steve
>> Look at what we have - deep, deep
>> We are building daily - progression
>> We help you by bringing value - multiple ways
-->> Low cost for what you want
-->> You are able to move the system in the way that you want it - allow custom

- Maybe make it known what we are spending on new functionality and R&D

- This is who we are... we are who we are and we plan on maintaining that

- We need to take things with a grain of salt

- Our current direction is directing projects over to one main source (Cory) and then dividing things out from there - a director of development operations - Steve and I have decided that we will let this play out for a while before making a major change or shift.

- Walls and helping to sterilizing things - getting some separation

- Like an essay - tell them what you are going to tell them (prep), then tell them (main content), and tell them what you told them (conclusion)

- You can do that? or You can do that! - We love it!

- We have a team that helps and supports us... that is huge

- We, as a company, need to have our clients get in line. Sometimes we give preferences and special treatment. We need to help standardize things.

- As a skill, we have people saying that they are proficient in adilas as a skill set. Pretty cool.

- Constant development and pushing the ball forward. We are building and refining every day. Keep it going!

Meeting wit h Cory and Steve and going over projects. We did a few quotes, went over some projects, and advanced the ball a bit.

Meeting with a number of folks. The goal was dealing with the shopping cart. We had Steve, Chuck, Jonathan, Cory, and a client on the meeting. The first part of the meeting was the client going over some of their requests. Here are some highlights from them...

- They would like to be able to send text messages from the customer queue

- They would love to have a hand-held scanner and have it automatically be able to update an unmanned cart. Some talks about using the built-in cameras on certain tablets and such. Other talks about hardware and software problems and solutions. Through the web, sometimes those pieces are hard to get to perfectly talk to one another.

- Lots of questions about barcodes, labels, and auto/bulk actions.

- They would like possible popup/modal type windows to see customer notes, maybe the last invoice, and even a modal popup on the ++ or advanced add to cart (haggle tools)

- The also spoke about major needs for tiered pricing - the same options that work on my cart favorite buttons and smart groups and tiered pricing. As part of this discussion, there were options mentioned about parent attributes, barcodes on buttons, advanced barcodes (QR codes), mini conversions, etc. This becomes a bigger and bigger need. It also needs to be more standardized. Lots of options, but because it could go so many ways, it is hard to find the correct path. Too many options.

- Along the tiered pricing vein, there was also a request to be able to assign items (subs or child packages) to a pricing tier through the build new PO process (bringing in the items and assigning them to a pricing tier as part of the inbound process).

- They really want a fully interactive cart, yet still locked down, yet still super powerful, yet super simple, yet, yet... Lots of requirements.

- Training mode, how to get to the best training and how to connect the dots. We have help files, news and updates, videos, etc. - but we need a way to get to that really quickly. They, the client, were also requesting that each new feature has a full tutorial and/or video. They only wanted the things that were fully done to be added to the news and updates.

- They would love for more onsite or local training options. They love the time and are willing to spend the money. They would love to get the training options to be standardized and regular (scheduled and consistent).

- They love the bulk update cart functionality

- Being able to bulk print labels and skip steps (save as a quote or cart checkout). The also wanted to be able to flag certain items that they only need one label vs multiple new labels per quantity, etc. It sounds like it could be pretty deep. There were also requests to be able to bulk print labels from the PO. Calvin's new adilas label builder does do bulk labels for invoices and PO's. They just might need some training.

- Online orders, ecommerce, and even options for delivery.

- In the cart, being able to see it at all times. Having some sort of split screen where there are items or look-ups on one side and all of the items on the other side. Lots of one pagers with asynchronous connections and easy flow through the sections and/or pages.

- We love ideas and helping to push the ball forward. The needs keep coming. We just try to keep solving those pieces as we can.

- We also allow the clients to chime in and help us prioritize, fund sharing, and have a say in where things are going.

////// more notes after the client left - Just Chuck, Jonathan, Brandon, and Steve

- Steve - a big thank you out to both Chuck and Jonathan - you guys are stepping up the game. He was also talking about collaboration between the different developers and how cool that will be.

- There may end up being 8-10 versions or variations of the shopping cart. At some point, we need to separate the logic from the view/design. Jonathan was also talking about putting the specialty features into settings so that each cart may be more configurable. Good stuff.

- Questions from Jonathan about market analysis and what does that say for us? Sadly, the reality, we haven't done anything there. Lots of options.

- There were some talks about having a system to run your stuff vs trying to marry all of the individual pieces together. There is pain on both sides, but we are heading towards the systematic type approach. Trying to bring all of these things together.

- Time to value - how many clicks to get those needs fulfilled. Not that we can't do it... we just need to figure out how to help speed up the process and make it easier and more easy to get to those pieces and features.

- Smoothing out processes and making it easy to get to the places that they need to. It kinda comes down to navigation and visual flow process. Aka - the full user experience.

- Steve was talking about how making these pieces work together to get all of the POS (point of sale) systems, inventory tracking, CRM (customer relationship management), CMS (content management systems), accounting, reports, and backend storage all in one place. That is the dream.

- Some of our clients are virtually starving for instructor lead training. Jonathan is saying that there is a barrier to entry to this... meaning the learning curve to fully know adilas. We need to help provide it and also help to standardize it. Small talks about competition, reps/consultants, and ways of teaching the processes, pieces, and principles.

- Small mention of the adilas café and how some of that would help us provide training and service type options. You could get training from the adilas university or you could get direct training and/or hire a certain person to help fill a certain need. Think of all of the power users that could offer services and/or training. What if we could show user stats on who has done what and what level they qualify.

- From Chuck - what about a monthly webinar? We could plan it out, record it, charge for it, etc. We could do digital meetings, in-person training, instructor lead trainings, etc. As we keep updating the system, we need to keep updating the videos. Maybe even using YouTube as a primary source of training. Possible Facebook groups, tips of the day, etc.

- From Chuck - doing light idea mining when we are out and about. For example: Hey, what processes do you do to sell things? We then record that and start making some settings, permissions, and selections together to help them with what they are doing. Presets per industry. Sometimes it is so overwhelming... we could really create virtual profiles and help with settings and configuration stuff.

- From Chuck - small talks about web components and being able to customize things on the fly. Separating logic, functions, views, displays, processes, etc.

- Lots of settings and even helping those people get to those settings and help it make sense for each industry. Settings and configuration options. Groups, categories, settings, nested presets, tiered pricing, labels, etc.

- From Chuck - he really doesn't like it if we do a process and then virtually dump him in an unfamiliar page (backend navigation). That comes back to page flow and user interface. We will keep working on this. If we send the users to the correct spot, we don't lose them and we even help them know what the next step should be. This may take some mapping and design stuff.

- Trying to stay small but still looking for talent and help.

- Help file on barcodes - Web link - help.cfm?id=413&pwd=cart - barcodes can really speed up shopping carts and there are tons of options. This is an area that could still be developed out further and enhanced. Just an idea.

See attached for a number of other resources. There are a couple of videos and some research on shopping carts and POS interfaces (point of sale interfaces).

Cory and I met and talked about a custom process and flow chart that was submitted to us by a client. We went through each step, asked questions, made some assumptions, and took some notes. It was a fun process. It had over 20+ boxes in the flow chart. Once we get everything all put together, we'll go back to the client and get some more clarification before we fully come up with a quote. Pretty big custom process and flow dealing with inbound products, testing, production and packaging, invoicing, fulfilment, and shipping and delivery logistics. Cool stuff.

Cory joined the meeting and we switched gears to talking about budgets, projects, timelines, quotes, and other small details about upcoming and existing projects. As a note, we are seeing a general trend going towards deeper cost tracking, job costing, special timeclocks, sub payroll options, bulk payroll tools, and summaries and aggregation of data. Lots of bulk or aggregated (summed up) requests.

On the meeting with Cory, Jason, and Zack (clients). Talking about sub locations and sub phases (virtual steps in a process). Interesting conversations. We were going through flowcharts, questions, processes, procedures, ect. Line by line and talking through things. Also lots of talks about mini conversion and other future projects.

Cory booked me some time so that I could work on this project. That was very nice. I got in a good hour and a half on it today. I'm working on passing along both a part number status as well as a QTI (transitional) invoice status. It is going good, just passing things from page to page.

Cory, Steve, and Brandon did a little bit over an hour on working through projects and trying to figure out budgets, priorities, and project details. We talked quite a bit about how to move a project from the general pool over to the project queue. The main thing that moves a project is funding. That's a big key component.

Towards the end, Eric popped in again and had some questions. We also talked about some funding options and what not.

Working with both Cory and Steve to talk about project management and new processes. We went over a number of new projects and also talked about options for doing better bidding, estimates, and quotes. See attached for a very loose list of things to consider. Just getting started.

Cory and I spent an hour going over notes, flowcharts, and details of a project that needed to be quoted. We used some new spreadsheets to estimate times, values, and hours needed to complete the project. This marks one of the deepest quotes that Cory and I have done together. Still learning but improving and that feels great. Good stuff.

https://zoom.us/j/997233164 This meeting is the one you already had planned with Kelly. Cory is joining and we are going to zoom so we can show you the first 3 projects we need quoted for financial accuracy in reporting.

Questions... how do we flag our projects for projects that are fundable? Cory asked, how are the projects related? What projects play along with that.

- 3 things - internal shopping cart, look and feel, balance sheet stuff and reporting/exporting

- MVP for the cannabis industry - balance sheet, reporting, sub inventory, mini conversions

- Building new products off of the existing platform as a service (PaaS)

- From Kelly - small group of legacy people to help fund some of the reporting and exporting - certain ones would be grandfathered into older lower rates while others will get increased rates going in the future.

- We did some other forecasting and looking at numbers.

- Grouping projects into like areas

- Lots of talk about smaller packages, modules, and list of features and options per price tag

- Changing our focus to working on client funded projects

- Getting more organized and really staying as focused as possible - working toward a goal

- Everything is trending toward our community funded projects and getting things funded

- Finding the mix and blend between client funded projects and internal funded projects

- Light crowd funding options

- Phases, even with-in our own environment - making it easier and easier to record the data and also to get the data back (reporting) and easy in/out type process.

Great meeting. We were working on a proposal and going through the pieces, projects, and steps. I was helping where possible and Cory was writing down ideas and getting rough draft stuff going. After the meeting, she ended up going back over things and refining it. The proposal looked really good. Simple, but still enough to advance the ball.

Working with Cory and Steve on quoting and project management stuff. As a fun side note, Steve and Cory set up another meeting and got together and were doing some quoting on their own and just brining me the bigger or more complex problems. That's kinda cool.

Cory, Steve, and Brandon going over questions and projects. Steve needed some files on different servers to be checked and compared to see if one server had newer files than the other. We did so and found that one of the servers was not updated. We fixed that and then did more project work with Cory. Both Steve and Cory have done a number of new quotes and that is awesome. They asked a few questions but mostly nailed it. In general, and where we can, we are trying to move away from custom black box code and more into page or group level settings. That way the code becomes more data driven vs hardcoded or full custom.

Meeting with Jonathan Wells and going over some design elements. We had a couple of us on the meeting. We had Steve, Cory, Jonathan, and myself. The meeting started out and we spent the first 40 minutes going over some of the changes in direction that we are seeing. Basically closing up the model, switching focus, and why we wanted to change things up. Lots of talk about direction, vision, and upcoming options.

After that, Jonathan showed us some of his new cart R&D stuff and where his mock-up is headed. We also got into talking about configuration and sub permission (functions within a bigger permission). We talked about consistency and design styles and bringing the R&D closer to where we are at. Basically, working on closing the gap between where we are (currently) and where we want to be (in the near future). The closer we can get and start filling in that gap and making that transition, the better.

The final topic of the meeting was dealing with sales and being able to start selling some of the other features that we offer. These are things like: monthly reoccurring, setup, training, design, custom code, tech support, consulting, project management, R&D, sales, and internal development. Lots of other offerings.

See attached for some mock-ups and screenshots.

We were going to talk about projects, but we ended up watching the data 2 server. It was struggling. Wayne, Steve, and I were watching traffic, databases, etc.

Cory, Steve, and I going over projects. Some of them were tax rounding buckets and adjustments, new part category settings for ecommerce, new project quotes and project management stuff.

Emails and phone calls with developers. Talked with both Chuck and Russell.

Cory booked this time block for me to work on payroll stuff. Clients are upset with this not working. They, the federal government, majorly changed how federal taxes are calculated.

Cory booked this time for me to work on a project. I did some emails and then jumped back in on this balance sheet project and transitional invoices and how they show up on the balance sheet and eventually on the P&L once out of the transitional state or status. Made some notes where I left off. I'll be back on this later on.

Marisa has taken over this project

4/2/20: Cory will add info to help pages.

All info that is released for new functionality needs to be in help files and on gears on appropriate pages.

Ideally, going forward, we are going to be moving more from the open buffet model to packages and selected product groupings. It will still all be there. This is more of a marketing type move. And, judging by our speed... it may be a while... :)

On a meeting with Steve and Cory going over projects and quotes. We are all learning and making progress. As part of our meeting, we chased down a balance sheet question with transitional invoices and then into sales tax stuff. Lots of moving pieces. We also talked about potential for new or better service levels that we could offer to our clients. Steve and Cory are doing most of the project quoting and just asking me if they have deeper questions and/or get stumped.

More emails and setting up a new email account for Cory. She is doing great as a project coordinator.

Going over project questions and doing some project quoting and prep work. Cory is rocking the house and doing awesome. Really excited for her and what she is doing. All of us are getting better at communication, quoting, and project management stuff.

Four of us were on the meeting to go over projects. We had Cory, Eric, Steve, and I, all in together going over plans and options. Lots of discussions about business verticals, MVP (minimal viable products), themes/skins, and bulk back box type options. We also had numerous talks about picking up low hanging fruit, doing gap analysis (we are here and we want to be over there - what is the gap), building the core on rules, assignments, and settings. Lots of good direction.

Project planning and coordination with Cory and Steve. On a big scale, we are seeing lots of interacting and connected settings starting to popup. That is both good and bad. Good in that people can set what they want. Bad in that they then have to be educated on what choices to make. Growing pains in the world of settings, configuration, and permissions.

- Talking about sub inventory and new package management settings and rules to play by. Auto open new packages, auto close 0 quantity packages, and other open/close type settings or rules.

- We have a client that needs really high numbers for invoices, invoice payments, invoice line items, PO's, and other places in the system. We talked about options to expand our current database tables or maybe go more along the lines of real in-line extensions and what that might do or handle. Imagine if we could flag a certain invoice that it has super high numbers. We could then use a custom table, such as custom_big_numerics, to hold the numbers in. We could set up the system to check for really big numbers and then run accordingly. Lots of talk about flagging and tagging records, and then rolling over to real in-line extensions to help handle the special cases. Think database extensions vs fixing the whole system to handle the random couple that exceed the norm. Some good ideas there.

- Along the lines of huge numbers. We may also want to include huge positive numbers, huge negative numbers, and huge numbers of decimals (details after the decimals).

Per Steve to discuss data points in compare inventory page.

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https://zoom.us/j/997233164


Meeting ID: 997 233 164

On a Zoom session with Cory, Steve, Kelly, Sarah, and myself. The subject was aggregated P&L (profit & loss or income statement) reports. Lots of good and fun ideas floating around. This is a spot where we can really help businesses and gain more visibility in the business intelligence (BI) realm. Here are a few of the notes from the day.

- Log any changes made to older things (invoices, payments, line items, deposits, expenses, etc.). Once logged, show a report for both audit trail as well as what changed and who touched it. Even to the level of notifications and communication stuff.

- Lots of talk about the need for the ice-down dates and how that may play in.

- Getting into the business intelligence (BI) level with quick data, summaries, totals, and aggregates.

- We do great at transactional data - right now. We would love to move more into the aggregate type levels.

- Seeing the bigger picture.

- Using BI functions to help drive revenue for us and our clients. This is what our clients want. Quick and reliable access to counts, sums, averages, maxes, mins, and stats and reporting.

- Big need to be able export the data. We also talked about being able to import data, even from other financial or operational type software packages. Along these lines, we also talked about the need for API sockets to help both push and pull the data as needed.

- Some other names and phrases that deal with bigger or summarized systems. Things like enterprise, consolidated, multi-faceted, etc.

- Dashboards and being able to show and compile the aggregated data.

- Playing with the ideas of "Powered by adilas.biz" - Having adilas being under the covers, somewhat in the background, but built on our business platform.

- A super general BI enterprise solution. Maybe even a product that rides on top of the bigger platform.

- For fun... we built a small fake database to show where we were headed. Just playing around.

Project stuff between Cory, Steve, and Brandon. New quotes, updates on current projects, and assigning developers to new and upcoming projects. As a note, Cory is doing awesome. She is filling the wagon, doing follow-up, communication stuff, news and updates, and also saying "no" when needed. Even to Steve and I. We need that.

Cory joined us and we went over her project list and questions that she had. We did some new quotes, talked about existing projects, and gave reports where we could on what is happening. Good work session.

The earlier meeting before, with cory and Steve, sort of naturally rolled into a discussion on sales and marketing. We talked about our existing models and where we are hoping to go and get to. Good stuff. As part of the conversation, Steve had me show Cory some of the small drawings, concepts, and notes from some of our meetings last week. We are gaining ground and making progress.

Click here to see some notes from 4/16/20 (last Thursday) - lots of good sales ideas.

The meeting was originally going to be going over a deep look into the automated P&L (profit and loss or income statement) financial documents and reports. We switched it out and ended up with a group meeting on a different topic, set by both Kelly and Sarah. Good meeting. The main topics were: proposal for performance improvements, scalability, revenue increase, legacy and enterprise planning. Here are a few notes and topics covered:

- Upgrades and helping our clients get the service levels that they want. This could be dedicated boxes, clusters, VPS environments, clear out to full on enterprise type solutions. Each upgrade needs to come with a cost. We just can't do this for free as our base level product.

- Charging the correct amount for certain service levels

- What ways do we communicate and how are those channels working? Email, text, phone, GoToMeeting, Zoom, elements of time, pass along from our clients, etc.?

- Kelly and Sarah would like to get a list of who does what and who is in charge of what aspect (task or position).

- Both Kelly and Sarah were filling the role of business consultants in this meeting. Great questions and trying to keep the subject on target or on task.

- They, both Kelly and Sarah, are somewhat doing an analysis  and seeing where they can help and how best to structure things. I was impressed, they seem like they want to take an active roll and help the whole business become more fluid and efficient.

- Top priorities from Steve - cash flow, servers, customer care, and new UI (user interface).

- Light talks about sales and marketing

- Top priorities from Brandon - servers, current projects, maintenance, R&D, and planning for the future - including new look and feel for the whole system

- Cory is currently doing a great job pushing forward the custom and internal projects - project coordinator

- Charging for storage, processing, and hosting of the software package

- Software is a constant process of refining and building

- What does our team look like?

- What are the future goals? Short term, medium, and long range goals?

- Time management and where we are going

- Concept of adilas.biz as a trust

- Getting business consulting for adilas done by adilas power users

- Cofounders and a small village

Tim with Herbo met with Steve, Cory, and I to go over his vision of an fully automated enterprise type system. We met and talked, drew pictures, took notes, and chatted about scenarios, requirements, and flow of goods and services as compared with the flow of money, funds, and financials. Lots of top down controls and bottom up mirrors, mapping, and roll call type situations.

Here are some other small notes:

- Holding companies, nesting corporations and locations going down, trickle down effect, rolling up effect.

- Id's becoming standardized through mappings. Helping to automate parts and processes.

- Attaching additional intel, info, or instructions to certain key transactions that start and/or process other steps of the transaction. For example: A new PO is brought in, a sub routine (recipe/build or assembly) is done on the items and then automatically distributed out to sub companies with instructions on how to pay either the holding company or direct to the vendor. All of this done through a single screen where the product is brought in through the master holding company and then distributed to the sub or affiliate corporations. Think of it as a process that gets started and the rest of the process is defined and setup by the info added to the starting piece in that process.

- How the holding company (higher level company or summary or aggregated company) could process things, cascade info down, get values passed back up, and controlling flow of monies, accounts receivables, accounts payables, bank balances, etc. Full control top down or bottom up. Plus, be able to stack the model as needed. It got pretty deep.

- We went over a number of scenarios and talked through flow and possible processes. Just talking and chatting at this point. Build on what we have. We already have PO's tied to vendors, tied to items, tied to locations... what if we could also tell it to distribute those items to other companies and those transactions could be run based on info in the first corporation. Instructions on how to account for things, how to pay for things, or how to differ payments or liabilities. Pretty flexible but with clear instruction on how the transaction or family of transactions needs to work. I like the word family transactions... multiple, with varied yet specific outcomes. Kinda fun.

See attached for one of the drawings that we were doing and talking about.

We had our second meeting with Kelly and Sarah. Very interesting. They, both of them, are somewhat acting as business consultants for us here at adilas. They are somewhat part of adilas and have been for years, yet they are currently taking our meetings and trying to help us plan and get better and do better. Very interesting.

Here are a few of the topics discussed and talked about today.

- The diversity of the adilas organism. It is alive and growing... ever changing.

- Who is caring for the adilas.biz website. That is a primary communication and sales channel. Who is doing what and what assignments and/or delegations have been made there?

- Lots of talks about white labels and how that could potentially play into the mix. Custom skins, industry specific environments, regemented processes and procedures, defaults, settings, permissions, flow, data entry, updates, notifications... and the list goes on and on. The summary would be specific skins, specific functionality, or industry standards per business vertical.

- What would a 100% white label look like - We envision that we manage and take care of the core elements and pieces. The white label company would handle all of the rest of the pieces. Which include billing, tech support, setup, sales, training, etc. Adilas would just be in the background as a business platform or business system engine.

- Wouldn't it be cool if a real white label also offered live on-site training. Say a company uses the software package. They could charge for people to come and learn and do on-site training (at the white label's site) and show the in/outs of the software package and/or the industry specific skins, functions, processes, or features. That would be super cool.

- Question - how do we decide to switch or specialize in any one industry? Answer - So far, it has just been coincidence and expressed interest of outside parties. No real studies have been conducted. Floating with our ears and eyes open.

- Focusing on core development.

- As a fun side note, part of the meeting was going over some graphics and ideas of where we would like to take it. Just concepts and ideas and drawings (lots of analogies).

Added new permissions for Cory to be able to add/edit help files (super high admin permissions). Light training and explanation. Pretty straight forward. We finished early so we went right in to the next thing and looked up some sales tax questions. We ended up doing some research on the 3rd party error logs and were able to get some specific dates and times for the client on when they changed their tax settings. Cory will take that info back to the client and explain what we found. User error vs code error.

Steve and Cory started at 10 am but I was still helping with a family thing. I joined back in and listed to the rest of their planning meeting. They are doing great and are working as a mini team. Cory brings up the projects, takes notes, defines things, and Steve provides tech, quotes, and questions going back and forth. Good stuff. They are cranking through things and getting those projects quoted, queued up, and assigned. Really exciting.

This was going to be a special meeting for a specific project but it ended up being an extension of the general touch base on quotes, projects, and plans. Here are few things that I pulled out of the meeting (not necessarily part of any one project, but more overview of subjects).

- Both up and down traffic for enterprise systems. At one time, we were mostly focusing on smaller systems rolling up into a bigger oversight or holding type company. What we are seeing is that the clients really want both directions - roll up, and cascade down (two-way traffic).

- Some of these enterprise type setups will be a cross between a permission and a setting. Who gets to do what and what direction or instructions are needed to make the data flow either up hill or cascade down hill? Interesting.

- Looking at both aggregate systems and transactional systems

- The watchers, feeders, and triggers may come in to play as data (things) rolls up or down, depending on task and flow. The watchers, feeders, and triggers may even become part of the communication process and how and where to track things that are going on.

- We are starting to see the next steps... from transactions up to aggregate and from master back to transactional systems. We don't know everything yet, but patterns are starting to emerge and become more clear. That is awesome. Once we fully understand them, we can then document them and build them.

- Steve was talking about starting at a master vendor list level and then letting those vendors be available in the smaller or sub systems.

- We also talked about master lists for items, photos, part categories, sub inventory templates, etc. Think on three main levels... global (anybody could use), enterprise or master level (top level for a multi-level structure), or the individual corporation or world level.

- Smart software and creating master global lists for known vendors, items, categories, photos, customer types, custom units of measure, time templates, etc. The list keeps going...

- Lots of additional services - that is awesome, but we need to be able to charge for that and/or those services. We just can't do all of them for free. They are a cause and effect type service but also need to be a value add-on service that comes with a price.

- There was some talk about bringing in some of our developers closer to have more control over output and processes. Trying to get away from the wild west type mentality.

- Having Steve help more with project management. That could and is huge. He can and is able to point people in a good direction. He has done that for years. Originally, this was his brain child (meaning adilas as a company).

- On some of the projects, we may increase some of the project bids to help include new settings. That seems to be where everything is going and/or heading. Permissions and settings.

Going over projects, quotes, and deep technical stuff. Cory mostly lead the discussion and Steve and I chimed in where needed. She is doing great on monitoring and controlling the virtual project door or gateway. The deeper we get, we have to know who is doing what and what else they are working on. Human time and talents and where are we putting those resources to work?

At times, the projects just keep coming and we virtually feel like the wagon is being overloaded. It doesn't feel like there is an end to it. Part of the game.

This was a multi-hour Zoom meeting with Kelly, Sarah, Cory, Steve, and myself. I actually don't know when Steve came in, but he was in there by the end... :)

We did a high-level training on elements of time and how the time templates and subs tie in to the mix. We started by going over some light brainstorming and where the need for elements of time came from. Here are a few of the earlier brainstorming links:

Original brainstorming for elements of time - over 150 things we wanted it to do - date of February 2011 - https://data0.adilas.biz/top_secret/time_web_gallery.cfm?corp=371&id=2181

Brainstorming on types of time and extra functions or add-on's of time - date of February 2011 - https://data0.adilas.biz/top_secret/time_web_gallery.cfm?corp=371&id=2184

More from February 2011 (just that month) - original brainstorming for elements of time

We then went in and did lots of work with the time templates and how they act and interact with different pieces of the puzzle. Tons of potential. Lots of custom options. Lots of options out of the box (ready to go right now), and tons more that could be made available (say a round 2 of elements of time).

There was quite a bit of talk about how time and time management and general management are what fills the gap between operations and accounting. Lots and lots of drawing. Cory actually recorded the session. I'm not sure if she is going to make it available, but lots of potential inside of elements of time and what that section offers. As a fun side note, we talked about having a virtual chemistry set and being able to create and make tons of things with the raw elements and chemicals. Elements of time is somewhat like that right now.

I joined but my appointment didn't show up. Steve and Cory were working on projects and doing quotes. I was rolling back some new code into the older version of the same code to help fix a bug. Emails and light tech support.

Our earlier meeting ran over. Once Cory had a chance, we went over projects and quotes and what not. One of the topics brought up was testing and pushing code. We are constantly deploying new code, pushing things up, reviewing things, and making changes. It happens all of the time.

The question and/or topic was - what are the processes and protocol for doing those changes? When should they happen? And what communications should be in place either before or after new code is pushed? That gets kinda tough and we didn't have any set in stone answers. It kinda depends on what is needed, wanted, tested, how deep, how wide, and how much each project affects the core pages and/or core logic. We chatted about some ideas and options but no firm concrete decisions were made. Lots of variables.

Steve really wants to pitch some of the VPS (virtual private server) stuff to our clients. He had some questions along those lines.

I met with my daughter Aspen to go over some of the crazy stuff that is going on in my life, at adilas, and just in general. I'm feeling squeezed, stretched, burned out, and overloaded. This little exercise was very good and helped me put some thoughts and emotions into writing and on paper. It didn't automatically fix them, but I really feel like it helped. We bounced all over the place, but I wanted to record them for history sake. Sometimes we try to make everything smell all rosy when in reality, it can be very hard. 

We started out with - what do you do in a day? Then a week? Then a month? What are the pre-set things that happen all the time? Lots of good questions. This lead into us going over a rough schedule and talking about time and where it gets used and called for. These notes may be all over the place, but the general gist is there. Also, I did upload the scans of her notes - good meeting.

- Days off aren't really days offs, especially lately.

- Emotions: overloaded, stretched, no in the zone time, efficiency, so many transitions, nothing seems to end.

- Lots of my time gets taken up or scheduled by others. I have allowed that as a way to help the bigger picture. What do I do in the spare moments? 20-50 emails a day, 5-10 aren't that important, the rest need replies and/or action. I record notes from every meeting. I do enjoy this, but it does take time. Other times I have to track down bugs, help with servers, do maintenance, or do code sign off. Many of these are unscheduled and just expected, even if my normal schedule is full.

- The dreaded transitions - there is a transition between getting into a project, doing the project, and cleaning up or pulling out of a project. I have to switch gears all the time. You never really get deep into a zone. It is all surface stuff and transitions in/out and light doing. You don't feel super efficient or productive.

- Some of the notes that we take have some really good stuff in them. We go so fast, we hardly ever get to go back to them. If truth be told, there is a virtual gold mine in some of the notes, ideas, brainstorming, and documentation that we have gathered and/or have at our disposal. I would love to go back and learn from those things. It really is a gold mine.

- There is a pay disconnect. This exists not only for myself but also for Steve and others. We get paid about 1/3 of normal rates and wages. There is no incentive for working harder. The harder we work, the more gets piled on us. It's like digging in sand, you take some out and it just fills back in. I'm not sure of the answer, but there is a pay disconnect.

- Here are some of the tasks that I do: record notes, fix bugs, work on emergencies, servers and FTP stuff, databases, maintenance, code sign-off, planning, meetings, training, pay bills, emails, text and phone calls, decision making, consulting, code work, projects, graphics, helping others with their projects, being a cheerleader, helping to share the vision of where we are headed, quoting projects with Cory and Steve, coming up with requirements, writing new content (sales, tech support, adilas university stuff). Business meetings, advising, sounding board, talking, interviewing, customer tech support, client meetings, organize events, day dreaming, and helping the developers and designers with their projects.

- I kinda feel like I've been taken advantage of... there is a huge vacuum that needs to be filled. Way more work than any one person could possibly do. I'm willing to help but I feel that I get sucked in and loaded up because I'm willing to do it. Over time, that becomes a problem and adds stress, anxiety, and burnout. We've got to share the load.

- Some of these things won't go away and that's fine. The biggest problem is time. If you don't have time to do these things, they build up and create almost insurmountable barriers. You still have to do them, but it feels like there is no time. Problems begin to become excuses. That is at least how it begins to feel.

- Here are a few of the things that add stress (no specific order): demands, required but unscheduled tasks, multiple servers, bugs, maintenance (monotonous), transitions lessen productivity, willing to help but getting taken advantage of, vacuum, independents and lack of stability, finances and bootstrapping (fun for awhile but not for 10-20 years of that), no budgets, changing finances and funding, everything is just in time, soo much potential - it clouds your focus, and issues with clients and business verticals (say medical cannabis or other business verticals).

- Towards the end of the meeting, Aspen was asking me about plans and the future... I'm not sure what it will be... but I'd really like it to head in this direction. Going from dreams to goals to reality, getting a great core team going and in place, be able to divide and conquer, be able to focus more, have a positive outlook (vs being somewhat depressed or down), making smart investments in people and products, get the servers stabilized and snappy, eventually do a full product rewrite, and go from a transitional system (current model) into more of an aggregated or summarized type system. I don't have to build the whole thing, I just want to help plan it and teach it and share the vision of where we are headed. Lots of good options.

Going over quotes and projects. We are getting better and better at this. Good progress.

Meeting with Molly to go over some custom gram trackers. She has found a small bug between the restore to cart (quote back into the cart) and the custom gram trackers. We took some notes and will do some research on that. Towards the end of the call, there was a lot of talk about API sockets, WordPress, and Molly's new product that crosses adilas with Woo commerce.

Meeting with Cory, Steve, and Spencer. Steve came in a little bit late, so we started out just doing some quotes. Once Steve got on, we moved over to Spencer's stuff and looked at his responsive - one-pager - cart project. Also, Spencer told us that he would be interested in working more with us on internal Adobe ColdFusion projects. That is really good news and we are excited about that.

See attached for the mobile ready responsive cart stuff. I didn't get all of the pieces, but enough to show the proof of concept. After that meeting finished up, Steve, Cory, and I talked about other projects and things that are on the radar (up and coming pieces). We also talked about the developers and who is going to work on each project.

Cory,

Thanks for the extra information!

We are aware of the intermittent 500/503 errors that you are experiencing. Our technology team has also identified the issue causing this error. We expect a resolution shortly and will follow up once we have confirmation that the issue is fully resolved. 

​

In the meantime, please retry any transaction that receives a 500/503 response until this issue is resolved.

Thank you so much, and reference ticket #446893 for your records.

Have a good day,

 

Andrew Magnemi

API Team

Metrc, LLC

Your ticket number is 446893

Great little meeting with Jonathan Wells. We had Steve, Cory, Jonathan, and myself on the meeting. Cory was only able to stay for the first little bit. The main subject was dealing with a dashboard of sorts and mock-ups and samples in the fracture interface (future project for adilas).

Super cool mock-ups, tons of potential. We are going to be pitching some of these mock-ups to current and perspective clients. See attached for a number of screenshots.

Some other topics that we discussed are: investments, prototypes, reverse shopping carts (brining products into the system), global master lists, virtual catalogs and being able to copy values from the catalogs, predictive buying and selling trends, thresholds with maxes and mins, and other topics. Good stuff.

Cory showed me a random math error between the original price, the taxes, and the rounding error. Pretty deep. I took some notes and then logged in and tried it. I worked for awhile on doing manual calculations and checking out the different pieces. Lots of notes. Cory was on for the first 20+ minutes, then I was just working on it on my own. I made some progress, but no solution yet.

Bryan had some questions about application scope variables vs normal page scope variables. We got things fixed and he headed on his way. After that, I returned to the math bug that Cory showed me earlier today.

Towards the end of the day, got a call from Russell. He was saying thank you to me for helping to pioneer some of the original pieces of adilas. We all know that they need to keep progressing, but it was nice to hear a thank you every once in awhile.

Zoom with Hypur to see about adding to the e-commerce payments allowed

Going over quote and projects. One of them was dealing with a client's request to delete some data due to the sell of a company and the person wanting their old data but not the new owner's data. We talked about options of physically deleting the data, voiding out the data, or virtually flipping the data to a different corporation where nobody would see it or touch it. Pros and cons and we will get back with the client.

The other topics were dealing with new and custom reports. Lots of requests for daily breakdown and better grouping of the data vs line by line or invoice by invoice. Basically a small call out for better aggregated data and reporting. The data is all there, it just makes it hard if you have to pull multiple reports to get it. 

Great little meeting. We met with John and talked about a bunch of different options. Brandon has some notes from the meeting. We asked about his current experience with doing adilas development, where he wants to go, what he would like to do, etc. Fun meeting. We determined that he would like to work under Russell and be on that small developer team. He anticipates that he could have up to 10 hours a week to help with code, backend, frontend, and UI/UX type projects. Sounds good to us and we'll keep moving forward.

Talking about project management, custom reports, custom links and buttons to those reports, and communication channels. Some of our main resources are time, funding, and talent/skills.

Both Cory and Russell were throwing ideas back and forth. Good conversations. Light show and tell about who's on what and what is happening. Both Cory and Russell were talking about setting up a set weekly meeting.

Lots of talks about new data tables and functionality that is both wanted and needed. Big data and huge amounts of records... trying to guide our users to the best tools for the job. Helping to ask them questions and then solve those options. Definite flavor of aggregated data and quick summaries and counts.

Our clients really want to be able to experience their own data in their own way.

Big data is big data... If you are viewing things on a computer or a phone, you still need to scroll. How can we help with that process. We were talking about sticky columns, sticky column headings, smooth scrolling, quick access to filters and sorts, and mobile responsive ideas, options and things. Freeze panes, panels, special windows, etc.

Some people don't like change... but some people really do like change and it is exciting. We may need to play both sides of that. Surprises and forced changes sometimes come across the wrong way. It all comes back to settings. We will try to provide as much backward compatibility but still help push the market and the experience on and on.

There were also talks about permissions, levels, and what data gets provided for each role and/or level. Soo many needs and everybody needs something different. All part of the game.

We even got into some look and feel concepts and where we want to go. There was also some talk about scheduling some of the releases of the new products and features.

Steve and I were the only ones on the morning meeting this morning. We started out just doing our own things and working on small projects. After a little bit, we ended up talking about some of the challenged of doing custom code verses doing more specific and/or rigid specs. We have a lot of concepts and dreams that play into what we do. That is really hard for certain developers (black and white thinkers) to grasp. We sometimes code to the flexibility and potential of a project vs the exact need or output. We like that, but it does make it difficult at time.

This whole conversation started due to a report that a developer called me yesterday and said that he had decided to take a certain project in a different way than what was planned. Originally we had proposed three options and were leaning towards options number three. Unbeknownst to me and the other developer, Steve and Cory had quoted a few other projects based on the fact that certain prep pieces would be in place from this other project. To us, the other developer and I, we could go any direction that we wanted (we had multiple options in front of us). We didn't know about the other plans. This conversation between Steve and I got us talking about direction and vision and who is managing all of this... it gets pretty deep, pretty quick.

We talked about all of the different phases and how things either need to and should flow through certain processes. We talked about R&D, look and feel, mock-ups, project management, wire-ups, custom code, database design, servers and deployment. It gets pretty deep.

As a side note, one of my new emails was email 4 for the Star Wars - adilas ecommerce email campaign. I have copied in some screenshots from the email. Once again, both Chuck and Marisa are having fun.

Meeting and going over Cory's tick list. This included questions on projects, update reports, new projects, and quotes. She is doing a great job. Here are a few notes that I wrote down during the meeting. Just trying to record things.

- On add/edit parts (general inventory items), we may not want to allow updates on part categories. That could have lots of cause and effects - both upstream and downstream

- Currently there is a duplicate check error message on certain payables sections. That message is good and well, but we may need to move it to the end of the process. We had some reports where that error message (even through it is good) stopped another process from completing correctly. We may need to just delay that message until the end of the process vs as soon as it is encountered.

- We also spent some time talking about projects and which ones are deep, shallow, or somewhere in the middle.

Review of projects on a Zoom meeting

Going over Cory's tick list. She was asking questions, following up on projects, checking on quotes and funding and doing what she does. Great stuff.

Going over different projects and quotes. Steve and Cory do most of the stuff. I help where needed. They are doing a great job.

Emails and FTP (file transfer protocol) stuff for new servers. Wayne has been busy and will be moving the remaining clients from the old data 2 to a new VPS server. That will happen tomorrow morning. Doing some prep work stuff to get things setup.

Quotes and projects - touching base on both new and old projects. Reports, follow-up's, updates, and assignments.

Eric popped in and reported on some of his projects. He left and then came back later on to show all of us a demo of his wholesale cross corp transfer stuff and how that all plays in.

Here are a couple of other topics that kept poking their heads out...

- Custom and hardcoded projects leading into more and more data driven settings - pealing back the layers and making things become more standardized by adding in data driven settings vs strict hardcoding or one-off's.

- We have to keep looking down stream... cause and effects and how that affects things - systems thinking

Both Cory and Bryan saved the day. Both of them knew a lot about cross corp stuff and really helped to steer the discussion.  The main topic was cross corp invoices to PO, the processes, the tricks, and the underlying permissions and access points. Good meeting. We did record it but I didn't think that it was needed to publish it. 8 people on the meeting getting training and participating.

Going over projects, quotes, and questions. Cory comes to each meeting with a list of questions and we just start down them and chat were needed, point things in a certain direction, and answer questions that she has. Both Steve and I respond as needed.

Towards the end of the meeting, Steve needed me to merge in a few files.

Talking about cross corp transactions - invoice to PO - there ended up being 6 of us on the meeting.

Cory and Todd were talking about Arizona vs Florida and some of the back history from the different corporations.

Most of the questions were dealing with Arizona and getting their cross corp invoices to PO setup correctly. There was talk of random data, older or inaccurate data, inactive items, checking core pieces (our side and deep code checks), and also allowing for custom black box extensions and options. We ended up with a few to do list items on both the client side and on the adilas side. Cory will be coordinating those pieces. Good meeting and making progress.

Weekly check in with Alan. He reported on some of the projects that he is working on and progress in other areas. Pretty short but making progress. He was going to report directly to Cory as well.

As of 4/12/21: 4338.45 + 1000 from Brandon?

paid 2600 +1500= $4100 so far. Will need to bill again by the end

10/27/2020: Bryan needs to spend no more than 2 hours looking into this project. Dig around and make sure this is correct. Make a scratch file- does this work? If so, then Bryan will meet with Brandon to move forward. *May need hardware to complete.

10/19/20: $200 spent by Bryan. $300 by Alan. $200 by Cory= $700 total (on the wrong project)

9/24/2020: New merchant processing. Starting piece and database piece.

***Please make sure you look at their documentation. You should start with a blank scratch page so you can build this thing to connect to the gateway. This is the first milestone. Please get sign off with Brandon before moving on with the project. If you have any questions, please get with Brandon before starting.

Merchant types is the name of the table.

Name it, create a path, where do we go to get their gateway? This usually holds some sort of url path they provide in their documentation. 

Database update needs to be done for this script.

Did a similar one here: update_20140311.cfm (this was for paypal)

Not running like 3rd party solution. Run it like a normal merchant processor.

The next portion is the admin portion- called merchant account settings. Here is url where this starts:

Web link - merchant_home.cfm - where it starts or we do a new assignments

The next page requires a password to get into (you may have been here before):

Web link - add_edit_merchant_accounts.cfm?mode=add&id=new&corp=0&name=new - requires a password

Text Brandon if you need it.

Web link - help.cfm?id=347&pwd=merchant - need to update this help file so admin users know how to proceed.

Then you need to test. You will need to change the parameters:

Web link - test_merchant_settings.cfm?id=67&corp=263&name=000%20Office - this is the account setup and test page... basically a quick ping. This link comes off of the merchant_home.cfm page

Go to these pages and search for USAePay per page. Use them as a handrail so you can see all the pages you need to touch. 

shop/web_payments_action.cfm
 
shop/web_submit_cart_final_invoice.cfm
 
top_secret/cfc/cart_2.cfc
 
top_secret/cfc/Services/MerchantCustomerServices.cfc ?? (not sure)
 
top_secret/cfc/Services/UsaepayService.cfc ?? (not sure)
 
top_secret/secure/add_cart_payment.cfm
 
top_secret/secure/add_payment.cfm
 
top_secret/secure/merchant_processing.cfm
 
top_secret/secure/process_payment_action.cfm
 
top_secret/secure/test_merchant_settings.cfm
 
top_secret/secure/view_transaction.cfm
 
top_secret/secure/void_prep_transaction.cfm
 
top_secret/secure/void_transaction.cfm
 
top_secret/secure/void_transaction_multi.cfm

6/25/2020: see quote for details

Cory joined us to go over projects. However, instead of going over new projects, we somewhat extended our talks on servers, code branches, and flow processes. Wayne, Steve, and Cory were able to talk about how code flow and processes do and will affect project management. Wayne was leading the discussion and mostly interacting with Cory and Steve. Lots of talk about testing, project branches, and other project management type decisions.

There was also some talk about using bit bucket issues and/or Jira issues to track bugs and small tweaks that were needed. This is another small piece of project management to help with bugs, issues, and things that aren't really full projects (smaller changes that are needed).

Cory, Steve, and I rescheduled for our normal meeting later today.

Cory, Steve, and I took up the first hour going over quotes and projects. We were going to meet earlier, but we had a different meeting that went over. Most of the session was lead by Cory asking questions and going through her list. She helps keep us on task.

Paying bills and recording info and pushing up scans for documentation for the bills and expense/receipts.

Cory joined us and we went over some existing projects, questions, and quotes. She followed up on a few things and then about half way through things, she and Steve jumped into more quotes and circling through different projects.

Kelly, Steve, and Wayne were talking about test driven design. There ended up being 7 people on the morning meeting call. The first 45 minutes were mostly Kelly, Wayne, Steve, Cory, and myself. The other guys waited until the end. Here are a few of the topics:

- What is important to the clients in their interfaces? Small disconnect between what is possible, what is available, and how hard/easy is it to use. Also, what if the client doesn't know that a certain function and/or feature is even an option? Education, user interfaces, configuration, training, speed, and tasks at hand.

- Light talked about some of the fracture concepts such as being able to turn everything fully on/off, show/hide interface pieces, mass settings (corp-specific settings and/or industry-specific settings), make sure those on/off toggle switches cascade through the whole system. The iceberg approach vs the mountain approach. Same amount of data, just the approach and perception changes.

- SOP's for adilas developers, adilas reps, adilas consultants, adilas setup people, etc. SOP is short for standard operating procedures. Getting things more standardized and organized. Be able to scale and do it with style.

- On the cart, currently we have some corp-wide settings that help the user determine what they are searching for (items, flex grid tie-ins, recipe/builds, cart favorite buttons, barcodes (mixed sources), and sub barcodes. As we were talking... Steve had the idea of allowing the corporations to check what they search for and in what order to do the search. Currently, they have to chose one of our drop-down cart quick search settings and we then do the search. Steve was thinking that maybe we let them tell us what to search and in what order to do that search. Great idea. Just wanted to record it. Currently, the corp-wide settings is #37, but that may change. Search for it by looking for "mixed sources".

- Along the same lines as above (cart search and scan options)... what if the corporations could set up what they want and then each user could tweak that on a per user basis, if needed. Just another thought. More preferences and helping the system be more effective in the searches.

- Dustin is interested in doing some of the test driven design stuff. He jumped on and was talking to Wayne and Steve about his interest level.

- Two reoccurring themes keep coming up... They are structure and getting more organized. Interesting.

Cory and I met and chatted about a new bug that some users are seeing with the adilas label builder. We decided that we needed to pass it off to Calvin, the label master. I did record a super small video and it is on my local machine if needed.

On the meeting with Cory and Steve. Cory was brining up questions and going through her to do list. We came across one that dealt with some custom code for a gun club in Arizona. We had moved their code and it was working, all of the sudden, if flipped and reverted back to older code and even some testing variables built in. We decided that it was some of the new code that was flipping existing code to match the master branch. We did some quick work and had to update 5 or so files and make them part of the master branch. Hopefully that will help it.

We had some other talks about custom code and trying to get all of the servers on similar playing fields. That is tough some times. We are trying, more and more, to get everything part of the master code branch, so that we can be more consistent and effective. Light other talks about other projects that are coming down the pipelines. Nothing seems to stand still very long. Constantly moving, every day.