Meeting with both Steve and Alan. Originally we were going to be discussing some ideas on company structure and where things are headed. We got a little bit sidetracked and ended up covering a number of other topics. These are some of the notes.

- We spent some time doing a general catch-up. It's been awhile since we have met as a group.

- Steve was talking about some of his friends that are teachers and have been forced to do online school (prison camp for the teachers). They, the teachers are being watched super closely. They, the teachers, almost feel like it's a prison camp type atmosphere (too tight).

- Advances in software

- Age of our kids, they are growing up

- Business, everyday wondering what you will do today and tomorrow

- Kelly has been pushing hard on us

- Master/slave relationship

- The squeeze - by clients, internal owners/users, and in general. We are feeling it!

- Analogy of a bug vs windshield - which one are we?

- How do we find our way forward? Plan and vision

- Super loose structure - our current plan is very loose

- Wild west thing - our current mode of operation - minimal rules, laws, expectations, or structure

- Getting spread thin

- Alan was talking about teams for projects but no one takes ownership

- Still dealing with teams, they didn't want to be left out but didn't want to really participate

- So much to do but the turnaround is so slow (how quick we can get the projects across the finish line)

- Frustrating/mental health

- Building and not finishing things

- MVP (minimal viable product) - Leaving stuff that is still flapping in the wind

- Whirlwind (bouncing all over)

- Discussions on funding and a centralized office

- Drift & culture

- Deadlines and nobody caring about it

- Why don't you care?

- Managers of Steve's stores - back in the Morning Start Automotive, Inc. days - They really kept things rocking and rolling

- Not taking any crap and rolling some heads if needed

- In the replacement business (people) - When you deal with employees, you tend to be in the replacement business (from past expierence)

- Reviewing peoples work and making sure that people are on task

- How big can you get before it implodes on itself? Experimenting...

- Managers and assistant managers

- Employees and workman's comp

- Payments, lawsuits, HR stuff, discrimination - more employee/employer stuff

- Filling in the gaps

- Start with a manager

- Manual of what your duties are - put it in writing

- Defining roles

- Part-time or variable working schedules

- Part-timer's may end up costing you money

- Scheduling and who is working when

- Missing the employee/manager piece

- Independent contractors and putting requirements on them

- We are all part owners but what does that mean?

- Alan had some questions like - Co-owners and having to pay to be paid? How does that work. Basically, we had to pay money to become a co-owner and then we get paid by the company for doing work. Just trying to figure things out.

- How does joint ownership work?

- Defining responsibilities

- Who wants that management position?

- We (humans) know right from wrong

- Too much oversight or pampering

- Learning curve

- Moving on

- You could always get someone better - or not - That's a variable

- We can't hire people that need help all the time

- Avoiding things

- We have all been trying really hard

- Good guy/bad guy and letting people go

- Fitting virtues to the jobs that they can do

- Efficiency

- 1 person can manage 5 or less people

- Are our people remote or local

- Going over some possible structure options

- Getting the managers setup

- Being able to crisscross over departments (some flexibility)

- Each department does their own R&D

- Able to switch things up (bring new life)

- We have so much stuff that our clients could use but we don't do the client retention stuff (letting them know about stuff like gift cards, loyalty points, new carts, etc.)

- Each department could use a programmer

- On purpose, rotate people around

- Bare bones - What do we need, right this minute?

Meeting with Cory and Shari O. over a Zoom session. We were looking into an issue with one of our client's balance sheet and some gift card transactions. We had to update the created date/time on the corp special account transactions for some gift cards that were partially done in the old way and then converted to the new way. As a side note, we may need to allow that date/time field to be editable. I had to do it from the background. That might be nice to have that as a standard feature.

We talked about the discount engine project and came up with a small plan for going forward. The new plan involves a database change, retrofitting the old discount engine code to use the new database changes, then working on the new discount engine code. Ideally, we get the database piece done and then allow our users to pick if they want to use the old or the new (for a while). When ready, we fully transition to the new code base. We also covered some other questions and what not.

Eric and I were looking at the auto deposit gift card payments update. Merged and pushed up new code. Ran the update on all servers. The new code will handle all auto deposits going forward.

Merging and pushing up code with Eric. After the initial work, we spent some time talking about data modeling. Here are some of my notes.

- Eric would love to do some more data modeling and taking things into consideration and making a plan. He used to do this for other companies that he has worked with and for. Great resource. We could really use his help with adilas lite or fracture. This was like a mini database and data modeling lesson of sorts. I was loving it and scribbling down notes as quickly as I could. Fun stuff.

- We talked about flex grid tie-ins, flex attributes, and parent attributes. Basically, things that he sees that we do that might be built out into more efficient tools and features. Maybe rework some of this and/or combine some of the features.

- What really connects to other things (natural relationships) or what things are forced together (forced or special relationships)? We may want to look at use cases and try to pull out the natural relationships. Then build your application according to those natural relationships. You may still need to allow the forced or special relationships, but those become the edge cases vs the norm.

- If something happens over and over again, this should be part of the core system. Currently, we do use a lot of flex grid tie-ins to help with some of these special cases. As a side note, some of these one-off features are becoming more normal and should have their own logic and tables vs putting everything into the flex grid tie-ins. Great tool for getting things started but eventually, you may need to build out specific tables, logic, and pages. Make it more normalized and more efficient.

- As a note, what does the flex grid do? It allows for one-to-one connections, one-to-many connections, add log notes to anything, tying things together (main id's to sub id's or main id's to other main id's), and it also allows for up to 30 custom fields. Once again, it can be on a one-to-one basis or used and setup as a one-to-many relationship. Here is a help file that has more info on the flex grid tie-ins.

- As a note, the flex grid tie-ins have been the big brother to the things we are trying to build called flex attributes or real in-line database extensions or real in-line extensions for short. Here is a small, older graphic link, of what we are trying to do.

- We talked about the bus to motorcycle project (datasource project or world building project). We are headed to a new model where the corportion id numbers (corp_id) will be left out per database. Each company will have its own database and thus may not need the corp id number. This deals with table names, joins, and data that gets stored in the database.

- Back to the flex attributes and a possible option to build them right into the main entities or high level tables (for the 12 main players or wherever we see fit to put them). This option has some pros and cons. We'll have to work this out. Currently, I'm really leaning towards something similar to what we did for the current flex attributes or parent attributes. Let them build and setup any custom fields that they need. Dynamic relational model. Just for fun, here is the progression - flex grid tie-ins (2009), sub inventory attributes (2015), parent attributes (2016/2017), flex attributes (2020).

- Lots of talk about data modeling and being able to take off the corp_id. Including on the end of corp-specific tables - for example: invoices_53, invoice_payments_53, time_sub_inventory_53, and a slew of others.

- Maybe break the pili or po invoice line items into two different pieces. It was joined together to help with inventory counts over time and across multiple locations. Anyways, we may look at separating those tables into multiple pieces. Super important, make sure to remember and include locations. If just a single location, we could do the architecture differently. However, with multiple locations, it gets a little bit more complicated or tricky. There are tons of other possible options.

- The payee table should be broken up as well. Currently, if a person or entitiy is tied to an expense/receipt, a PO, an inventory item, it lives in the payee table. Payees consist of users, employees, vendors, and special customers that had to get paid out of the system (a copy and convert process). Anyways, we may want to break that table up into users, vendors, and special customers (something like that).

- We talked about a concept called "attribution" and data normalization levels. There are two main types of data models. You have the logical data model and the physical data model. Entities and entities have attributes. Eventually, those entities and attributes get translated into tables, columns, and fields in a database. Often, most attributes become their own database column or field.

- Attributes are different than types.

- We talked about fields like "flag_for_1099", "password", etc. Those are attributes for certain entities. However, does a vendor need a password field, most likely not. Each field or attribute needs to go with the entity that it belongs with. We, at adilas, tend to mix and blend some of the attributes between different entities. In some ways that is fine, but it requires explanations, instructions, and training. It's not as easy to follow without someone to guide you along. Anyways, some good conversations about data normalization stuff. What goes with what and why does it fit like that?

- Make the names readable and logical where possible. We do a pretty good job on that, but there is some randomness in there as well. Along with that, we jumped into talking about a section called special accounts. We are planning on using that for gift cards, loyalty points, in-store credit, vendor credits, punch cards, and other special account transactions where we almost need a bank account style with a rolling number and being able to add/subtract using individual transactions or actions. Anyways, we have a few fields in there called dev_flag_1, dev_flag_2, and dev_flag_3. We use those flexible fields to help with certain parts of the process. In a way, we didn't know what we were going to need, so we added in some flex fields. Well, now, those flex fields have rules and hold certain data that could be its own column or field. However, because we didn't know what would be needed, the fields are somewhat mixed, depending on what is stored there and what kind or type of transaction record is being stored (loyalty points vs gift cards or whatever).

- The conversion trickled over into human reference fields vs computer identifiers, ids, or computer reference fields. They are different and play different roles.

- As you think things out, eventually you have to transform or go through a transformation from logical models to physical models. Eric kept saying that we should be shooting for the third normal form (data modeling and database modeling). Figure out the whole business world (plan it out as best you can) and then build out what you need, based on what you see and/or know.

- We talked about aggregates and data warehousing. I mentioned that I would like to build out tables for yearly per location, quarterly per location, monthly per location, weekly per location, and daily per location. We would also have the underlying transactions or transactional database tables (raw data that holds all of the data). The other tables would be what we transform the transactions into (a form of aggregates or business intelligence).

- Along with aggregates, Eric was saying that sometimes you can watch the database and see what tables, queries, and reports cost the most (data, traffic, or processing time/energy/frequency). You then build out aggregates based on those findings and/or known needs. For us, we've been doing this for long enough, we know a few places that could really help with speed, server load, and provide great BI or business intelligence levels.

- Our system has to go clear out to the full accounting level. That changes how we do certain things. That is awesome! Our sort of end goal is perfect accounting, aggregates, per day, per location, and per category. Some of those (category levels) vary but they have mostly been defined in the current system. That is huge. We have a plan, we have a path. We just want to refine it. Eventually year over year reporting, monthly by month comparisons, real-time data - all data is live and searchable (adilas).

- Snapshots, aggregates, different preset and controlled data levels. We may need current data (tables without any dates - assumption of current counts, values, sums, totals, averages, maxes, mins, etc.) as well as dated or historical data (tables with dates to allow previous or prior lookups and date driven lookbacks).

- What about enterprise mappings and cross-corp stuff? We need to plan that out as well.

- We also need to consider servers, speed, reliability, backups, redundancies, and how deep we going?

- Lastly, Eric could help with a ground up data model. We could pick a topic, break it down, and do a number of smaller sessions vs a big push. That would be too much. Anyways, great meeting and Eric could be a great resource for planning, checking out our decisions, and planning out the best course of action. Good stuff!

Woke up this morning with thoughts of a virtual obstacle course going through my mind. I remember seeing a movie and the extras after the movie talked about how they put the digital characters through an obstacle course to test to see how well their modeling and simulations were doing (Pixar - Monsters Inc.). Once they could virtually run the whole obstacle course, without problem, they were able to go to the next step.

If we are building out the next level of adilas, code name fracture or adilas lite, I was thinking that we could come up with a good virtual obstacle course of sorts. I was thinking, simple database stuff, one-to-many relationships, users, permissions, roles, settings, validation (server-side and client side), add/edit options, getters, setters, reports, pagination, API sockets, coded using frameworks, etc. I know that sounds like a lot, but a mini version of the things that we do all the time.

This could include, form fields, toggle on/off switches, checkboxes, radio buttons, drop-downs, selectors or choosers, date picker, time fields, text fields, numeric fields, buttons, navigation, dynamic CSS (look and feel), mobile ready or mobile responsive designs, etc. Modals, dynamic help files, aliases, show/hide features, and the list keeps going.

This is just for fun but what about using customers and customer logs (simple CRM stuff - customer relationship management) for one of our virtual obstacle courses? Once again, just an idea. The features listed below are in no specific order. This is both funny and not so funny... We can already do all of this right now (using the current adilas ship A application). We want to rebuild this using our new ship B - fracture or adilas lite code and frameworks.

- Settings, navigation options, turn things on/off - do I want to use certain features or options
- Settings, what to call things (naming convention) - corp-wide settings or high level group settings
- Show/hide field level settings (toggle on/off, show/hide, aliases, rules, defaults, sort order, etc.) - data level settings
- Add/edit customer types - way of organizing and grouping customers
- Add/edit main customer functions and pages
- View single customer page (similar to the customer log page)
- Simple search, display, and drill-down into individual customer records
- Advanced search, pick and choose fields, filter, sort, export, and save reports
- Add/edit customer logs (notes and follow-ups per customer) - allow HTML - be able to sanitize as needed for display (say you had some bad or mal formatted HTML - still make it look good)
- Add/edit additional contacts
- Add/edit additional vehicle to customer assignments (currently being worked on for ship A)
- Aggregated data - log counts, contact counts, vehicle counts, total customer counts by type, individual customer info such as total invoices, quotes, elements of time, payments made, purchase history, items bought, etc.
- Full history of all actions - add, edit, modify, etc.
- Dynamic help files
- API sockets to do all of the functions listed above. Things like add/edit main, add/edit logs, add/edit additional contacts, add/edit additional vehicle assignments, view or get back data on all pieces (together and individually), search, show reports, even alter settings. The current API has a visual show and tell page, the real socket (live interface), and printable/searchable documentation.
- Rudimentary training per section - pages, sections, functionality
- Integrated unit testing
- Photo management
- Upload media/content (files)
- Gallery page - (images, scans, photos - up to 100 per customer with captions and show/hide settings)
- Remote login (ecommerce level) to allow a customer to login and update info, see histories invoice and quotes, be able to upload images from ecommerce, build your own statements, and view log notes out in ecommerce
- Quick search options
- Show log notes and follow-ups on a calendar type interface or view
- Search log notes
- Search additional contacts
- Flex grid tie-ins and limited flex grid tie-ins
- Customer flex attributes
- Doesn't have to be right now, but customer tie to invoices, quotes, and time (naturally).
- Barcode label options for simple customer information and customer id numbers
- Validation - server-side and client-side on all forms (add/edit forms and report filters). Base this off of a data dictionary type interface.
- Mobile ready and responsive web format and styling
- Customers can be tied to loyalty points, discounts, and gift cards
- Customer queues
- Email reports and special email options (custom email settings using corp email settings)
- More options on the customer homepage - tons of links and nav to other sections. Reports, management options, and core update and bulk tools.
- More options on the customer log page - including options for custom paperwork and numerous drill-downs to customer-specific searches and filtered reports.

Just being silly, but I'd like to record all of these pieces, in the old way and then compare them to what and how the new way works. Kinda a side by side view. Depending, it may end up being an old way, a semi-new way, and the actual new way. I'm not sure how fast we can jump from old to new. We may need an intermediate or middle ground step.

Sean and Steve were on the meeting talking about the adilas label builder. They would like to create a simple label homepage. They were also talking about other smaller homepages or landing spots. Things such as the gift card homepage, loyalty points homepage, label homepage, and other industry specific homepages.

Eric popped in and we went over gift cards. He had made some small changes. We merged and tested some the pieces. I also talked to Eric about some needs coming down the pipeline for aggregates and deeper business intelligence (BI) levels. Eric was requesting deeper access to real database and SQL prompts on the test server. We talked about scheduled events, creating a manual trigger, and ways of getting at server logs and database logs. We talked about possible workarounds and getting things done.

After Eric left, John and I looked at his GUI page for testing results for page re-works. Small code review session and merged in and pushed up the code to data 0. John went in and did some live testing. This is a new tool to track code review, page sign-off, and who tested what on the new pages. It's a graphical tool to show progress on code/page sign-off. Looks good.

Eric jumped on and we looked at gift card logic. Apparently, a little bit of code changed. We were pretty tight a couple of days ago and then got a note yesterday that a client found an error (only if selling two or more gift cards on a single invoice). We were checking things out and retracing some of the steps and logic. Lots of good back and forth - dialogue. Eric was able to get the same error on his local box so he will take a look at it. After that, John and I were going over some layout stuff.

Checking on auto dates for loyalty points and gift cards. Didn't fix it but thought that I found something. I'll have to circle back around. The problem was dealing with an adjusted date/time or the actual transaction date (especially if back dating an invoice). We need those two dates for different things and processes. It looked like some of the code was using the adjusted date/time for both the effectual (when should it show up) and the historical date (when did it happen). They are different.

Fixing small issues with SG&A costs with Sean. They had setup a system and started running things. They were a little bit too deep and we had to back some things out (going from child inventory to parent inventory - going upstream a bit). Sean and I were working on some back dating of invoices. He was trying to get a balance sheet in order and up to date for a demo. We found a small error, if doing some back dating and got it fixed. Lots of backend database work to get things cleaned up.

We found an issue with both loyalty points and gift cards. If the invoice date was the same as today's date, no problem. If the invoice was back dated, it went through the cart ok but the dates that got stamped were the adjusted date/time stamps based on the user's time zone offset. What we really need is the transaction date to be applied to those invoice payments and any auto clean-up processes behind the scenes. We'll get it all figured out. The way was found it was on purpose doing tons of back dating and then immediately checking the financials and backend accounting reports and records. Good stuff.

Sean and Michael were meeting and talking about gift cards, demos, and sales. I was cascading updates and settings to other servers. John jumped in and helped me with the Herbo server and with my local docker image stuff. The Herbo server just needed to be restarted (Adobe ColdFusion services). We kept running into problems with the docker image stuff. Some of it would run great and other parts would fail or not work correctly. Wayne jumped in and helped me out as well. No major success before the server meeting started (the next meeting).

Bryan checking into the morning meeting with a question or two. We will have to get with him later to get it all figured out. It wasn't a simple fix. Michael and Sean were talking sales and gift card stuff. Cory jumped on and we were talking about scenarios on reports for showing new columns. If we just add them, not all of our clients like that. If we don't add them, other clients want them. You almost can't win.

Our solution will end up being a mix between show/hide checkboxes and saved settings where they could set their own defaults and then still be able to change things on the fly if they want something different. Anyways, we may end up with a mix between normal filters and options and pre-saved settings to help speed things up.

This is our bad, but we have a small lack of communication to our clients. Here's the tricky part, even if we put something out there, they usually don't read it. However, if we do something and don't let them know, they get mad at us as well. Cory and Kelly requested some changes, now we are dealing with the backlash. Some like it, some don't. Sounds like we need more settings.

Recording notes and working on a list of known issues. See top_secret/secure/known_issues.cfm for more information.

For fun, here is a list of some of the items listed on that page. This list originally was started in 2009. Small list of what are known problems. Some of these things are real problems and some are just warnings. Lots of things have changed since then. It may need to be updated, added to, and some of the items removed, that have been patched, fixed, and/or finished.

1. Invoice pmts on account with something different than 0.00 value.


2. Receipt pmts on account with something different than 0.00 value.


3. Reimbursements (rei's) with a bank assigned on the receipt pmt.


4. Invoices with mismatch between main and line items.


5. Deposits with mismatch between main and line items.


6. Receipts with mismatch between main and line items.


7. PO's with mismatch between main and line items.


8. Non verified payments (outstanding deposits and checks).


9. Duplicates ???


10. Dates prior to the corp start date or prior to the bank start date. See bank_balance_helper.cfm page.


11. Dates in the future. see bank_balance_helper.cfm page.


12. Internal invoices that are not marked as paid.


13. Receipt payments that are verified but the main is not verified.


14. Difference between invoices and stock numbers. Created a number of flags to show disconnect.


15. When paying back splits and rei's - what about both (main and subs) being assigned to income statement expense types? This could double things up on the income statement. Defaulted special multi build (rei and splits) to b.s. items for expense types. Still possible problem on original e/r that may get assigned to the balance sheet.


16. Update PO's not tied to a balance sheet item (say a loss account or something).


17. Lien payoff line items on invoice with a 0 cost. The cost and the price should be the same otherwise it puffs up the profit. Did run a report at one time to fix this. Also added code to the cart to match cost and price for lien payoff stuff.


18. PO payments that have the wrong date and thus the po_paid date is wrong. The system was using the current date as the payment date even if the payment was actually made in the past. Small disconnect between actual payment date (e/r payment date and PO paid date).


19. Check auto dates that are actually used in I.S. reports or B.S. reports. Need a way to manually change the auto dates if really being used. Check the unit payments, PO payments, other system made payments. The system seems to be ok, the problem is with dates and being able to either set the date when using or edit the date if defaulted to today's date.


20. Blank expense/receipts (payee_id = 1).


21. Voided items but part of it is still in play or not fully voided. Need to get to a voided list quickly.


22. Denied check requests on payables page.


23. Sales tax problem with work in progress invoices. They don't show up on sales tax reports until they get flipped back to a customer invoice. The problem is that the date (main invoice date - if not moved forward) will not show up on the next month’s tax reports. If this happens, the invoice will fall through the cracks and not be counted for sales tax. Possible option for sales tax, Steve thought that it might be cool to have a point and click interface that we physically pay taxes on certain invoices. That way, they never fall through the cracks and we only pay taxes once we collect the monies. This would also help with a system-maintained b.s. item for accrued sales tax. As an update, Eric was working on a sales tax aggregate project to automate this.


24. Along with sales tax problems, how do we show this on the balance sheet? We need to show collected, paid, and owed values. Once again, Eric has been working on this in his sales tax aggerate project.


25. Payroll has similar problems with regards to what has been paid on, what is still needed, and how do we show this info on the financials.


26. See idea in note book about showing all daily transactions. This is different than a history transaction record. This is what really hit in and out on this day in time according to the system. This is not a known issue but may help with finding issues. Daily monitoring of each account per location, per day, per account or category. This would be awesome.


27. Check for master/slave relationships between date changes. For instance main invoice date compared with invoice line items dates. PO main date with PO line items date.


28. Known issue with PO dates. Do we run off the main PO date or the PO received date? Need to standardize. Leaning towards PO received date.


29. Known issue with location based payables. Both expense/receipts and deposits have the location on the line items not the main. This means that monies could potentially get split between stores which would alter bank balances if only part of the money went in/out of the bank. Known problem here. Solution might be that banks are what they are (full monies in/out) and all sub lines and types are location specific. This could give a false indication as to how much money was available for each location.


30. What about transition invoices that have the main invoice date overlapping the transition (wip/qti) invoice date range. They don't show up anywhere other than on the main invoice homepage which doesn't tie to anything. Added a small fix on view_transition_dates.cfm page. Still need to check for possible mismatches.


31. Disconnect between sold date on units and invoice date. This is a disconnect that is unmonitored and will only show up if pulling a sold report (units) and an invoice report for the same time frame.


32. When backing up the main bank start date, there is a problem with expense payments and deposits that have a date before the main start date and a verified date after the main date. The payment or deposit date is not counted but the verified date is. I had the same problem with Leanna in Poncha and with Drew Middlemiss doing his first bank statement. What a pain. See the bank_balance_helper.cfm report (5/16/09) for small fix. Still a known problem with a starting bank balance not being 0.00.


33. Advanced pmt on invoices (pre-paid). They hit the bank because they were deposited but they also need to show up as a liability to offset the deposit or cash going up. This should be a system maintained item.


34. What about deposit types of other income that are assigned to invoices (double counted)? The default is an invoice hits the p&l and only deposit line items that are under other income and revenue adjustments hit or the p&l.


35. What about bad debt? Do we want to create a system maintained items for this?


36. What about deposits that are made before pmts are posted to invoices. This is not backward compatible.


37. Know disconnect between PO dates. The main PO date is currently used as the main search date. The PO received date is the main b.s. date. We are thinking that the main date may become somewhat of a request date or a age player only. The main date will become the received date with the received flag.


38. If a check request gets approved and assigned to a bank but never written out (bank never sees it), there seems to be a problem. There is also a problem with older check requests and the dates that are set in the background. They are uneditable once the request changes into a normal e/r.


39. Known issue with i.s. (income statement) deposit types. If used, without an invoice, they don't show up on the income statement. They may also be double booked if on an invoice and also recorded as other income or revenue adjustment.


40. What about payments made on a PO before it was received. This could happen with a request PO or a basic PO that has not yet been received.


41. What about inactive (status) on parts and subs. If we have details (activity) but something is inactive, that could cause problems.


42. Levels of inventory - this could deal with parents, subs, and usage details. We may need to check costs, quantities, dates, etc. Sub inventory was added way after 2009 (original date of this report). We may want to spend a whole session just going over sub inventory levels and possible pit falls.


43. Steve, Kelly, Molly, and others have lists of balance sheet challenges and other known issues. Check with them and get their lists.


44. Ecommerce and what plays into the real mix from there - invoices, taxes, costs, prices, discounts, payments, quantities, elements of time, etc. Good questions? Some of this is already figured out, it just needs a little bit of loving.


45. What about aggregates (somewhat new for us and just barely getting rolled out) and making sure things match up. Category (could be whatever), by day, by location - are there update processes that may be ran to keep things up to date. Manual updates, API sockets, watchers and feeders.


46. What about backorders? Steve did a whole section on backorders but I'm not sure if we tied in everything to the balance sheet and P&L. Anyways, may need to circle back around.


47. What about banks that get turned on/off (active/inactive). If we go back in time, we need to know if they were playing.


48. Same is turn with location. If they get turned on/off (active/inactive), we need to know when they were playing. We may need a start and end date and then be able to pull things accordingly, even if the current state or status is inactive.


49. What about cost of goods sold on unlimited or special line items? They should be a $0.00 cost because they are unlimited (like a labor or a service). If a cost is needed, it needs to be allocated through an expense to the COGS section or distributed in a thing called SG&A costs. SG&A (selling, general and administrative expenses - aka accounting for general costs by attributing them to a single unit and thus incorporating the true costs into an item). Basically, you take a normal expense like the electric bill or rent and build it into the individual cost of each unit by unitizing the expenses and virtually spreading a bigger general cost to smaller pieces. Sometimes that type of process (SG&A) is required for certain manufacturing and/or production type products. Basically, they (the IRS) don't allow you to expense off the whole expense (rent, insurance, waste, electric, etc.) as a bulk item. It has to be distributed to each smaller piece. If you do real SG&A, it helps assimilate those costs in smaller percentages and thus passing on a truer look at real costs of goods sold.


50. Anything that is currently marked inactive but may have played a role at some point. This could be locations, banks, part categories, items, vendors, customers, etc. Often, if we make them inactive, they don't get pulled (but maybe we need them at some time in the past).


51. Other special account options such as in-store credits, vendor credits, punch cards, etc. We already have loyalty points and gift cards that use special accounts. Maybe expand on this and allow for custom options or other digital payment accounts or payment solutions.


52. I'd love to map out all of the existing balance sheet and P&L values. Make it more widely known and really put it out there. Right now, it all happens behind the scenes and is kinda like a magic box. I'd love to get it all mapped out and presented to the public. We'll get feedback, refinement, and maybe even some other really good ideas. That's my vote, let's get it all out there in the public eye and public realm.

Sean, Shari O., Michael, John, and I were on the morning meeting. We all checked in and said what we were working on. After that, we all either left or went on mute and worked in the background. Shari O. had to take a tech support call and Sean was waiting to chat with her once she was finished. John had some flex grid tie-in questions. I was doing some research on MVP's and past data that we had recorded for what we wanted in some of our MVP (minimal viable product) stuff.

Here is a short MVP list that I'm thinking about - for the record, we already have some of this, we just need to refine it and make it watertight:

- Special accounts and in-store credit - We already have loyalty points, and round 1 for gift cards. Eventually, we would like to do in-store credit, vendor credits, punch cards, and other ones. The next biggest need is for the in-store credit stuff (in my opinion).

- Round 2 on gift cards - We've been gathering ideas and wants and needs

- Coupons and promotion codes - clear out and through ecommerce and internal shopping carts

- Take Calvin's adilas label builder to the next level - we've already done some planning and prep work there

- Standardize the merchant processing options - We have like 9 different integrations. Here's my next goal, pick one, make sure it flows from start to finish and is super simple. I want to do normal sales, pre-auths, captures, tips, refunds, voids, and reoccurring payments, etc. We have to be able to do manual key (like ecommerce mode), swipe, chip/EMV, and tap to pay hardware integrations. I want to do and offer all of the merchant processing functions. I was thinking that we could do a big push and try to get all hooked up with Datacap and then let them handle all of the different hardware pieces and different merchant gateways. That's my thoughts right now.

- Revamp the internal shopping cart, my cart favorite buttons, and general look and feel. I would love to head towards the fracture project - we have a bunch of R&D on where we want to go with that.

There are tons of other things on my list, but that is my quick MVP list for right now.

Talking with Sean about making a tighter game plan for credit card payments and which merchant account types we will allow and support. Currently, we are super open which is nice, but it also introduces too many variables. We have done integrations with a number of different companies and vendors, but not all. It gets really tricky when new hardware is introduced and chip or EMV requirements are needed. Anyways, we'll work on refining our options and how we approach custom solutions.

Eric joined the meeting and had a few questions. He let me know that there was a problem with the Herbo server (most likely a test branch of code). We also chatted briefly about some other MVP special account options that we would like to get to. We talked about in-store credit, round two on gift cards, coupons, and promotion codes. We also mentioned that we may need to do a full review of what we call our standard merchant processing setup and credit card payment options.

Emails, reviewing some videos on a time formatting bug/complaint on employee timecards. We used to leave it very open and allowed users to enter times as they see fit (for example: 5 pm, 5:30 pm, or 5:30:00 pm). The new time pickers require a certain format and some of our clients have been complaining about the requirements. We had time-pickers for hours and minutes, as well as one that required hours, minutes, and seconds. Basically, they want it back open where they can just quickly slam in a time vs having to comply with specific formats.

Sean and I were talking about parent attributes, ecommerce settings, and making things easier. We then talked about gift cards and quick setup options. Trying to round out corners and speed things up. John jumped in and we talked about some new print style or print CSS stuff. We talked about moving dollar amounts over to the right on printable pages (PO's, invoices, deposits, and expense/receipts). John and I then looked at the chooser page (new code) and made a small tweak to the page. John just barely redid the page to update the look and feel. He also took two chooser pages and combined them together as a single page. Good stuff.

As a side note, I saw an email from Steve about being onsite to help a client and help them with deployment and setup for a couple of days. We gain a lot by being there, on site with the client, seeing workflow, personalities, staff, and general flavor of the company. It's fun, great, helpful, but it does take time and resources. We may have to do more of this to really get things going.

Emails and watching the gift card setup demo from Sean (recording of Sean and some clients). Sean was talking about next round options for gift cards. There is a lot of setup (currently) to get them going. Once that is done, it is pretty quick and slick. There are a few things that are kinda quirky dealing with session stuff and turning things on/off. Instead of it just switching a switch, they had to logout and then back in for it to reset the session. We'll get that fixed. They were talking about physical and virtual cards. Sean was doing a great job showing options. See attached if you want to see the 26 minute clip. The first part is just setup stuff. The last part is using the gift cards and going over options.

Steve had a question on ecommerce redirects. The guys were giving us their sales updates and report (where they are visiting). I showed them some of my new graphics that I have been working on. Michael and Sean showed me a new gift card flyer that they made. See attached. I also did some research on some numbers and sent an email out to Bob with some R&D numbers for expenses.

One huge advantage of our system is the visibility and transparency of who does what inside the system. If we don't have it, we could easily add it. We currently have tons of histories, log notes, historical data, and data broken into tons of small transactions, all being monitored and recorded in the background. That is awesome.

The sales guys are gearing up to help sell gift cards. Sean and Michael have been pitching some of our existing clients to see if they could help them get started, for some practice runs (doing gift cards and gift card setup).

As part of the sales meeting, Steve asked me if I had any sales ideas. We started getting into a small pitch of where I think things need to go. Basically, a pitch of our pitch (parts of the adilas master plan). Nothing is in stone, but I had been thinking about some ideas and options over the weekend. I pitched the idea of maybe selling some percentages of adilas in order to raise some money. We are shooting for 2 million and basing a budget off of that. As we were talking, Steve was liking what he was hearing, but he also had some hard or tough questions. I wrote a number of these questions down in a Word Doc that I have been working on, but some of them dealt with things like client acquisition costs, life expectancy for clients, what do our clients really like and need (MVP stuff), and how can we roll things out in packages or make the process smoother? How do we get paid back? What are the timelines? What is the ROI (return on investment)? And other great questions. Good discussion.

Eventually, Steve had to bail out and jump on another call/meeting. He wanted to stay but had to go. He told us to keep planning things out. Sean, Michael, and I kept going, talking and laying out the basic pieces of the plan and/or pitch. It's not ready yet, but we want to build and make our own pitch deck (files, assets, and a presentation) for potential investors and co-owners.

As we were talking and drawing things out, Sean said that he heard this from one of our clients - "You (meaning adilas) are sitting on a gold mine." - Renee Grossman - "You just need to finish it!" - Meaning we have a great thing going and being developed. It just needs to be taken to the next level and fully get the i's dotted and the t's crossed. This comment of "You've just got to finish it" inspired some more discussion on helping people catch and believe the vision of what we have and where we are going.

I was giving the analogy of the Death Star from Star Wars and how it was mostly a work in progress but it finished enough to give you the vision of what it could be. I realize that not everybody likes Star Wars, but I liked the analogy. We went through a number of drawings, light sketches and talking about options. I had a fun time, and the guys were chiming in and having fun as well. Basically, I was trying to pitch them on the adilas master plan and recruit their help in building it out further.

Just for fun... I added a small Star Wars graphic that I modified on 3/13/23 to this element of time, just for fun. See attached.

 A good discussion between Steve and Sean talking about gift cards and options for training, pitching, and selling just that small feature. Sean has been reaching out to some of our existing clients to see if they need any help setting those things up. I'm hoping to help them out by building a special little page to help new clients just use gift cards. Basically, a mini homepage for quick gift card actions.

Cory joined and was asking about recipe/builds and maybe making some sort of placeholder (variable) recipe/build process. We ended up talking about options to duplicate recipes. At first, we were just talking about the main recipe details and such. It then turned into a full-on duplicate recipe option with options for both main ingredients, outputs, line items, and the main recipe details. Basically, a bulk edit tool for recipes and recipe line items.

Cory and Steve then switched over and were talking about enterprise systems and flow of data from top down and what pieces are done and what ones are not yet done or finished. We are heading in that direction. After that, Cory and Sean were talking about helping out corporations that are doing more and more manufacturing.

Steve and Sean talking about gift cards, quick deployments, referrals, and other client retention stuff. John and I were going over flow and new pages. We got into a discussion about getting valued client feedback and making sure that we are hitting all of the requirements. John was saying that part of his job, as a frontend designer, was to get and decipher user and client feedback. He also said that he would like to talk with and get feedback from stakeholders (adilas co-owners) and others. That is awesome. He was also talking about "requirements engineering" and how that feedback is a vital part of the whole puzzle.

Note for me - as we go forward, maybe let the guys/gals define their own roles and jobs. That might be a good start and then refine things from there. Part of our plan going forward deals with defining roles and tasks better. This may fit right in and takes all of the pressure off of just one person. Just a thought.

John and I were talking about ways to get good feedback on new changes, pages, flow, etc. We also talked a little bit about the adilas cafe and community and how that may be part of our efforts for getting better communication channels. Good stuff.

Sean was showing the guys a new gift card demo site, just for selling and redeeming gift cards. They were talking about trying to build a super simple interface to help pitch some of these smaller features that could be gateways into more of the system. Ideally, it would be awesome if we could build a simple page that could skip the normal start cart and search for an item functions. We could even skip buttons and my cart favorites (custom user-defined buttons with built-in searches) and just code it to be super simple and to the point. Ideally, they would also like to put the gift card amount (remaining amount) in the notes section.

Sean is going to come up with a plan and then email me a mock-up (simple drawing of what he is looking for). It may end up being a cross between a quick add to cart, quick redeem, light invoice stuff, and buttons to search other gift card transactions. We were looking at both the CRM (customer relationship management) page and the quick retail homepage. We will create a small mix between the two of them.

Steve and Sean were talking about how quickly you could setup a company and just sell and redeem gift cards. We may end up pushing this a little bit further. This could be a quick way to get our foot in the door with a company. We did some playing inside of the demo site and even made a few buttons, setup some quick settings and defaults, and ran a few things through the process.

As a note, we have a number of other quick standalone features that our clients can use that don't require a ton of other pieces. Things like the customer queue (even generic placeholders), timeclocks and timecards, quick calendar events, project tracking, ecommerce, etc. As you get into more and more things, the complexity level does go up, but some of those things could almost be sold or marketed as standalone products or pieces. Of course, they are all there (included), they are just smaller pieces of the whole that may be used independently or with minimal training or other setup.

Steve was asking about a possible option for showing buttons (my cart favorite buttons) with choices (like options on a menu - what options or side do you want with that?). We spent a little bit of time talking about how the buttons could include choices or whatever. At some point, we would like to do some buttons that tie right into time and scheduling as well (time buttons). The button is nothing special. The big advantage there is that it can hold the rules and assignments or special selections or settings. Basically, backend code and/or choices or presets get assigned to each button. That's what makes the button so useful.

After Steve left, to jump on a call with Mike, Sean was asking about quick setup options for things that we do all of the time. I mentioned that we could easily setup prep scripts or special code to help do certain things and/or configuration steps. Say you have a process that would require you to do a certain number of steps (say 10 or 50 or whatever). If you created a quick prep script, you could click one button and then have the system do all of those steps (5, 10, 50, 100 steps) all in the background. Especially if it is the same thing over and over again. It could really speed some things up. This would be a great addition for our fracture project, going forward. Quick settings, quick setups, quick default, and industry specific prep scripts. That would be really cool.

At the end of the meeting, John and I spent some time looking over a page to help split an expense/receipt between locations. This is something like an insurance bill or a bill that needs to be split by percentages between locations. John is working on taking older pages and updating the look and feel. It's looking good. He has permission to merge that page into the master code branch.

Small code changes to help with session gift card settings and gift card objects when switching between corporations. Light testing and pushing up new files.

Emails and researching a different bug on gift card payments. I ended up just doing some looking around. Not sure where to go, based on the new stuff and newer flow processes. I know the old way, super well. But some of the new stuff is still kinda fuzzy for me. I may need to get with either Eric or Wayne to get some clarification. I made some other notes for when we meet that will allow me to get back to what I was looking at.

Just Steve and Sean were on the meeting with me this morning. By 9:30 am, both had bailed out to do different things. We were doing some quick updates and going over things before they bailed out. Here are some of my quick scribbles (notes):

- Gathering ideas from different people. Including new people who are already influenced by existing adilas theory and designs.

- The value of education

- Talking about options for selling shares, percentages, and maybe going public with adilas in order to raise funds for projects that we want to do and pursue. It's all about the connections.

- Steve was talking about the drive to make more money that is shared by most business owners and entrepreneurs.

- Selling adilas to fill in small parts of the business as fill-in pieces. Not piecemeal but selling certain tools and features to help round out other businesses, models, or software packages. For example: Say someone just needs ecommerce, online ordering, scheduling, timecards, or even things like gift cards. We pitch it, get them going on what they need and hopefully they like it and want to expand to other parts and pieces. This is an older saying from Russell Moore back in 4/13/16, "Adilas is a great companion software package for any business!".

- We are still seeing a future need for in-store credit and being able to apply those liabilities to outstanding invoices. You can do it right now, but you have to do everything manually. We would really like to automate that whole process and make it super easy and smooth. This will end up being another one of the special accounts type functions. Not everybody gets it, only certain people or customers need it, and it is basically a reverse account where you overpay and then get to use that value to pay for other things. Very similar to gift cards. As a matter of fact, you could issue a gift card for the overage and then let them use it at will as a payment. Once again, in-store credits will play along with other special accounts such as gift cards, gift certificates, loyalty points, punch cards, lunch cards, vendor credits, and other special account options.

- We got into some talks about deployment as a bottleneck and how training and education could help solve some of that pressure and bottlenecks. There is also a huge need to keep educating and providing learning for new functionality that keeps getting developed. That's an ongoing process.

- Small discussions about keeping up some of the demo sites and making them nice and clean. There is a huge value in nice, clean, data.

After Steve and Sean left, I sent the rest of the time looking over emails and looking into a possible bug on invoices and the new bigger alternate logos for PDF invoices (some new invoice settings).

Morning sales meeting. The guys wanted to see a demo on the new gift cards. We had 6 guys on the meeting, and we spent 45 minutes going over things and showing the ins and outs of all of the new gift card stuff. We were bouncing between carts, customers, invoices, P&L reports, and balance sheet liabilities. Good stuff.

The rest of the meeting was a small standup meeting where the guys were reporting on sales activity, leads, and companies that they have been following up with. Sean was really happy that the entry cost has been lowered a bit. That really helps the smaller businesses.

Debugging session with Eric. We were looking into a bug on credit card processing and how that relates to the new gift card code that we pushed up. Looking into the flow and process of our existing merchant processing code. We got on a call with Missy from McCorvey's Pro Shop - bowling world - and chatted with her about for a bit. She gave us some info and we went into the system and looked around. We then ran a number of pages through a code diff (what is different per page) and actually found a small typo error. We fixed it, made the changes, and pushed up new code. Hopefully that will fix the problem as we couldn't duplicate it. We checked a bunch of shopping cart checkout pages and credit card processing pages. Everything else seemed to be working fine.

Eric and I working on wave 3 of the gift cards project. We broke a huge project down into 3 smaller waves to help relieve the dependencies that were built into the project. Lot of application-level stuff, session stuff, and cached server objects and views. Testing and reviewing code. We had to fix some merge conflicts. This branch (the new code) was started months and months ago. That sometimes makes for a number of merge conflicts. We also spent some time picking up missed files and rebuilding the needed assets. We had had some code repository issues with this branch. Good work session.

Eric and I doing some gift card project planning and testing. We were splitting up a code branch to do a second merge and release wave. Testing on my local branch. Lots of back and forth with Eric. Merged in the second branch and then talked about group dynamics and lessons learned. Making progress. Hoping for one more branch tomorrow, and then it will be fully up and deployed on the master branch.

Eric and I working on the gift card project. We had it all ready back around Thanksgiving time but we've had a hard time getting it fully integrated. Lots of variables and things (application level changes) keep happening all around us. We are making progress.

Today, we ended up having to roll back some commits and try to get his code branch back up to date. Somehow it got all mixed up. While Eric was rebooting his computer, John and I talked about an error message and tracking down a bug in the bank transfer code. After Eric's machine was back up, we spent a bunch of time trying to reset his branch. Sort of a salvage type mission and session. Thank goodness for Bit Bucket and the code repository. We had to go through a number of sub commits and try to reconstruct the main gift card branch.

Morning meeting with all of the guys. Everyone was reporting in and giving updates. I gave an update about using the snow owl theme headers and close to 40 custom navigation links that are available to the whole user base, per corporation. We talked about an update on gift cards. Eric and I are working on that project and trying to roll things out in waves.

We switched over to talking about ecommerce and gaining more control via settings and options. Steve was commenting to Danny about tiered pricing out in ecommerce land. There are some new options coming and we'll take the existing pieces and just keep making them better. As the discussion progresses, we were talking about our general approach and how diverse our user base is. Because of that, we have a ton of tools that some clients may never want or use. In that same breath, we can also offer things to our clients that they never would have gotten if they had a specific software package that only did one specific thing.

The guys were talking about problem solving and how we excel at that. Steve was talking about a shed analogy and how you can have a ton of different tools in the shed, but you only pull out what you need for a specific project and/or task. That's adilas, in a nutshell. Just for fun, Danny was talking about the TV show MacGyver or MacGyvering - making it work with what I have. We love the challenge of trying to make the glove fit. We have tons of tools and features that we can mix and blend to make it happen. Good stuff.

Eric and I were pushing up files for wave one of the gift card project. John and Cory are going over the discount engine and talking about ways to do live testing with good data, without hurting anyone's live data. As a wish list, the developers would really like a way to get good clean data (basically a new database or new data) at will. Some of the data that they end up with gets muddy, due to testing, demos, and bug fixes. Sometimes they only complete a part of the process. It sure would be nice to be able to clean that data or database up with a click of a button. Basically, a restore to point x or y (whatever or even an ongoing good and clean data point).

After John and Cory got finished, Eric and pushed up some more code for wave one. The goal was to get some of the dependencies out of the way without leaning on them (using them). That way, when we push up the next wave, those other dependencies will allready be there in place.

Checking on a list of parked domain names. I reported back to the guys about how my Docker server install was going. No problems on my local development environment. We talked about other server level projects such as: inventory snapshots, email formatting, gift cards, dependencies, and sales tax aggregates. We keep making small little tweaks. We also checked on a number of other small projects.

Eric popped in and he and Wayne were talking about triggers and stored procedures. They were looking at the database entries and what not. As part of the meeting, they (Wayne and Eric) were physically looking deep in the database. Eric is going to circle back around and do some more checking on his side of things. They were reviewing the stored procedures.

It was kind of fun to watch them view and refresh some of the aggregate data on the fly. Cory was acting as the user (actually doing something inside of adilas), Eric was orchestrating what to do and look for, and Wayne was doing the backend calls and database SQL statements. It was fun to watch, as a fly on the wall.

Eric is going to run some debugging scripts on the data. They are looking for a cause and effect scenario. They were also looking at servers, monitoring processes, and running pages. From what it looks like, they will need to do some further data research and analysis. They are trying to get to the bottom of the data differences between the transactional records and the aggregated data.

As a note, if we can't get with Wayne, John is the backup database admin person. He has access to all of the different servers.

New code with Eric for gift cards. We also decided that we would add the adilas quick search to the classic homepage in the top header as well as all other pages. That was the only page that has/had a built-in quick search, so we didn't think that we needed it in the header as well. We have had requests to put it on all pages, even if it is already there. Some users use the quick search as a primary navigation tool.

Cory joined us and we went through some scenarios and did more testing.

Phone call with Eric. Making a plan for deploying the gift card project. We have already rolled it out a few times but had to pull it back due to some random errors. Our next deployment will be staged or done in waves to get rid of the system dependencies that exist at the application level and the session level.

Work session between Eric, Cory, and I. We were testing and going over gift cards and trying to see if we could push some things up to data 0 for live testing. We looked over code, made some back-ups, and then did some code review. We ended up pulling the code branch onto my local machine and did some testing instead. We found a few problems.

After Cory left, Eric and I made some plans for moving the project forward in smaller pieces. Currently, there are too many system level dependencies and things that deal with the entire application scope variables and values. We are going to push it up in smaller pieces or waves so that the dependencies become less of an issue. It may take a few days (vs a single quick push) but it will make it smoother. Good plan.

John was reporting on some new updates on the department homepage. Eric, Cory, and I were looking at gift cards and scenarios with different settings. We had an internal email bug reported to us and we started looking into it. John was the lead and doing most of the debugging today. Bryan joined us as we were checking things out. Sort of a grouped effort. We spent quite a bit of time looking at the email stuff. We pushed up some new code and John will get with Wayne later today to finish things up. We did what we could for current time. It will need more attention later.

Eric joined the meeting and was touching base on a number of projects. We chatted about gift cards, enterprise catalog or item catalog, and the inventory snapshot project. Small sales meeting. The guys were reporting on efforts and what not. Lots of follow-ups and different communications. We have the best price for the value. Talking about bigger demos and updates. There are lots of little shops out there that need our help.

Shari O. asking questions about a client setup. Steve was showing some stuff from the Herbo proposals. Light research on using Google Meet (online meetings). We currently use GoToMeeting, just looking around.

Cory was talking about projects getting stalled out and how to help push them through the finish line. We were talking about this earlier but she just barely joined at 10 am. Light rehash of some of what we were talking about.

For the server meeting, we allowed Steve to talk to Wayne about emails and how things are going. Wayne was reporting on the gift cards and refactoring some of the cart logic. As soon as he is finished, he will get his code out to different parties to look at and do some testing. Cory and Wayne were doing some planning and scheduling of releases.

We then talked about passing certain branches of code back and forth and who is going to test, merge, and deploy certain things. We are trying to get better at working as a team. Some of the branches need to be strategically placed and tested on certain servers before going live. With that process, it opens up a whole new subset of needs for being able to merge, sync, and reliably deploy and execute code, branches, versions, etc. Currently, we are all pushing up code daily to a code repository using both Git and bit bucket. Wayne is the one who primarily changes which servers are pulling from which branches. Ideally, they all pull from the master branch, but we do tweak that every now and again, based on other projects, testing, requirements, etc. It's a pretty big job.

After that, the topic switched over to differences in display and page outputs. We talked about code differences, data differences, and even things like settings, permissions, and other custom code. It all plays into the mix. Light discussion on how to best help convey or communicate any errors or differences. All of those factors may or may not play in (code, data, settings, permissions, or custom stuff). It can get interesting.

All of the other guys jumped off (Wayne and John) to meet on a different Zoom session. Cory is doing a great job trying to keep up with billing and what not for custom work. At the end, Steve, Cory, and I got on a small work session and chased down a small bug in the dynamic PO labels. It ended up being a blank query for parent item attributes that wasn't populating in the correct spot. Small work session.

Talking with Sean about a cart redo "the guts" and how we are going to refactor things. Going over gift cards and where that project is at. Getting closer, just waiting on the cart logic refactor. Just for fun, Sean and I were talking about the classic look and feel vs the newer snow owl theme and look and feel. The classic is fully done but older. The snow owl theme look and feel is newer but is only partially finished (full page rewrites). Still updating pages and sections. It has more functionality and provides our users with a better overall experience.

Along with those look and feel discussions, we were talking about some what if's... what if we used a super generic (almost black and white) type interface for training (just the basics) and then showed how you could skin it (adding on the look and feel once you know what you are doing). As we were talking about this, Sean said that he has a email that had some client requests on it. I asked him to send it over for review. I would really like to see what the client wish list is.

As a side note, one thing that some of the clients were asking for, which we do, is no transaction fees, they just wanted a flat rate or a flat fee. I thought that was interesting. Basically, don't punish me for doing more transactions. Steve and Sean asked for a demo on the new unique event online scheduling. We ran into a small bug and the demo didn't go very well. It's close, it just needs a little tweaking.

I switched and did a small bug fix out in ecommerce and pushed up some new code.

Spent 15 minutes on a phone call with Eric, going over logic and flow for submit cart and gift cards. Emails, checking on bugs, and general stuff.

As I joined the meeting, Cory was already on there. She invited Alan and we had a good discussion about transitional invoices (QTI stuff - between a quote (Q) and an invoice (I) - thus QTI - quote, transition, invoice).

Cory showed us the problem and then I showed Alan, in code, and we ran a number of simple queries on the live server to look at data. I did lots of drawing to help illustrate what is going on. We talked about things and Alan is going to look at the code and make some changes. Good session.

Right at the end of the meeting, both Wayne and Eric joined the meeting. They are working together on the new gift card stuff. They are both very smart and I'm glad that they can work together. More good progress. Cory and I had to jump off to get on another client meeting. We left them in charge and on the GoToMeeting session.

Looking over code for gift cards. Checking emails. Ended up pushing up some code and ran into a problem (crossing two code branches). Eric joined, Wayne joined, and we ended up rolling things backwards (back to the master branch). We talked about the need for unit testing as well as integration testing. Eric and Wayne were talking about software lifecycles and us maturing as a company. We are getting better and better but still need some improvements.

We could use some internal training on writing tests and how best to make sure that we have good coverage. We have so many different levels of coding skills (junior devs, senior devs, full stack devs, designers, etc.). We got into a big conversation about where certain logic needs to go and how best to handle errors and logic for checking for record counts.

That lead into a conversation about MVC (model, view, controllers) and how we are currently doing some of that but we are also mixing things. For example: We have some of the view and the controller in-line or on the same page. Some of our logic is intermixed with the display vs the business logic. Some of the code is older and some of it is newer. We need to make some plans and then go and head in that direction. Currently, we tend to go in a number of different directions. It gets done, but it looks more like patchwork vs tight, smooth, standardized code. Getting a plan and being united in that rollout, even if we have to do a little bit at a time, would be awesome for our fracture project and plans.

All kinds of random stuff. I logged into our Kabbage account (business funding) and flipped everything over to American Express accounts. They changed hands. Pulled down Eric's gift card branch and spent over an hour going through things and making small tweaks to his code. Light code review. I then got on a phone call with Steve. We were on the phone for well over an hour. We covered a ton of different topics. Most of it was geared towards updates, check-ins on different people and projects, and making plans. Trying to keep things going. It takes time and effort to make the ball go around. Trying to help it along. Good conversation.

Project management stuff. Cory and Steve were going over projects, custom labels, and progress in those areas. We jumped into talking about server issues, email issues, and where are we heading. That lead to a conversation about the lack of education and training. Things keep changing so fast, it makes it hard to keep on education and training aspects of the system.

All three of us started talking about permissions and new permissions. We have a need to help secure up or tighten up who has access to certain settings. We decided that we needed a new master page level setting to help control those page settings. As we talked, we decided that eventually, we may need other settings or be able to assign sub permissions to a user based on their higher up settings. Similar to what we do with the manager's time clock settings. It has to be turned on and then we have a whole other page where an administrator turns on certain departments for the manager. We can see the need for similar type things in a settings admin or master settings mode. Basically, a person gets a main permission (part of the permission list) and then we/they configure what underlying access the users get. This becomes somewhat nested, but really opens up options and granular control of who has access to what and who can do certain things but not do other things. More ways the system is breaking or fracturing into subs or smaller and smaller controllable pieces.

We are getting really close on the gift card stuff for the system. Making plans and trying to see if we can push that new feature out before Thanksgiving. We have wanted this for years and years now. It's kinda fun that it is almost there and within a couple of days of being fully launched.

A couple of different phone calls with Eric to go over cart logic and new updates for his gift card project. As a side note, we sure would love to redesign the shopping cart and turn it all into smaller micro services vs a linear page flow with nested logic. Some of the original cart logic goes back almost 20 years. It's amazing how much things change over time. At the time, it was very well done. By today's standards, we would love to keep tweaking it and making it into much smaller more mobile pieces. I can't even imagine what some software companies are dealing with that started 40 years ago (in the 1980's or 90's). We started in the early 2000's. It very interesting how it keeps changing.

Working with Eric and Cory on gift cards. We were testing and making some last minute decisions. Making plans for how we will roll this new feature out and who is going to be testing it (internal, clients, companies, etc.). After Eric left, Cor and I took a little bit of time and fixed a small error in the daily sales report.

Group session with Cory and Eric, going over gift card logic and testing. We were talking about testing and Eric made the comment - the coder doesn't do the testing... you need someone else to test it. That is really good advice for us. We have been so small, we would play all of the roles, design it, code it, test it, and deploy it. As we are able, we should start sharing the load and getting other views on the code, logic, and flow.

While Eric and Cory were testing scenarios, I was fixing some logic and going through the submit cart page. Small logic tweaks to accommodate the new flow for multi-error messages without a hard stop or hard abort in the code. If one or more things errored out, the rest of the submit cart process would try to finish and then show any errors at the end. I pushed up my changes and Eric will add to them.

Going through logic for showing and hiding gift card data on the P&L and the balance sheet. Lots of talking, discussing, and brainstorming. Eric mostly wanted to get a second opinion on where he is headed. He is almost finished with the new gift cart functionality. Lots of cause and effect type relations.

During the server meeting, Cory and Wayne were reporting on different issues, problem, questions, and talking about changes to sub inventory. Wayne is working on some new changes to help speed things up there. Wayne was also volunteering to help Alan with some elements of time (flow) stuff for production processes.

One of the big topics was the email server. It's kinda old and has been acting up lately. It's turning into one of our top priorities.

We spent some time talking about servers and specs. We have certain pages, like the balance sheet, that cause heavy loads. We really want to get into some preset sums, counts, maxes, mins, and averages - basically, we need aggregated data. We have great transactional data, we just need to keep moving up the chain and create the aggregated data that is date specific. That will allow us to go both forwards and backwards. That is very important, to be able to easily go backwards as well. Making this change to aggregated data will be huge for us in the future. We really need this as part of our fracture project.

We have a project called the inventory snapshot - mini aggregate project that Eric was working on. Once he finishes with his gift card project, we are going to have him jump back on the inventory snapshot project to help with quick inventory quantities.

The last thing that we went over was between John and I. We are working on a smooth hand-off of the discount engine project. Coordinating times and making plans. That is coming along well.

On a Zoom meeting with Eric and Cory. Eric was showing Cory and I around the site and how to use his new gift card stuff. We made a few suggestions, but mostly it was looking great. Going over flow, logic, and other questions. We also spent some time and went through a number of scenarios and demo transactions. Making plans for the next steps and pushing things live. We still have some work to do on the financials but looking really good.

Prep work for Drew at the High Valley Bike Shuttle. Talking with Eric about gift cards and logic. Looking into what it would take to get to the bulk edit parent item's core values. I ended up having to ask Sean. Fixing settings and prepping for ecommerce stuff for the bike shuttle.

Small work session with Eric on gift cards. We were adding in code to help setup the quick search for gift cards.

Eric and I going over progress and questions on the gift card project. We spent some time looking over code that was trying to mix both client-side and server-side logic. We decided to keep them completely separate. Making plans and decisions.

Phone call with Eric talking about gift cards and USAePay accounts. Running ideas and scenarios between ourselves to make sure that we have things covered.

Phone call and then jumping on the GoToMeeting session with Eric. Going over some FORM and URL scope variable stuff for the gift card project.

Phone call with Eric going over questions and flow for the gift card payments and project.

Great meeting with Eric going over his progress and questions on the gift cards and gift certificates. This will be part of special accounts inside of the system (tying into existing pieces and sections). We are planning on doing single corporation gift cards for now. Once we get that done, and if someone needs it, we will tackle cross-corp or multi-corp gift cards. That gets more complicated and we could charge for that and/or those options.

Eric was going over a number of scenarios and use-cases. I loved hearing it. I could tell that he had thought about a number of great scenarios, processes, and even logic level decisions. Checks, balances, validation, flow, pages, permissions, etc. Good stuff. I was really proud of him for that. Basically, try to break it and make it stand on its own.

Part way through the meeting I grabbed the screen and we looked at existing database tables, data, and options. We were drawing and brainstorming on additional ideas. We talked about quick search options, checkout options and flow inside the cart, invoices and payments after the fact, ecommerce integration, and other advanced options. Good meeting. He is well on his way and making great progress. All of this will tie-in and be a part of the special accounts section. We already use customer loyalty points in that section of the system. More things will be coming in future months such as: in-store customer credit, vendor discounts, punch cards, lunch cards, retirement packages or accounts, and other virtual or actual special account. Good stuff.

Meeting with Eric and going over settings and priorities on his current projects. We also talked about backend database triggers, ETL (extract, transform, and load options - data warehousing and internal aggregates). After Eric left, Cory and I were going over other projects. Here are some of the things that we were talking to Eric about.

- Gift cards
- Sales tax aggregation
- Possibly pushing data through API to Weedmaps and Leafly
- Inventory snapshot
- Prescott shooting range - driver license scans

Steve and Sean were touching base on sales. Steve had a few code questions for me dealing with queries and flow. John joined the called and was asking Steve and Sean about prices and options for clients (pricing structure stuff). Eric joined and was asking questions about gift cards and going over different ideas.

This may or may not help, but I went in and found a bunch of older files that we were had started and worked on dealing with special accounts, loyalty points, gift cards, customer in-store credit, vendor discounts, and other special account stuff. See attached.

Emails, recording notes from earlier this week and today. Phone call with Eric going over ideas for gift cards and pushing that project forward. Eric and I also chatted and talked about doing research and project analysis and if a client needs that, that we could charge for that as well. Basically, breaking up estimates and quotes into project analysis and code development (two parts to the whole). He's got a lot of stuff going on right now. Busy, busy!

Meeting with Steve and Cory to go over projects. We talked about a couple of projects for Eric. We talked about gift cards, other special account projects (in-store credit, vendor credits, punch cards, coupons, and gift certificates or gift cards). Another one is the mini aggregate project to handle inventory quantities per location. The other possible project for Eric is getting back to the enterprise item catalog project. All of those have value and would be great add-on's.

The next major subject was projects that Alan is either working on and could work on. He is one of our top developers and is in demand, because he can do so many things. One of the projects that Cory really wants him to work on is the transition invoices out in ecommerce land. They already exits out there, they just need a little bit of loving. He could also help Steve out with some BioTrack production stuff.

Lots of talk about other developers and what they are working on. It is a challenge to coordinate projects and developers. Lots of moving pieces. We also talked briefly about some projects for Bryan. We are still trying to help our clients transition from billing in the old independent way to dealing with Adilas as a team or an entity.

Another subject that came up was the number of hours spent in a training and tech support with our clients. It takes a lot of time and effort. One of the benefits is that we learn a lot along the way. The more we help our clients, the more we learn, and can adapt the tools and features that we have to get the desired outcome. Along those lines, sometimes we (internally) need to be reminded of certain processes and tools that exist that we may not remember or are new to us. For example, all of Steve's new backorder stuff that he developed and managing quotes, orders, PO's, and backorders.

Cory was kinda putting her virtual foot down on certain projects. We are trying to retain our clients but sometimes they get out of line. We talked about preventative maintenance type stuff with our existing clients and helping them along the way. We, as a company, are offering more and more internal service offerings. We used to sub it all out to outside independent sub-contractors. We are trying to make those same offerings, but do it all internally now and helping out in new ways. It makes for a better product and better retention.

Follow-up with USAePay and getting more info on merchant processing stuff. On the phone with Steve talking about all kinds of stuff. Mostly about the multi member LLC and percentage ownership stuff. Steve and I were on the phone for well over an hour and a half. Here are some of my notes... all over the place.

- Trying to get our guys and gals to focus on one thing and getting it all the way finished. From top to bottom. We have a lot of stuff that feels 50-75% done. We want to get it all the way across the finish line. Our goal is to give them a single project so that they can get it all the way finished before moving on. We are hoping that if we extend them some ownership in the company that it will help to motivate them to play the game.

- Need for more news and updates. We also thought that it would be good to do some internal news and updates for our internal staff. That idea came from Steve.

- We need someone who is able to get into some deep JavaScript stuff and really help out there. We have a number of projects that are very heavy in that area and need some loving.

- We chatted about different developers and their skill levels. As a side note, the deeper we get, the more things start breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces. So many interweaving and interlocking pieces. Lots of dependencies and requirements.

- Kelly seems to follow trends very well. It's almost one of her skill sets. In the book, "Who Moved My Cheese", there are two mouse like characters. One is Sniff and the other is Scurry. Kelly seems to have those type of instincts.

- Divesting possible ownership and management options to an outside company. Just playing with options.

- For our internal team, we have been talking about a price of $1,000 per percent of adilas. That is about 1/100 of its actual value. On the open market, 1% would be somewhere between $50,000 to $100,000 at a $10 million dollar valuation.

- Steve was mentioning options for an operating company, a holding company, a management company, and maybe a retirement company. Just talking possible options, down the road.

- There seems to be a huge gap between sales and demos. If we get the demo and get to talk to people and show them what we have, we shine, and they want it. If we can't make it that far, it doesn't go very fast. Kinda interesting but logical.

- We are trying to stir the pot on the sales side of things. We talked about doing a sales sprint, daily sales standup meeting, and getting some of our guys really going and focused there. We really want to manage it properly as well. It is one thing to say go, it is another thing to have a plan, accountability, and be able to measure efforts. We really want to lean on the manage it properly type level.

- As far as sales and travel. We were talking that if they log their miles, we could pay $0.25 per mile. That covers gas and some light wear and tear on the vechiles. We would have them log those miles inside of adilas. Ideally, we would tie that into a general budget for what they are charging us or what we are budgeting for their help.

- We would like our salespeople to stay as local as possible so we don't burn up tons of travel costs. This is at least true for getting started out and getting things up and running.

- One of the goals would be to help the guys and gals be more accountable. Along with that, dealing with sales, we need them to log the contacts, touches, and daily standup meetings. Ideally, we want to record these notes as real-time as possible, while they are fresh in your minds.

- Sales is a game of numbers. The numbers should tell the story.

- I'm going to reach out to Shawn and get his instructions for his sales and contacts that need to be logged into adilas, in the CRM (customer relationship management) section of the site. See attached.

- Both Steve and Sean would be the main contacts for the sales guys. The main adilas morning meeting would have a small standup for sales everyday.

- For me, keep pushing out gift cards as we get them - perks for the guys and gals.

- Steve and I went over some percentages and who was going to be selling what percentages. We made a list on a spreadsheet. Our initial internal offering is going to be 5% from Steve and 5% from Brandon. These will be sales made to us as individuals - checks made out to Brandon or to Steve vs adilas llc. We will come up with a promissory note of sorts to document the sales of those percentages.

- There is huge value in getting in there, out there, doing it and learning from your mistakes and successes. We build and break, we build and break. Don't overthink it! Just keep going!

- When we present our offer to the guys and gals, Steve wants it to be pretty simple. This is the deal. If you want to play, great. If not, here are the options. Keep it as simple as possible.

- In closing, Steve was making some comments on having sufficient money to play and make other plans. Hinting at some other fun things to come... It just keeps going!

The morning meeting started out normally and then sort of morphed into a multi hour long meeting with no real stop or start between the different topics and sections. We started out and Sean was checking in and lightly going over some of the BioTrack API socket questions. We got into a discussion on promises made and client and user expectations and how deep we want to go into those areas. Some of our clients expect an easy button for every possible wish or desire. It just doesn't work like that. Yet those expectations are real and valid based on user requirements and user demands. That puts tons of pressure on us as a software system. There just is no physical way to make it do everything, for every person.

Wayne joined the meeting and the conversation moved over to slow queries, database indexes, record counts, volume of data, and all kinds of other topics. We spent some major time going over potential problems with our flexible "LIKE" searches on the parts homepage (flexible wildcard searches across multiple database fields and columns). We need the flexibility, and we have trained our people to rely on that, but because it is so open, it is causing issues when put under a huge data load (not thousands but millions or multiple millions of records). We can handle quite a bit with no problem. When you really overload it, it starts groaning and squeaking under intense pressure. Technically, that is called scale.

The amount of data that some of our clients are generating and recording is causing a volume or scale issue. We got into deep logic and how we could speed things up if we were able to use indexes, exact searches, and get rid of huge list look-ups (using the SQL IN clause) or super flexible text searches using like commands (SQL LIKE clauses with wildcards). Basically, when doing some of these functions, the databases skip the indexes and end up looping over millions and millions of records. We spent some time talking about a number of possible solutions.

We had a break where Wayne had to go pick up his kid from school. In the meantime, John and I were talking about some of his projects. He was showing me a bunch of stuff that he has on a Jira board for the discount engine. I was kinda getting overwhelmed and depressed. So much stuff to do and manage. Sometimes it feels like it is all over the place and it never ends.

Wayne got back and we flipped back over to database queries possible options to help speed things up and handle a huge scale or a huge load of data. We talked about a combo type approach where we have to include tweaks to the database, code changes, UI and UX (user interface and user experience) changes, and other backend management changes. It may end up being a combo type package or approach to fix some of these problems.

That topic and discussion lead us to talk about prior or earlier decisions that were made years ago. We talked about why certain things were decided upon and implemented. It is very interesting and the story keeps rolling out in front of us. What we have now is a combination of history, situations, decisions, and even future wants and needs. It all mixes together and makes a complex solution. Some of the why and what we did is super important.

Having said that, things keep changing and morphing. We talked about building things for a non-static environment. Dealing with scale (up or down). That lead us to possible daily or real time mini aggregates on quantities and other key points and factors. Basically, ways of summarizing data and getting to more of a business intelligence type level - quick counts, sums, totals, averages, mins, maxes, etc.

Talking about the aggregation processes lead to talks about database triggers, update routines, scheduling, clean-ups, automation, manual checks and overrides, and the list goes on. Along the way, we kept talking about how important the inventory pipeline and tracking the ins and outs is so critical to these values, stats, and numbers. Steve joined us and we got into update functions, methods, table row locking, more manual updates, and reconciliation options to make sure all is well. You basically need the transactions (what happens and when - this is the details or the historical record). You also need the sums or totals (these are the running or current aggregates). These two pieces, transactions and aggregates play different roles.

As part of our discussion, we were looking at one-to-many database table and column relationships and how things are handled currently. It gets deep quickly. We then started talking about breaking shared tables into corp-specific tables and building smaller corp-specific aggregation type tables. This lead us to a small discussion on sizes of tables and when ones are already broken down into corp-specific tables and which ones may be up for review.

On the mini aggregate tables (quick sums, counts, and totals) we could go different ways. Do we want a historical record of the aggregates or do we just want to keep current (now) sums, counts, and totals? If you add historical, you start adding dates and get new records every day (assuming things are changing) or if you skip the dates, then there are less records, things may be quicker for the current but could take longer if going back in time. Maybe both... one to hold the historical aggregates over time and one to hold the quick and dirty (real-time current look or roll call report).

The deeper we got, the more that settings and database options came into play. We have a future project called fracture in the planning. We need to be able to have and use settings on what our users and corporations (worlds) want to see and use. We have tons of data and tons of records. Okay, great, what do you, as a user or end user, want to see, show, display, sort, etc.? How does that need to be organized? It goes deep and gets into advanced settings, display options, and being able to save layout and configuration options per person, per page, per corporation. That all needs to be included in the fracture stuff, along with the other transactional and mini aggregate database options listed on this page.

Once you know where you want to go... You can get there (hopefully). If you plan on being the only one to get there, the trail doesn't have to be very good. If you plan on repeating the journey, the trail needs to be even better. If you want a bunch of people and/or companies to complete the journey, you will need a road, not a trail. All part of the process.

Going back to tables, we talked about two big corp-specific tables in the system that will need a buddy mini aggregate table (or more). The big transactional tables are the po/invoice line items and the time sub inventory tables. Those two tables (that are already corp-specific) will need helper tables to keep track of both transactional aggregates per date (semi historical summaries) and also current non-historical mini aggregates for the quick and current view (no dates). Another way of putting this is making location specific pre math calculations vs having to go and re-sum things up or count things based on complex look-ups. You virtually do the known math per item, per package, and per location before it is needed. Then those numbers and values are quickly ready and available as mini aggregates. If you need more details or the blow by blow, you just go back to the transactional tables or records (different tables).

Some of our current pain is in the sales and POS (point of sale) systems such as carts and inventory tracking. We can do it, but if it gets into hundreds of thousands or millions upon millions of records, you run into the scale factor and issues.

Just for our notes, a couple key pieces are corporations and locations. If everybody just had a single location, some of this would be really easy. If you have more than one location, the solution needs to scale and keep track of mini aggregates based off of corporation and locations. That is a huge key that often gets overlooked. Plan for multiple (unlimited) locations. Here are some possible columns that may be needed for some of these mini aggregate tables for mini aggregate quantities - auto id, corp id, store id, part id, sub reference id (sub id), part count, and maybe a date if doing historical.

Switching subjects again, we need to charge more to clients for harder tasks and functions. I had a friend that was talking about software. He said, you tend to get two different types. You get cheap software or custom software. Hardly ever do you get cheap custom software. Custom does cost time and money. That is the way it is.

After Wayne left, Steve and I stayed on for a bit to go over some other things. We talked about gift cards, coupons, and other upcoming projects. I showed him a PO rounding demo and what I have done so far. The next question was... how deep are we going to dive per subject? Lots of options.

Emails, recording notes, and general to do list stuff. Trying to do smaller blasts to keep caught up better. Email out to Beaver Mountain pitching the idea of a customer facing scheduling app. We already have a bike shuttle company that wants that. We are just pitching our services, as well as custom code work out to clients. Also recording some gift cards that got distributed.

Cory and Steve touching base on funding and projects. It got into a discussion between Steve and I on our current model and defining things more tightly. Basically, making some of the verbal discussions more official and permanent. This will help all parties involved. Cory and I will work on a plan and get it back to Steve for review. After that, Cory was going over questions and projects that she had on her list.

We really want to get the sales tax aggregate project launched and merged into master. Currently, it is somewhat in a stalemate on a separate branch right now. Cory texted Eric and he joined the meeting for a bit. Small conversations about some plans. The main holdup right now is how to deploy the new code on all servers and also on the developer testing environments? The new code requires some higher database level permissions and access grants. This gets into a conflict between automation and security. We don't want a super enabled database user on the system but we still need to get some things done.

Merged in some new labels for Danny, Cory, and a client. After that, we briefly talked with Steve and Cory about the gift cards and special accounts stuff. We are running into some bottlenecks and how to get around those pieces. Some deals with talent, code, and permissions.

John showed Steve some of the Jira boards and then talking about some of the current sprints and using/allocating the correct resources. As a side note, we are getting pressure from some of our 3rd party solutions to do upgrades and required maintenance. John was also expressing his opinions on some current processes and executive decisions. We talked a lot about extra costs and budgeting.

Wayne and John are really wanting us to move away from Adobe ColdFusion and Hostek (as the hosting company) and move towards Lucee (opensource ColdFusion engine) and AWS for hosting. That is still just talk, but on the radar. Just talking numbers, savings, and possibilities. Eventually it comes down to decisions and then communications to keep all of us on the same page.

Having some audio issues. I ended up rebooting my machine, jumping out of the meeting and then rejoining. Worked with Chuck to help with his local setup for a multiple corporation (multi-corp) testing environment. Cory and Steve were going over logic for gift cards. We have a client that wants to use some gift cards and was wondering how that gets booked (financials). We would really like to automate the process, but for now, the users would have to keep track of things manually. We can't wait to jump back on that project. We will use special accounts and will be running things clear out to the balance sheet and tracking the correct liability. We got a few other small updates from other developers on projects.

We had a standup meeting for the scrum sprint. I took some notes and added them to the correct element of time. Bryan and Alan were talking back and forth and making some plans. Towards the end, Cory was coordinating different people and parties and what not. The two stars for the day were Alan and Cory. Good stuff going on.

Eric joined the meeting and was asking for more power and control on the dev testing server and environment. He wants a new user that has more database admin control levels. He is working with stored procedures and aggregated data stuff. He was also wondering what the next project was going to be. He is almost done, but somewhat waiting on help from the server guys. We talked about going back to gift cards and more options for special accounts. We also went over some small bugs that he could look into and help out with.

Alan was traveling, so he asked me to help with the standup meeting for the scrum sprint. Bryan reported in and is working on passing the unit of measure info to the action page. Here and John were coordinating on some efforts. John piped up, and I'm glad that he did, and had some questions about how are we getting there and what are the steps that are knows or need to be built. Too many assumptions had been made and we sort of forgot about prerequisites and knowledge needed for the developers. There were three or four of us on the project that knew what was going on, so we felt like everybody was on the same page. Come to find out, there were multiple parties that didn't know how to setup a multiple corporation (multi world) environment and then how to setup the enterprise to transactional corporation mappings.

Anyways, those questions spun us off into a decent sized training session. We went over how to get to certain places (navigation), we went over step-by-step processes to add new corporations, assign inventory types, bridge users between corps and what not. We talked about permission, dependencies, and other required steps and pieces. The guys were really interested in starting the sprint, and we felt like it was a great starting project, we just forgot about all of the other prep work and knowledge that was needed. Basically, we jumped into the middle of things but didn't have a clear understanding of how everything worked. I say that statement, but some of the team, really did know what to do and where thigs were going, it just wasn't perfectly clear and common knowledge. Good lesson.

Here are some other notes from our meeting. Different people played in and out, but the whole thing was just shy of 3 hours.

- Too many assumptions

- The guys need the skills to figure out how to fake or mock-up the data. If the real source doesn't exist, they need to fake it or mock it up. That also requires some instruction and prep work to know what will be expected, what format, what names the fields, queries, and database tables and column will have. It's all more planning and communication.

- When to pull the new data and run the database updates (timing). With multiple people working on the same project, there wasn't a clear instruction as to when certain things were ready, stable, and good to go. That caused some of the guys to just sit around and wonder if things were ready. Not super efficient - yet. It will come. Great lessons are being learned.

- More conversations on learning how to fake inbound and outbound data

- From Wayne, he would love to see, get the UI (user interface) done first, new methods built, and then roll over to the DAO's (database access objects).

- Numerous questions on where does the frontend end and the backend begin?

- The need for internal training

- Talking about backend tools and controls - along the way

We then jumped into the server meeting. Normally, it has a specific start and end time, but today, it all felt like one big giant meeting. A bunch of the guys bailed out, after the huge training session on multiple corps and enterprise level systems. Just Wayne, John, Cory, and I stayed on for the server meeting.

We went over some of the extra domains and whether or not they were resolving to the correct spot. Small review from the earlier standup meeting. We are planning on heading more and more towards scrum projects and small teams. Some of the developers have questions and concerns and some of the projects may be over their heads. We, as a team, need to keep helping them along the path.

I'm really proud of Cory, she is taking almost any project that is coming across her desk, even ones that have already been assigned out to other developers, and she is trying to propose or turn them into smaller pieces and user stories. She was working with John and suggesting that we take his discount engine project and break it up into smaller user stories and what not. Good stuff.

At the very end, it was just Cory and I on the meeting. We went over some cash flow stuff, looked at receivables, payables, and talked some business strategy and options. We then got into a discussion of where things are going and help to help it go in a good direction. We have trained these guys to act and react in certain ways. We need to help them and even change the behavior. We need the guys to turn to their scrum teams vs turning to me to get help all the time. I'm excited to get that going and will work to support that change in direction.

Special accounts. A lot of work has already been done. Need to tie it in. 

Settings: turn on/off, rules, auto # or manual = need to have a setting to choose

Corp=# for gift cards

Create miniature accounts.

Load and unload and reload, expiration date.

Home page to deal with this directly (quick search option). How much is on your card?

Name of gift card is dynamic.

It's a real liability.

The client wants to use gift cards to generate more revenue and track liability. 

Do we load with an invoice?

Scrum in February hopefully.

Going over questions, quotes, and projects with Cory. We talked about getting the Cannapages guys with a testing account on the development server. Lots of time talking about gift cards and running them through special accounts. We did some light research and looked up some stuff on the developer's notebook for special accounts, gift cards, and where things are at. We even looked at the database model for special accounts and gift cards. We really want to get on to this project. We talked about running things over and through the scrum teams vs just assigning projects to a specific developer. We have a lot to gain, if we can get these scrum teams working well and being efficient. We are hoping!

Sent an email to Marisa about the Audrey, the new girl who may be helping with some marketing efforts. Paying bills, scanning receipts, and purchasing some gift cards for the guys and gals (using reward points).

Writing letters and sending out gift cards to our guys and gals. That was kinda fun.

Sending out gift cards to our guys and gals.

Purchasing some gift cards for our guys and gals. Emails and recording notes from the past couple of days.

Cory, Steve, and I were talking about different projects. We decided to scrap one of them and wait for some other changes to roll into place. I was pitching an MVP (minimal viable product) on some payroll stuff. We chatted about needs there and where it could go. We talked about bulk payroll, special time card aggregates for some of the math, multi-department based timecards, new fields and settings for special programs, and other fields and values that are needed.

As a fun side note, we even talked about mixing payroll functions with special accounts (accrued hours and virtual time based loyalty points for employees and special laws dealing with additional funding and special programs). Special accounts are for things like loyalty point for customers, gift cards, in-store credit, vendor credits, etc. In this situation, we would be using special accounts to accrue or add up additional hours that are earned over time. Then, the employee/users could redeem those extra hours or bonuses, when they wanted. We would have to keep track of values being added to their account, as well as values being paid out or virtually redeemed. This gets into liabilities, and who owes who and the timing that goes along with that. Interesting twist.

Steve, Eric, and I joined the meeting and went over some scenarios and talked about some deep financial flow questions about bad debt, customer loyalty points, gift cards, etc. I jumped out at 1:30 to meet with a business consultant. Steve and Eric kept talking about deep financial flow and options for another hour plus.

Met up with Shannon and did a session on the presentation gallery. We were working on bullet points under CRM (customer relationship management) and CMS (content management systems). See below for a small list... still in the building and editing process.

1. Business Functions

1.1. Sales
1.1.1. Inventory tracking
1.1.1.1. Start to finish inventory tracking
1.1.1.2. Item usage histories
1.1.1.3. Unlimited
1.1.1.4. Reports, exports
1.1.1.5. Images, scans, multimedia
1.1.1.6. Units of measure
1.1.1.7. General items
1.1.1.8. Serialized items (stock/units)
1.1.1.9. Time or services (unlimited)
1.1.1.10. Fulfillment
1.1.1.11. Sub inventory (parent/child)
1.1.1.12. Transfers
1.1.1.13. Internal builds (manufacturing)
1.1.1.14. Ecommerce settings
1.1.1.15. Updating inventory counts

1.1.2. POS (Point of Sale)
1.1.2.1. Invoicing
1.1.2.2. Quoting/Ordering
1.1.2.3. Secure shopping cart
1.1.2.4. Barcoding
1.1.2.5. Custom buttons
1.1.2.6. Discounts & campaigns
1.1.2.7. General items
1.1.2.8. Serialized items (stock/units)
1.1.2.9. Time or services (unlimited)
1.1.2.10. Locations & tax settings
1.1.2.11. Hardware options
1.1.2.12. Custom designs & layouts
1.1.2.13. Ecommerce tied to POS

1.1.3. Customer options
1.1.3.1. Loyalty points
1.1.3.2. Preset discounts
1.1.3.3. Purchase histories
1.1.3.4. Payment history
1.1.3.5. Accounts receivable
1.1.3.6. Customer billing
1.1.3.7. Online bill pay
1.1.3.8. Images, scans, multimedia
1.1.3.9. Customer accounts
1.1.3.10. Reports, exports

1.1.4. Reporting
1.1.4.1. Sales reports
1.1.4.2. Profit reports
1.1.4.3. Daily/weekly/monthly reporting
1.1.4.4. Per locations, per salesperson
1.1.4.5. Deposits
1.1.4.6. Purchase histories
1.1.4.7. Trending items
1.1.4.8. Automated P&L
1.1.4.9. Exports
1.1.4.10. Advanced filtering
1.1.4.11. Save your own reports

1.1.5. Payment solutions
1.1.5.1. Normal POS options (cash, check, etc.)
1.1.5.2. Merchant processing (credit cards)
1.1.5.3. Online bill pay
1.1.5.4. 3rd party payment solutions
1.1.5.5. On account (customer credit)
1.1.5.6. Custom configurations

1.1.6. Ecommerce
1.1.6.1. Real-time (live) inventory counts & tracking
1.1.6.2. Fully integrated systems
1.1.6.3. Online product purchase
1.1.6.4. Customer login portal
1.1.6.5. Online bill pay
1.1.6.6. View histories, statements, orders
1.1.6.7. Fulfillment
1.1.6.8. Fully configurable (settings)

1.1.7. Other special functions
1.1.7.1. Work orders
1.1.7.2. Layaway
1.1.7.3. Recipe/builds
1.1.7.4. Hidden line items
1.1.7.5. Reoccurring
1.1.7.6. Barcode/QR code generators
1.1.7.7. Emailing capabilities
1.1.7.8. Discounting engines
1.1.7.9. Quantity tracking & thresholds
1.1.7.10. Loyalty points
1.1.7.11. Gift cards

1.2. CRM - Customer Relationship Management

1.2.1. Sales & purchase tracking
1.2.1.1. Payment tracking
1.2.1.2. Monies owed
1.2.1.3. Accounts receivable
1.2.1.4. Purchase histories
1.2.1.5. Invoices/quotes

1.2.2. Customer profiles
1.2.2.1. Holds additional information & subs
1.2.2.2. Log notes
1.2.2.3. Additional contacts
1.2.2.4. Reoccurring billing
1.2.2.5. Purchase & payment history
1.2.2.6. Groups & types
1.2.2.7. Preset options - discount, tax category
1.2.2.8. Photos, scans, files, media
1.2.2.9. Expandable custom fields
1.2.2.10. Manage relationships
1.2.2.11. Unlimited customers

1.2.3. Customer tracking & follow-ups
1.2.3.1. Unlimited notes & logging
1.2.3.2. Show/hide notes on calendar
1.2.3.3. Show/hide notes in customer portal
1.2.3.4. Purchase histories - what did they buy?
1.2.3.5. Accounts receivable - what do they owe you?

1.2.4. Calendaring & scheduling
1.2.4.1. Elements of Time
1.2.4.2. Reporting
1.2.4.3. Billing

1.3. CMS - Content Management Systems

1.3.1. Upload content
1.3.1.1. Permissioned
1.3.1.2. Image galleries
1.3.1.3. Files/Media/Content
1.3.1.4. Pre-filled custom documents
1.3.1.5. Digital story telling
1.3.1.6. Manage content relationships
1.3.1.7. Multi-file upload

1.3.2. Web presence & ecommerce
1.3.2.1. Custom controls
1.3.2.2. Categorize
1.3.2.3. Turn things on/off
1.3.2.4. Change web pricing
1.3.2.5. Show/hide things on web
1.3.2.6. Provide long descriptions, specs, reviews
1.3.2.7. Full ecommerce experience
1.3.2.8. Shipping options
1.3.2.9. Customer portal
1.3.2.10. Online bill pay

1.3.3. Data controlled content
1.3.3.1. Point & click interfaces
1.3.3.2. Template based & custom options
1.3.3.3. Permissioned based
1.3.3.4. Create unlimited content
1.3.3.5. Edit content & record histories
1.3.3.6. Advance content (virtual data assembly line)
1.3.3.7. Business world building
1.3.3.8. Store, view, interact as desired
1.3.3.9. Backend logic based on content (cause & effect)

1.3.4. Whole system
1.3.4.1. The whole system is technically a CMS
1.3.4.2. System look & feel
1.3.4.3. Backend layout & design - what's under the hood
1.3.4.4. Built-in core flexibility
1.3.4.5. Custom anything (Dream it up! We'll wire it up!)
1.3.4.6. Data & content storage
1.3.4.7. Tracking all data interactions
1.3.4.8. Access points (who, what, where, when)
1.3.4.9. Solid foundation of permissions & settings
1.3.4.10. Dynamic possibilities (Let's grow together!)

1.3.5. Hosted solution
1.3.5.1. Cloud based
1.3.5.2. Ease of use - mobile, home, work, travel
1.3.5.3. Automatic updates
1.3.5.4. No hardware & minimal IT requirements
1.3.5.5. Built on multi-server environment (getting more than most businesses could afford on their own)
1.3.5.6. Backups & disaster recovery
1.3.5.7. Data & system security
1.3.5.8. Managed services
1.3.5.9. Not charged per devices or per users
1.3.5.10. All system pieces in one spot
1.3.5.11. Interconnected & accessible
1.3.5.12. Access to support & training

- still working on the outline for these sections below **

1.4. Expense Tracking
1.5. Payroll
1.6. Calendar
1.7. Data Connection
1.8. Accounting
1.9. Reports
1.10. Business Intel
1.11. ECommerce
1.12. Big Data

Eric and Brandon had a small brainstorming session on gift cards and using them inside of special accounts. See attached for some new brainstorming notes. The newest notes are at the bottom under a date of 12/2/19.

Eric is going to keep pushing along. He is also planning on doing some research to get some ideas how other systems play with and use gift cards. We will be circling back around later for more planning, meetings, and development.

After Eric and I were done, I spent the rest of the time doing email stuff.

- Steve would like a one page document that talks about history of adilas and how the hosting of the system evolved. Different server levels - shared hosting, semi-dedicated servers, full dedicated servers, VPS (virtual private servers), stacks/clusters (linked and joined dedicated servers), etc. Steve would like to use this document to help with sales and up sales of systems.

- Josh popped in and set up some times to meet with both Steve and I. We also talked about some other possible options using cookies and printing settings. CFCookie and CFPrint. Josh is working on a number of smaller projects.

- Eric joined and had some questions about special accounts and where we are headed from there. We setup a time to talk later today about taking special accounts out to the gift card level. That would be awesome.

Brainstorming with Shannon on sub features in the business functions realm. We spent some time brainstorming about sales, inventory tracking, POS (point of sale) features, and CRM (customer relationship management) options. See attached for our working outline document.

Working on ideas for the presentation gallery and trying to break things into smaller pieces.

1. Business Functions
1.1. Sales
1.1.1. Inventory tracking
1.1.1.1. Start to finish inventory tracking
1.1.1.2. Item usage histories
1.1.1.3. Unlimited
1.1.1.4. Reports, exports
1.1.1.5. Images, scans, multimedia
1.1.1.6. Units of measure
1.1.1.7. General items
1.1.1.8. Serialized items (stock/units)
1.1.1.9. Time or services (unlimited)
1.1.1.10. Fulfillment
1.1.1.11. Sub inventory (parent/child)
1.1.1.12. Transfers
1.1.1.13. Internal builds (manufacturing)
1.1.1.14. Ecommerce settings
1.1.1.15. Updating inventory counts

1.1.2. POS (Point of Sale)
1.1.2.1. Invoicing
1.1.2.2. Quoting/Ordering
1.1.2.3. Secure shopping cart
1.1.2.4. Barcoding
1.1.2.5. Custom buttons
1.1.2.6. Discounts & campaigns
1.1.2.7. General items
1.1.2.8. Serialized items (stock/units)
1.1.2.9. Time or services (unlimited)
1.1.2.10. Locations & tax settings
1.1.2.11. Hardware options
1.1.2.12. Custom designs & layouts
1.1.2.13. Ecommerce tied to POS

1.1.3. Customer options
1.1.3.1. Loyalty points
1.1.3.2. Preset discounts
1.1.3.3. Purchase histories
1.1.3.4. Payment history
1.1.3.5. Accounts receivable
1.1.3.6. Customer billing
1.1.3.7. Online bill pay
1.1.3.8. Images, scans, multimedia
1.1.3.9. Customer accounts
1.1.3.10. Reports, exports

1.1.4. Reporting
1.1.4.1. Sales reports
1.1.4.2. Profit reports
1.1.4.3. Daily/weekly/monthly reporting
1.1.4.4. Per locations, per salesperson
1.1.4.5. Deposits
1.1.4.6. Purchase histories
1.1.4.7. Trending items
1.1.4.8. Automated P&L
1.1.4.9. Exports
1.1.4.10. Advanced filtering
1.1.4.11. Save your own reports

1.1.5. Payment solutions
1.1.5.1. Normal POS options (cash, check, etc.)
1.1.5.2. Merchant processing (credit cards)
1.1.5.3. Online bill pay
1.1.5.4. 3rd party payment solutions
1.1.5.5. On account (customer credit)
1.1.5.6. Custom configurations

1.1.6. Ecommerce
1.1.6.1. Real-time (live) inventory counts & tracking
1.1.6.2. Fully integrated systems
1.1.6.3. Online product purchase
1.1.6.4. Customer login portal
1.1.6.5. Online bill pay
1.1.6.6. View histories, statements, orders
1.1.6.7. Fulfillment
1.1.6.8. Fully configurable (settings)

1.1.7. Other special functions
1.1.7.1. Work orders
1.1.7.2. Layaway
1.1.7.3. Recipe/builds
1.1.7.4. Hidden line items
1.1.7.5. Reoccurring
1.1.7.6. Barcode/QR code generators
1.1.7.7. Emailing capabilities
1.1.7.8. Discounting engines
1.1.7.9. Quantity tracking & thresholds
1.1.7.10. Loyalty points
1.1.7.11. Gift cards

1.2. CRM
1.2.1. Sales & purchase tracking
1.2.1.1. Payment tracking
1.2.1.2. Monies owed
1.2.1.3. Accounts receivable
1.2.1.4. Purchase histories
1.2.1.5. Invoices/quotes

1.2.2. Customer profiles
1.2.2.1. Holds additional information & subs
1.2.2.2. Log notes
1.2.2.3. Additional contacts
1.2.2.4. Reoccurring billing
1.2.2.5. Purchase & payment history
1.2.2.6. Groups & types
1.2.2.7. Preset options - discount, tax category
1.2.2.8. Photos, scans, files, media
1.2.2.9. Expandable custom fields
1.2.2.10. Manage relationships

1.2.3. Customer tracking & follow-ups
1.2.3.1. Unlimited notes & logging
1.2.3.2. Show/hide notes on calendar
1.2.3.3. Show/hide notes in customer portal
1.2.3.4. Purchase histories
1.2.3.5. Accounts receivable

1.2.4. Calendaring & scheduling
1.2.4.1. Elements of Time
1.2.4.2. Reporting
1.2.4.3. Billing

1.2.5. Unlimited customers

1.2.6. Photos, scans, other files & media
1.2.6.1. Unlimited

1.3. CMS
1.4. Expense Tracking
1.5. Payroll
1.6. Calendar
1.7. Data Connection
1.8. Accounting
1.9. Reports
1.10. Business Intel
1.11. ECommerce
1.12. Big Data

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

Steve and I met with Jonathan Wells to go over some progress. Below are some notes from our call.

- Creating user stories - basically scenarios and simulations - help to visually lead a user through the system and even know what is possible and how to do it.

- Question about obscure features vs basic or super needed functions and features - those extra or obscure tools and features create an expense (extra burden) to other customers (it makes it a little bit harder) - We need to narrow things down a bit.

- Settings - 4 main levels - world, group, page, user

- Templates per industry - basically, a way of controlling bulk settings per industry

- Cause and effect relationships - the deeper you go, the more you get into cause and effect relationships.

- Helping customers succeed - eventually you may need all of the different business tools and/or features and/or modules - there is nothing wrong with having the tools, you just may want to keep some of them in the shed until you need them. Only use or keep out what you will need.

- Each company may need to pick and choose what tools they want and how they want to play

- It also gets into size of the company. Even though they are the same type of company, the bigger they are, they need more tools and options. It gets deep fast.

- Features, advantages, benefits - great way to think about things and options.

- How do we get the word out and let out clients know about some of the new changes? Even then, do they read the news and updates?

- It comes back to the adilas café type model and having  a place to show your stuff, work, play, train, be part of the community, etc.

- Classic vs snow owl - what does that mean? It actually deals with a set of standard look and feel templates, headers, footers, and display options (visual themes).

- Map overview - Jonathan started showing us some of his new menu and nav systems - See the attached screen shots to get some ideas of where he is headed and some of the mapping concepts, mock-ups, layout options, and direction.

- Stacking the view and the nav - getting into graphical homepage and sub homepage and sub navigation. We didn't get super deep into this, but there is tons of potential there. Have a very easy to navigate frontend. As you get deeper, you still have a very friendly and visual navigation page at the sub homepage or graphical homepage level. Don't be confused by the word homepage. Each sub section inside system would need it's own sub or graphical homepage. For example: Say you have a main overview map or nav page. You would then also need a sub graphical overview page for say customer homepage, invoice homepage, time homepage, user homepage, PO homepage, deposits homepage, flex grid homepage, media/content homepage, etc. Hopefully that makes sense. See attached for some mock-up graphics and ideas including flat maps, icons, icon lists, mind maps, and related pieces. You could even virtually zoom in/out as needed to get more detailed views.

- What about a simple search (by typing) type interface? Be able to search for things like gift cards, payroll, inventory, discounts, etc. Once the search is completed, it shows options. This is kinda like a google type approach to the system. They, Google, tried to simplify the whole Internet. We could do something similar to that inside of adilas. Just another option.

- Google map view - zooming in and out - to expose different levels - mind maps (see attached for some concept art for mind maps)

- How visual education could really help them know what is involved and where things are going.

- Ranking pages and sections and what is the most important. That would really help to find the common threads.

Steve and Jonathan kept going with the meeting after I left. Steve told me later on, that he and Jonathan went for another hour (ish). They ended up on the reports homepage and Steve was going to have Jonathan give that page a small facelift. Good stuff.

Got up early and merged in some code from Eric and I's project on the sub special accounts. This is for things like rewards, customer loyalty points, gift cards, in-store credit, etc. Anyways, we had about 50 files to merge in and test. Worked on some new help files for the new pages and sections. I got all of that done and launched code to the data 0 for testing. Everything went well, so I pushed up code to all servers. Immediately, we got some calls and texts and people were getting an error. We jumped on it and had it resolved pretty quick but still had some complaints. We try, I literally tested on both local and live before pushing to all servers. Certain people have different settings and sometimes that affects things. We got it done and then I went to the Adobe ColdFusion conference. Busy start to the morning. 

Eric popped in and asked some questions about transitional invoices and how all of that works. We ended up talking about putting those requests into our community funded project list. Steve and I want to help to funnel the users and their requests into our project management options. Steve and I are going to be trying to focus on core vs custom and trying to figure out how maybe the custom could be core with settings (how to make it happen and/or play through).

3D calendar and time management. We are seeing people wanting to get into smaller and smaller time periods just as hours, minutes, seconds. Most of our stuff is currently on the day or single day type environment. 3D calendars deal with years, quarters, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds. Our users may even want to determine what their unit of measure (date specific) is... that way they could choose what level they want to play on (days, hours, minutes, etc.).

https://data0.adilas.biz/top_secret/help.cfm?id=479&pwd=core - help file for world building and showing the layering options

https://www.adilascontent.biz/top_secret/images/corp748_EA81FBBDE6/pdf/doc_26325_9F86EF2854.jpg - small drawing on how the upper levels of world building may be configured and such.

Steve and I are seeing our way through the multiple databases per server type option. Those are technically the cluster and solar system levels in the world building pieces.

After Steve and I got done speaking, I jumped back on the special accounts project (rewards, customer loyalty points, gift cards, etc.).

See some of the attached media/content pieces for an overview and preview of a new feature called special accounts. This is for things like rewards, customer loyalty points, gift cards, in-store credit, punch cards, etc.

Thanks for choosing adilas.biz!

Spent the entire afternoon working on the sub special accounts project (sub of the balance sheet). This will be used for customer rewards, loyalty points, gift cards, in-store credit, etc. Lots of good break throughs today. We added a fix for using application scope variables in the cfc's (ColdFusion components - backend logic pieces), tested the submit cart page, and we added in the account rule that dealt with show/hide the loyalty points on the invoice (customer receipt). We also showed totals on the customer log file with a valid drill-down to see the details. We are making progress. I also added some new notes to the main scratch file for the project. See attached. Good session.

Spent some time working on code sign-off and review for the special accounts project. This deals with rewards, loyalty points, gift cards, in-store credit, etc. Working on the methods inside the submit cart page. Lots of nested logic and methods calling other methods. Things like look up account types, see if they should/shouldn't use loyalty points, how many are earned per invoice, how many are redeemed (spent) per invoice, balances, rules (point values), etc.

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.

In working on sub special accounts (rewards, customer loyalty points, gift cards, in-store credit, etc.). Added some new validation and formatting to the show special account transaction report.

On the morning meeting with the guys. I got on late. They (Steve and Dustin) were talking about some recent hiking trips into the high country. After that, Eric popped in and needed some code merged in and pushed up to all servers. We got that done and then Steve, Eric, and I started talking about the special accounts and how close we are on the first round. The first round should be up and live by the end of next week. Here are some of our notes, related to that topic.

- The value of the loyalty points - do we calculate at the time of earning or at the time of redemption? Those values may be different.

- What about showing them (special accounts) on invoices or after the fact? Settings and configuration options.

- What about going back in time and trying to figure out dollar/point ratios and values... going backwards gets a little bit tricky. History, financials, and audit trail stuff.

- Histories and drill-downs to activity on these special accounts (big need). Maybe being able to search (quick search style) on special accounts. How do we get to the underlying details quickly? What is the story behind the numbers.

- We are seeing more and more possible settings and configurations for each section and/or type.

- Steve was talking about ecommerce. That may end up being another avenue for some of these special account types (say gift cards, earning loyalty points, etc.).

- We are seeing lots of other needs for these payment type solutions and tracking these sub special account totals, histories, and/or transactions. We are also seeing a mix between both internal (adilas) solutions and external (3rd party payment solutions) accounts of different types. All of them need the special account type mentality and/or flow (mini bank accounts that could be added to and/or subtracted from).

- We are seeing so many different point of sale systems (different POS's and POS competition) out there. We are hoping that some of these outside companies will decide to integrate with us and then help push our product forward. Choose your solution and then invest in that solution. Play the piggy back type scenario.

- One-off's vs core functions and features

- Light talks about barriers to entry and barriers to exiting. The deeper they get (meaning our clients or outside 3rd parties), the more they have virtually bought into the meat of the product and it makes it harder to leave (barriers to exit).

- Steve is seeing a trend where clients are wanting a single solution that does what they need and is highly configurable. We are trying to be that type of solution.

- Beta testing and allowing certain users and clients to jump in on things before a bigger release. We need people to push on things before it goes completely live and full speed.

- Possible problem with bulk loyalty points. We have tons of old custom points vs new automated points. We may need a small bulk migration tool or something like that... this may also be a special custom page that looks at existing logic and then adds new transactions (into the sub special accounts tables) to get the starting balances in place.

11.3 - Balance Sheet (logic and flow)

-The balance sheet is a financial document that is very commonly used for high level financials, I.e. banks loans, investors, taxes, etc. The balance sheet has 3 main categories that the details get divided into. They are assets, liability, and equity accounts. Sometimes people will use the acronym “ALE” to quickly remember those 3 categories.

-Assets are things that you own. Monies in the bank, inventory on hand, and other things that have a significant value that you need to track. It could also include monies owed to you for good and services previously invoices (accounts receivables). There are chapters and chapters of all the things that could possibly be assets, this is just a quick list for an idea.

-Liabilities are things that you still owe or may owe on. This could be things like loans, taxes, coupons, loyalty points, gift cards that you have already collected on, accounts payable, bills that are still due, etc. Once again this is just a short list to give a general idea.

-Equity or owner’s equity is more of earnings over time, investments, your net profit that comes from your P&L, distributions, all kinds of long term holding accounts. Equity usually derives some sort of value that has accumulated over time.

-The balance sheet is a "Snap Shot" in time and only applies to a single day. Basically, it is a roll call of who was where and what happened at that exact time (according to the system).

-Both the income statement (P&L or profit and loss statement) and the balance sheet usually end up being quite in-depth in real life and may contain multiple layers in order to tell the real story of what is going on or what has been done.

-The P&L is a time based report of buying and selling and basic operating expenses. By time based we mean that there is a date range associated with it. It could be a day, a week, a month, a quarter, a fiscal year, etc.

-The connection between the two is what is called the "Net Profit" or "Bottom Line". This value is first figured on the P&L and then passed to the equity portion of the balance sheet. The ending date range on the P&L is the balance sheet look-back date or balance sheet date.

-One of the hardest things for people to figure out is what goes on the income statement and what goes one the balance sheet. There are chapters and chapters that cover the in and outs of both reports. For basic purposes, the P&L is the day to day buying and selling of items and services. It also includes basic expenses that are required to run your business. The balance sheet deals more with who owes who, and how things get classified or grouped. Do we own it (or trying to own it), these are the assets. Do we owe for it (or trying to pay for it), these are the liabilities. The last piece of the puzzle is the equity or distribution of wealth (who are the players and what is their piece of the pie).

Interesting conversation between Josh and Steve. The topic was dealing with project management and how quickly our developers can be highjacked by custom requests. Steve was recommending that we try to capture all of the custom requests out in the adilas community funded projects vs just having the clients go directly to the developers. There are pros and cons to that... If they go directly to the developer, they (our clients) get things quicker, but it has a hidden cost (called distraction and/or highjacking of resources). If they go through a channel, it has some different pros and cons. One, we could mix and blend and figure out project management, allowocations, budgets, and priorities. We could even match funds and do other things. On the flip side, sometimes, if it gets mixed in with all of the other projects, it may not get done quite as quickly. Pros and cons and each side. It is amazing how it comes back to a balance type dance.

Steve and I had some great conversations about our guys, our process, and where we want it to go. Another topic was dealing with returning and reporting and checking in. Sometimes we have huge projects and we don't get any communication for weeks on end. We are going to try to implement more regular communications. That should help everybody know what is what and where things are at. Funny how it goes back to forming, storming, norming, and performing (team building skills).

Eric joined the meeting and we setup some big blocks of time to work on the special accounts project next week. That is for customer loyalty points, rewards, gift cards, in-store credit, and other special payment or special accounts.

Code review and working on the special accounts project (rewards, customer loyalty points, gift cards, etc.). Working in the view cart and add cart payment pages and sections.

Spent a couple of hours back working on the special accounts project (rewards, customer loyalty points, gift cards, in-store credit, etc.).

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).

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.

Code review and working on the add/edit process for manual transactions for the special account tracking (sub of the balance sheet dealing with loyalty points, rewards, gift cards, etc.).

Back on the loyalty points, gift cards, and in-store credit project. It has been on the side lines for a couple of months. Back in looking around on the sub special account tracking project that includes the loyalty points, gift cards, etc. Took about an hour to review notes, get back to the correct branch, look around and find a spot to start back in on the project. I would call that transitioning.

Spent the rest of the time doing code review, checking, and moving forward. Started back in on the corporation special account transactions homepage.

Pretty quite meeting this morning. Dustin checked in and then bailed out. Alan jumped on and gave me a small report. We also spent some time looking at the custom tables for holding sub inventory attributes. We talked about some possible rework options and helping that process. We logged into a server and looked around at database activity, column counts, row counts, and basic database stuff.

I got back on the code review and code sign-off for the special account tracking project. This deals with things like customer loyalty points, gift cards, in-store credit, etc.

Back working on the code sign-off for the sub special account tracking project (customer loyalty points, gift cards, in-store credit, etc.).

Got a call from Bryan and we had to jump onto the SWC dedicated server to check on a database problem. We found a locked table and had to reset the database server.

Pretty quiet morning. Dustin and I were on the meeting but mostly working on our own stuff. He did have me help push up a file to a server for testing, but other than that, just getting going and working on our own projects. I spent most of the morning working on the add/edit page for manual transactions for the corporation special accounts (things like customer loyalty points, gift cards, etc.).

Adilas is what we call a "business platform". What that means is there are tons of tools, functions, permissions, settings, and processes to help you run your business. This guide or manual will take you on a step by step journey in exploring and explaining some of the functions and tools that are available to you and your company. Not every tool or function will be used and that's ok. We want you to match the right tools with the right job. Some of the goals in providing this manual are helping you learn the system, apply the concepts in your own specific manner, help you track all your operational and accounting data, and help make you even more successful than you currently are! Let's get started!

Basic Outline - Feel Free to Jump to a Specific Section or Area
 
1 - Understanding The Basics
1.1 - What is adilas?
1.2 - How Does It Work?
1.3 - Enter Once - Use Many
1.4 - Database Basics
1.5 - Web Basics
1.6 - Standard Page Elements
1.7 - Navigation Tips & Tricks
1.8 - Vocabulary
1.9 - Adilas Theory

2 - Logins, Passwords & Permissions
2.1 - Main Website Features
2.2 - Username & Password
2.3 - Creating An Adilas Bookmark or Favorite
2.4 - User Permissions

3 - General System Settings
3.1 - Main Corporation Info & Settings
3.2 - Locations
3.3 - Sales Tax Settings
3.4 - Payroll Tax Settings
3.5 - Departments (tied to payroll)
3.6 - Assigning Employees to Departments
3.7 - Timecards (clock in/out)
3.8 - Master Time Templates (calendar & scheduling)
3.9 - Flex Grid Tie-Ins (custom data fields)

4 - Meet The Players
4.1 - General Overview
4.2 - Admin
4.3 - API Sockets & Communications (application programming interface - send & receive data remotely)
4.4 - A/P - Accounts Payable (vendor waiting room)
4.5 - A/R - Accounts Receivable (customer waiting room)
4.6 - Attributes (parent & child inventory flags and tags)
4.7 - Balance Sheet
4.8 - Banks
4.9 - Barcodes & QR Codes
4.10 - Black Box Page Technology (custom code options)
4.11 - Check Requests (sub type of the normal expense/receipts)
4.12 - Check Writing
4.13 - Chooser (custom interface chooser)
4.14 - Corporations (worlds)
4.15 - Coupons & Sales Campaigns
4.16 - Customers/Clients
4.17 - Customer Logs
4.18 - Customer Queue (check in/out)
4.19 - Data Imports & Exports
4.20 - Departments
4.21 - Deposits (monies coming in)
4.22 - Discounts & Discount Rules
4.23 - Display Options & Interface Choices
4.24 - eCommerce & Web Presence
4.25 - Elements of Time (calendar & scheduling)
4.26 - Email Settings
4.27 - Employee/Users
4.28 - Expense/Receipts (monies going out)
4.29 - Exports - MS Excel/CSV/PDF
4.30 - Flex Grid Tie-Ins
4.31 - Floorplan
4.32 - Gift Cards, Rewards, & Loyalty Points
4.33 - GPS & RFID Tag Tracking
4.34 - History & Reports
4.35 - Ideas & Sharing
4.36 - Interface Options, Dashboards & Choices
4.37 - Invoices
4.38 - Labels & Custom Paperwork
4.39 - Locations & Tax Settings
4.40 - Look & Feel (custom colors & navigation)
4.41 - Manufacturing (changing or modifying inventory)
4.42 - Marketing
4.43 - Media/Content/Files (physical file uploads and referencing)
4.44 - Merchant Processing - Credit Cards & Financial Solutions
4.45 - Mini Conversions (buying, selling, & tracking inventory - units of measure)
4.46 - My Cart Favorite Buttons
4.47 - My Stuff (personal settings & options)
4.48 - Objects & Data Over Time (theory & concepts)
4.49 - Orders
4.50 - P&L - Income Statement
4.51 - Parts/Items (general inventory pool)
4.52 - Payroll, Commissions, & Time Clocks
4.53 - Permissions
4.54 - Photos & Scans
4.55 - Purchase Orders (PO's)
4.56 - Quick Search
4.57 - Quotes
4.58 - Recipe/Builds
4.59 - Reimbursements (REI's)
4.60 - Reoccurring & Automated Options
4.61 - Sales & Promotions (see coupons & sales campaigns)
4.62 - Saved Reports (custom report favorites)
4.63 - Settings - Corp-Wide
4.64 - Settings - Group Level
4.65 - Settings - Page Level
4.66 - Settings - Personal
4.67 - Shopping Cart
4.68 - Special Line Items (system parts)
4.69 - Splits (payments made on account)
4.70 - Statements
4.71 - Stock/Units (serialized inventory)
4.72 - Sub Inventory (parent/child inventory)
4.73 - Support
4.74 - Texts, Emails, Reminders, & Communications
4.75 - Third Party Solutions
4.76 - Tiered Pricing & Pricing Engine
4.77 - Timecards (digital clock in/out)
4.78 - Tools & Maintenance

5 - Customers (in depth)
5.1 - Customer Settings (general)
5.2 - Customer Types
5.3 - Customer Logs
5.4 - Customer Additional Contacts
5.5 - Customers to Invoices & Quotes
5.6 - Customer To Elements of Time (scheduling)
5.7 - Customer Photos & Scans

6 - Inventory (in depth)
6.1 - General Inventory vs. Serialized Inventory
6.2 - Parts, Services, & General Inventories
6.3 - Vendor/Payees
6.4 - Part Categories
6.5 - Use PO's to Add Inventory
6.6 - Updating Inventory Counts
6.7 - Light Manufacturing
6.8 - Recipe/Builds
6.9 - Stock/Units (serialized inventory)
6.10 - Makes
6.11 - Models

7 - Sales (in depth)
7.1 - Shopping Cart
7.2 - Advanced Add To Cart
7.3 - My Cart Favorites & Smart Group Buttons
7.4 - Quotes
7.5 - Invoices
7.6 - Invoice Payments
7.7 - Transitional Invoices
7.8 - Reoccurring Invoices
7.9 - Discounts, Returns, Trades, & Refunds
7.10 - Statements
7.11 - Sales & Profit Reports
7.12 - Sales Tax Reports
7.13 - Merchant Processing (credit card payments)
7.14 - Transfer Invoices

8 - Deposits (monies coming in)
8.1 - Banks
8.2 - Deposits
8.3 - Deposit Types
8.4 - Deposits on Merchandise
8.5 - Depositing Invoice Payments
8.6 - Bank Transfers (deposit side)
8.7 - Special Deposits (balance sheet)

9 - Expenses (monies going out)
9.1 - Payables Homepage
9.2 - Expense/Receipts
9.3 - Expense Types
9.4 - Check Requests
9.5 - Reimbursements
9.6 - Splits or Payments On Account
9.7 - Pay Stubs (payroll and withholdings)
9.8 - Payroll Tax Liability
9.9 - Sales Tax Liability
9.10 - Special Payments - Credit Cards
9.11 - Bank Transfers (expense side)
9.12 - Special Expenses (balance sheet)
9.13 - Printing Checks
9.14 - Advanced Concepts & Usages

10 - Reports & Searching
10.1 - Report & Search Basics
10.2 - Adilas Quick Search
10.3 - Basic Application Type Searches
10.4 - Advanced Application Type Searches
10.5 - History Homepage
10.6 - Sales & Profit Reports
10.7 - P&L - Income Statement
10.8 - All Advanced Searches & Exports
10.9 - View Custom Code & Reports

11 - Financials & Accounting
11.1 - Bank Reconciliation
11.2 - P&L - Income Statement (logic and flow)
11.3 - Balance Sheet (logic and flow)
11.4 - User-Maintained Balance Sheet Items
11.5 - Adilas Theory on Accounting
11.6 - Roll Call Accounting Principles
11.7 - Old School Accounting vs. New School Accounting
11.8 - Vision for the Future

12 - Other Tools & Features
12.1 - Bridging Users Between Corporations
12.2 - Site Look & Feel (colors and logo)
12.3 - Corp-Wide Settings
12.4 - Training & Support
12.5 - Barcode & Label Generator
12.6 - Profit & Discount Calculator
12.7 - Finance Loan Calculator
12.8 - Financial Flow Calculator
12.9 - Global Parts Find & Replace
12.10 - Global Parts Mark-Up
12.11 - Global Stock/Unit Mark-Up
12.12 - Admin Time Clock
12.13 - Update Inventory Counts
12.14 - Managers Checkbook
12.15 - Wholesale - Cart Builder
12.16 - Cross-Corp Sales
12.17 - Custom Forms & Documents
12.18 - Custom Code & Reports
12.19 - Building Master Time Templates
12.20 - My Cart Favorite Buttons
12.21 - Smart Group Buttons (tiered pricing)
12.22 - Become an Adilas Rep

4.32 - Gift Cards, Rewards, & Loyalty Points

-Tons of custom options are available. Often these reward programs have some corporation specific flare.  

-The Adilas standards are still currently under construction. Expected release data first quarter of 2019. Some of the standards will include: loyalty/rewards, gift cards, punch cards, in-store credit, vendor credits, etc.

-Technically all of these special account types or payment types are subs of the balance sheet. Behind the scenes all of these accounts will be run under a general title called sub special account tracking. Within that we will allow you to name the special programs according to your needs. For example, if you want to call your gift cards XYZ Bucks, that is totally fine.

-All of the programs that get setup will automatically inherit a default set of rules. Then we will let you modify those rules to match your company. This may be custom naming, special ratios, values, redemption exceptions, all kinds of rules, etc.

Dustin and I met up on the morning meeting. We touched base and setup a meeting for Thursday afternoon to work on his cultivation stuff. He is doing great and has been a good team player.

I started working on some code review. Didn't get very far. Both Alan and Wayne popped in.

We went through a whole new section where Wayne was explaining and showing us what was going on out in the AWS land. Wayne was the presenter and was showing lots of things. Alan was asking questions and I was taking notes. See attached for the latest notes.

Steve and Eric popped in later on to listen and chime in. Wayne was showing some of the Docker image stuff. He was also helping Steve look at a server and find out what was going on. Good stuff.

Need - drop shipping and special tax tables for that drop shipping

We also had a client express that they wanted to be integrated with a number of other outside ecommerce type systems. Steve was using the analogy of having multiple fishing poles in the water (this ecomm package, this other ecomm package, and this other one - get more clients from different sources and areas).

At the end of the session, Eric and I went over the progress on the code sign-off project for special accounts and special account tracking (customer loyalty points, gift cards, etc.). Still working on things, but making progress.

Working on the special account transaction homepage. This is part of Eric's special account tracking project (sub of the balance sheet and deals with customer loyalty points, gift cards, and in-store credit type stuff). Made some headway on the special account transaction search and homepage (what are the individual recorded details).

Also helped Shawn with getting back into the invoice due date project.

Reviewing code on Eric's sub special accounts (sub of the balance sheet for customer loyalty points, gift cards, and other special accounts). Also working with Shawn to get him started on the invoice due date project. Trying to circle back around and get that project going again.

It must be Monday... We started out on the morning meeting and only Steve and I were on at first. We chatted about the transition over to the AWS (amazon) stuff. We have a number of questions and aren't really sure which way to turn. Steve needs to provide some of our clients with an answer, can we service them or not, and we need to know how long it will take to get the AWS stuff fully up and running. Lots of unknowns, but some great potential. Part of us wants to return to what we know (older stable ground) and the other part of us wants to keep pushing forward (new and uncharted but promising ground). It creates an emotional battle of sorts.

We switched gears and Steve had some questions about a project where he is tying in balance sheet numbers to vendors. As part of his project, he was trying to come up with a switch that we could flip to help us know if a vendor was an inventory (parts or items) vendor or just a normal vendor. As we talked about it, we decided to take it out to an app type level (the 12 main system players). We talked about that and Steve liked that idea. I got him some code to help him get started. It is amazing how much, as we keep going, that the system keeps organizing itself into main player groups and what kind of relationships are needed per system or main player group. Very interesting. Almost like it likes to be organized into groups and related functions. We sure have learned a lot along the way.

Alan joined the meeting and we were talking about some of his projects. He is still working on automating some of the reoccurring invoice stuff. We also talked about having Bryan work on the dynamic field names and settings per main player group. That is pretty deep and we may keep it tabled for now. Also, as we were talking about it, we were talking about how an object oriented programming approach may be a better solution for some of these new settings and defaults. Currently, we build and break, build and break (speaking about pulling and accessing settings). It may be nice to keep and hold some of the persistent or permanent settings and features. An object oriented model may be better equipped for that type of transaction. Currently, we look things up just in time. In the future, we may need to catch and hold those settings and maintain them in the user's session (stored in memory) options.

Eric popped in and we did some check in and follow-up with his code review on the sub special account tracking project. This project is a sub of the balance sheet and deals with special accounts (mini bank account type objects) like customer loyalty points, gift cards, in-store credit, etc. That project is promised by next Monday. I will be trying to focus on the code sign-off this week.

After that, Eric and Steve and I started talking about some of the new look and feel, CSS, and user interface stuff that Eric is wanting to help with. Both Steve and Eric were talking about a virtual "Adilas Cafe" or a global landing spot for the adilas users. This all goes back to separating the users from the main application code. There will still be a tie-in, but we are seeing a bigger need to keep users on the outside as a single entity and then allow them to go in and work or be a part of a corporation. We have many users that  have and/or will need access to multiple corporations, and even be able to bridge across physical servers. Currently, our model is based on users per server and then tied to corporations based on active permissions to those corporations. We are seeing a need to break that down even further and have a master or global user id (virtual pool of users) and then allow them to be bridged to different corporations on a more global scale vs just per server (physical box) vs the possibilities of dynamic cloud networks.

As we got deeper into the conversation about the potential of the Adilas café type model, we were talking about doing mock-ups, flow charts, etc. Eric had some questions about authentication servers and how that would all roll into the mix. We told him that he would need to get with Wayne to get more details. As we talked, we decided that Eric and Wayne should work together in a mini team type environment. As we explored the options, some of Steve and I's concerns (listed at the top of this entry) started to go away. We ended up somewhat asking Eric to be a project manager type role for this transition project between Newtek and AWS. That little tweak in the plan and how the developers were paired up, made a ton of difference and some of the anxiety started to go away.

We need to crate a list of specs for Wayne and what we want the application to do. Plan and play as if for years. We also talked about in-house coordination and communication. That is a huge key and helps all parties involved. Steve was talking about skating to where the puck (pretend we are playing hockey) is going to be. He and Eric were talking about the existing login pages and the corporation chooser page as being the beginning of the adilas café (landing spot or centralized common ground area). Good discussion.

We would really like to keep pushing the ball forward and making each system its own entity. This means having a centralized database controlling users and access to different corporations and/or entities and then having the individual entities having their own database or system for just their stuff. Currently, there are a number of tables that are shared between parties. For speed and efficiency, we really need to split things up more. This may also affect how we are able to bill for storage and processing vs a set monthly system fee. Anyways, as the conversation progresses, Steve and Eric were talking about using the choose corporation page as the starting common spot or commons area. Steve was also saying that he would like the users to be able to go to work (assigned or authorized corporations) as well as go play (demo sites, play grounds, or play sites). Basically, anybody could have an adilas account, and then they could either go into a real site (aka work) or a play site (aka play and testing). Fun ideas.

One of Eric's and Wayne's first item of business will be to do a virtual inventory check of where things are at on the project and what will still be needed and/or stands in the way. That will be awesome. It really was an mini answer to prayers that we decided to team up Eric and Wayne. It helped us let go and be willing to embrace some of the unknowns. As part of that, we are hoping that having the guys work together in mini teams helps us prioritize what really needs to be done and when. Sometimes, by yourself, it is hard to know what needs attention first, especially if it feels like everything is vying or trying to get the input, attention, and/or priority. Crazy stuff, I'm been there before and will be back again.

Steve and I talked about cycling through hardware and how that is just part of the line of work we are in. Later this year, we will need to buy some new laptops and upgrade some of our development environments.

One of the breakthroughs for today was the mini team concept. We have Steve and I, Steve and Dustin and Josh, Brandon and Alan, Wayne and Eric, Shari O. and Pat and Drea, etc. There are starting to be all kinds of little teams. That is awesome.

Shawn popped in and reported on some payroll updates and changes. We scheduled a time to meet again tomorrow. He is also willing to help me out with some of my projects and such. After that, I spent the rest of the session recording notes and trying to get caught up (as good as I could).

Josh joined the meeting and we worked through a few small things. He has 5 files that needed to be looked at. We talked about a few things and he will be reporting back in tomorrow for the final sign-off.

Wayne jumped in and had some questions about where and how we are storing images. We talked about what it would take to get all of those images pushed out and stored on the adilas content server. As part of our conversation, we did a quick search to see how many pages may need to be updated. We got a number around 340 pages that deal with images and/or image paths. All of those files would need to be updated.

Back on the code review project for Eric and the sub special account tracking stuff - sub of the balance sheet for things like loyalty points, gift cards, in-store credit, etc.

Working on code sign-off for Eric's sub special account tracking project (loyalty points, gift cards, etc.).

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.

Shannon and I met and talked about progress. I shared with her that we have 4-5 big projects that are coming into play in the next little while that all have a balance sheet flavor of sorts. We went over those pieces and how they play in. Some of the projects are: expand the transitional invoices and adding in inventory in transit (shown as an asset), new transitional PO project that Will is working on (in code sign-off but stills needs a little work), sales tax expansion project (on phase 5 of 5 and just need to finish some things up), Eric's sub special account tracking project (sub of the balance sheet for things like loyalty points, gift cards, in-store credit, etc.), and sub inventory with mini conversions (deeper inventory tracking and how that affects the balance sheet).

I also spent some time drawing out some changes that are coming with our transition out to AWS (amazon web services - new web hosting model) and things that Wayne is working on. I drew our current model and also what I know of the newer AWS model. We talked about pros and cons and I tried hard to help Shannon know where things are going. Some exciting stuff coming down the pipeline.

We talked about the concept of filtering and boiling things down and using a funnel type analogy to get towards the goal. Sometimes it takes years and years, but we are still making progress and learning along the way. We ended our meeting by using a quote from an author (different Shannon - Shannon Hale) - "There will still be time..." Sometimes that really helps me out, if I'm stressed or something. There will still be time...

Back doing code review for Eric's sub special account tracking project. This is a sub of the balance sheet and will end up allowing for things like reward points, loyalty points, gift cards, gift certificates, punch cards, in-store credit, lunch cards, vendor credits, employee payroll draws, affiliate programs, tiered marketing options, and tons of other special accounts. Basically, we will track all of the special accounts and then connect them to a single balance sheet item. The main balance sheet item will show up on the actual balance sheet. Behind the scenes, we will keep track of all of the tiny twists and turns and individual transactions. The summed up results will then be available for the balance sheet as part of the assets, liabilities, equity accounts, or even phantom accounts (kinda there and kinda not there). Pretty interesting.

I came in late, but Alan and Steve were looking into some Metrc API sockets and matching up things between systems. After that, Alan and Dustin got into some of the Inspinia datatables and how to interact with some of those new things. Alan was able to help Dustin out and point him in a good direction. Steve and I then looked into a balance sheet item called inventory in transit (asset). This is part of the math and code for the balance sheet. Eric popped in and had a few questions to help with his sub special account project (loyalty points, gift cards, etc.).

Wayne was talking about some other options that are available through AWS. Top level firewall rules, XSS (cross site scripting) validation, queues, topics, reminders (SMS), etc. Wayne predicts that our ColdFusion pages will become smaller and more efficient as we offload some of the other code functionality to other tools and/or other applications. So many options. We also talked about new possible options for using and doing custom black box pages as well as custom themes (global or industry specific). We were talking about all custom code and file storage (photos, scans, images, files, media, content) per corp and being able to charge for that. That really takes it down to the corp level and charging for storage and usage.

Emails, paying bills, and light tech support.

Going through code done by Eric for the sub special account tracking project (loyalty points, gift cards, in-store credit, etc.). I was working through master account rules today.

Steve and I were looking into a barcode scanning question from a client. We went in and logged in and looked around and didn't see anything out of the ordinary. We changed the item names and looked in the backend database to see if we could see anything. It seem like all is well. After that, Steve and Dustin started working on some of their production (mini manufacturing) processes.

Eric joined and had some questions about adilas API socket settings and being able to turn certain things on/off through the 3rd party solutions. We also setup some time to work on code review for his sub special accounts stuff (loyalty points, gift cards, etc.).

Tech support and helping Drea out. Wayne jumped on and helped with the backend tech support stuff. Basically, a company was missing a couple of records. We looked and the database had no record of them. Even the auto id numbers totally skipped them. From our point of view, the system should have given them an error message saying that a certain actions were not possible. Anyways, we did some research and got Drea as much information as we could. She will have the client call back two of their customers to see if they could get some data from them. There is no record in the actual database.

Wayne and I then did a little session where he wanted me to look up some small bugs that are showing up in his server error logs. I recorded one of them and we looked at a couple of other ones. Small little issues.

Shannon and I met up and went over some things. We started out and I gave her a demo on a couple of the new things that are being released. I had some struggles with Calvin's Adilas Label Builder, but it got better. I took down some notes and will be reaching out to him. I also showed her a demo of Josh's discount engine and where that is at. We talked about some other converging projects, including Eric's loyalty points and gift card stuff (sub special accounts). We briefly talked about some sales flyer stuff and encouraged each other to keep chasing the dream. sometimes it feels kind of allusive and hard to catch. Good meeting.

This project has been months and months in the coming… it is getting closer and really needs some tight combing, code review, and kicking the tires.

Wayne and Steve were having some good discussions on the new AWS (amazon web services) stuff. Lots of talk about bringing new corporations on and getting them all setup out in the AWS landscape. They were even talking about rewriting our API to match the AWS environment in a better manner.

Calvin was giving us a demo of his Adilas Label Builder app. He showed us a full build from the ground up. We built a PO label and then did a number of live tests. We had Wayne, Steve, and myself on the demo. Calvin is doing a great job. I will be meeting with him later on today to finish up some pieces.

Briefly working with Eric on some local JavaScript validation and questions. He is getting further along on his sub special account tracking project (loyalty points, gift cards, etc.).

Working with Wayne on media/content stuff. He is going through and testing all kinds of stuff on the new AWS environment. Currently, we have provided him a list of some known bugs and he is working through them. That is awesome.

Spent some more time working on the adilas tick list (giant to do list). Still just trying to get all of the smaller projects listed out and on one spreadsheet. That's a pretty big project in and of itself.

Busy morning. Dustin, Steve, and I started out the meeting. We then had Alan join, Eric join, and Josh as well. Steve and I worked on some new code together. I then passed it over to him to test it. Alan reported on where he was at on certain projects. Josh had some questions for Steve and Eric and I worked on his sub special account tracking project (loyalty points, gift cards, etc.). A big majority of the time was working with Eric and making sure we could get his new database install up and working. Because we brought things up from the ground up, it uncovered a few things with our current project. Good progress all around.

Eric and I had a good long meeting. We started out and just touched base. We then jumped off the GoToMeeting for a special client Zoom meeting. We met with a company and talked about 3rd party solutions, API sockets, and ways to integrate between the two solutions. Part way through the meeting and presentation, they, the other company, pulled in one of their main tech people. We then reviewed and somewhat started over. Minor detail.

After the client meeting, we jumped on the 3rd party project and went through all of the pieces. After we were done, Eric was saying that he would like to do more of this type of work. He was getting it and enjoyed it. I also saw him do some clean-up from other developers as he was working. I was grateful for that.

The last couple of hours was spent on the sub special account tracking project (loyalty points, gift cards, etc.). We went in and added some navigation from about 4 spots inside the system (ways to get to the master special accounts and ways to get to the corporation level special accounts), we tested it and then started working on other logic pieces. Good work session.

Eric and I hooked up and did a small session. He was having a login problem switching to a new code base from the repository. We fixed a couple small issues and the other one we at least got to a starting point (where to look for the problem). We also lightly spent some time talking about primary navigation for the sub special tracking accounts (where to put links and such) for things like loyalty points, gift cards, etc. The other thing that we did was setup some time blocks to work on the sub special account tracking project. Eric also has some new 3rd party solutions that he will be working on and coding. We talked about some options there.

Josh and Eric popped in. I helped Eric with a small bug in his sub special account tracking project (loyalty points and gift cards). After that, Josh and I spent almost 2 hours doing some code review on his discount engine. We spent most of the time working on the action page (add/edit and committing to the database). It is looking good and really coming along. This is the first major tool that Josh has created for adilas. Sometimes those first code reviews take longer just learn each other's style and way of coding. Good meeting.

As a random side note, some of the developer like using Zoom more than GoToMeeting. Some of them say that they have less of a delay when using Zoom. Interesting.

On the morning meeting. Dustin was on with me in the morning. Eric came on around 10 am to 11 am. Eric and I worked on some logic for the sub special account tracking stuff (loyalty points and gift cards). The other project that I was working on was some black box and custom barcode generator mapping for a client. Took over three main pages. The PO lines items, the view parts page, and the add/edit parts page. All of those pages have a number of links to the barcode generator page.

First topic of the day today was talking about the talent pool that adilas has access to. Steve and I chatted about a number of the different developers, reps, consultants, and sales people who are helping us to play the game. We talked about how best to keep funding those efforts and endeavors. Good stuff, but you do have to be creative.

I showed Steve an update on where we are for the customer tax category project that I've been working on. We also briefly talked about a new sales flyer and where we are headed with that venture. Lots of moving pieces. I worked on more code for the invoice side of the customer tax category project. This helps with invoice line items being added after the fact and still being able to maintain the correct tax categories if an item is added later on.

Eric popped in a couple of times and has a few small questions. We talked about touching base almost daily until we could get a firm grip on when we could have the sub special account tracking stuff done. This deals with loyalty points, gift cards, etc. Eric also had some questions about doing custom work or internal adilas work. He mentioned, that it would be so cool if we had all of the custom one-off pieces that he has built, inside of the main adilas platform. That would be super cool. In the meantime, we are gaining ideas and knowledge of what is wanted and what is needed. Sometimes we have to play the custom one-off game until we either know enough about the needs and wants of our clients or we get the correct amount of internal funding to build it as a core piece.

Wayne popped on and we chatted with him about moving and migrating a couple of companies from servers to other servers. Basically, a company that has a dedicated box, just acquired a couple more companies that are on another server. They want everything under just one roof on the same server. As we were talking, Wayne had a couple questions and ideas. He brought up the fact that if we wanted to, we could split all of these databases into smaller single corp instances and run them on their own databases vs deploying things in a shared or semi-shared environment. We talked about pros and cons and I shared a little bit of history with Wayne on what we have been calling the world building project. We have wanted to do this (getting people off the bus - splitting up the database) for years and years. Looking forward, I'll bet that Wayne will end up helping us out there. Good stuff.

Spent the rest of the time coding on the customer tax category project, emails, paying bills, and trying to get some verbage together for a new news and update on the customer tax category changes.

We got a report from Alan on the delayed inventory update stuff. You can now save your work, delete/remove some records, reset things, and then finally process the saved pieces. We are really close to getting that launched and online to let people start playing with it. Good stuff.

Eric jumped on and had a few questions. After that, Wayne jumped on and we went over some server things. Wayne is in the middle of a task to move about 70ish corporations from an older data 1 server up to a newer data 11 server. He is just doing prep work and practice runs right now, but building up for the actual migration process. He had some questions and a lot of them are dealing with different files on different servers. We know that we need it (custom code options), but it does make some of the standardization process more difficult. Anyways, we chatted about a number of options and even pitched a couple ideas back and forth about using includes, config files, and database storage of either values or objects (JSON stuff). Lots of good talks and discussions.

Eric came back on and had some questions on how to deal with optional database joins and displaying conditional output. Where this comes from is we allow the sub special account tracking transactions to be either tied to a customer, an invoice, a payee/user, or just generically tied to text entry (not a real database item). This allows our gift cards, loyalty points, and other sub special account tracking accounts more flexibility. I showed him some pages where we already do similar type logic (media/content and flex grid).

In between times, I was working on helping the customer tax category to stick. This is for customers that are say set to a tax category of wholesale, resale, government, etc. They are not taxed, but often a retail item will be setup as normal taxable or with tax included. My current mini project is trying allow the non taxed customers to get the correct auto tax categories as they go through checkout and cart creation process.

Emails and tech support. Recorded some notes from a conversation between Steve and I as we were going over some custom project quotes. Started working on a custom invoice for a client. They provided a number of pages with circles, x's, and lines. I'm just following those notes and building the custom invoice.

Eric popped in and we went over how to record a simple touch history (only record a history if a change is made) for the sub special tracking accounts (loyalty points and gift cards). We also talked about what details we wanted to record when that change was made. He had some other questions about my cart favorite buttons and helping a company get a single button master and then have all other users in that corporation use those master buttons. We talked about what is needed and he took some notes. Basically, we just flip who owns the buttons in the background and change some permissions from normal add/edit/create to view only. Pretty easy.

After meeting with Eric, I kept building on the custom invoice for the client. I stripped out tons of the possible options. I think that they will like it, the new invoice is very simple and basic. Just for fun, I took off: all stock/unit stuff, line item photos, line numbering, tax categories, discount columns, sub inventory attributes, all payments, any possible flex grid, and options for elements of time. Super plain jane, but that is what they wanted.

Alan, Steve, Dustin and I were on the morning meeting. The first little bit was each person reporting on what they were working on and what issues are still outstanding. Steve had a couple of questions for Alan and Dustin. They are following up on different tasks. I spoke with Alan a little bit about our plans for some changes in how the sub inventory and sub barcodes were going to be searched and filtered.

Next, I gave Steve a small update on my meeting with Spencer and Wayne from last week. He asked for some drawings on what was going on. I explained that Spencer was at a turning point where he was going to be needing access to actual data. He doesn't know Adobe ColdFusion very well yet, but he is a PHP master. PHP is another open source server side scripting language. Wayne and I decided that we would let Spencer build out his new prototype in PHP and use the adilas API sockets to get and pass data back and forth. That sort of spun us off into a small discussion on where are we going and how are we planning on integrating all of these pieces. That, of course, is a whole other topic. We touched on the need to build out the adilas API sockets (play at the wall - allow outside data connections) and how that would fit.

Calvin jumped on and a couple of the other guys bailed out. Steve and I had a good talk with Calvin. Our current project with Calvin is an outside label builder for custom and bulk labels. Part of our conversation was helping both adilas and Calvin get our communications being built up and on better levels. We chatted, got on the same page, and will hopefully be back on task next week. Calvin still has some other projects that he is working on right now. Good meeting.

Steve and I then spent some time talking about how the trend is kind of going toward 3rd party solutions and 3rd party build outs and then trying to inter connect them with internal adilas flow and processes. This took us back to a subject of PHP and other adilas API socket connections.

Eric popped in and had a couple of questions. He is building an project for sub special account tracking stuff like loyalty points, gift cards, etc. Some of our discussions today were dealing with page flow and naming conventions. We talked about having a new sub homepage for the special account tracking stuff. We then talked about how the user would have to let us know what special account type they were looking for information on, and then what that process would be like as they walked from step to step, adding filtering, and then finally results with drill-downs. Lots of concept level talks about flow and data. Good stuff and I think that Eric is making some good progress. We'll still need to tweak and refine things, but progress is being made.

Lots of emails and other things, just trying to get caught up and going. After that, Steve and I jumped back on the discussion about PHP, adilas API sockets, playing at the wall, internal vs public files, what servers would look like (just Adobe ColdFusion boxes, just PHP boxes, or dual setup of both ColdFusion and PHP per box). We have some questions that we will be asking Wayne about options and direction. We also made some good break trough's by noting which files and servers were private (owned and controlled by adilas) and which files and servers were public (owned by 3rd party and/or outside entities). Just adding what was public and what was private, really helped the conversation and get both Steve and I on the same page.

What we are seeing is that we need to keep pushing for a full separation between the data (database, storage, and access to the data), the logic (functions, methods, API sockets, and flow), and the actual display (what things look like, where they focus, and what they do or don't do - visual interfaces). Those three things data, logic, and display are huge. The more we separate them, the more modular our application becomes.

We didn't spend a ton of time on this... but all of our discussions were somewhat pointing to the greater and greater need for the adilas market (adilas world) to play a part in the puzzle. Currently, we have a saying "Play at the wall" for the adilas API sockets that we expose to the outside public. That wall is basically the access point between the adilas database and logic and the outside world. We are almost seeing a 2nd wall (virtually speaking) starting to form up. That second wall or outer wall is the adilas marketplace and who has what, who offers what, how is it obtained, or who has made pieces that  virtually are able to be plugged in and/or integrate with adilas core functions and functionality? I'm betting that the open market will end up playing a bigger and bigger role as things progress. Our challenge is how to manage that as it grows. Good stuff.

Went in and met with the folks at Industrial Tool. Lots of great training and other ideas (idea farming and harvesting). We had some great discussions and I took pages and pages of notes. Some of the huge takeaways for me are:

- The need for more toggle on/off settings

- Make things standard vs plain one-off black box code (custom code)

- Customer purchase history and letting that play in as part of the pricing engine

- Need for full and integrated gift cards

- Show/hide discounts (even if they are applied)

- Showing items that are on order (ordered and/or coming in) on part usage pages

- Helping preset customer tax categories pass into the cart

- Being able to flip flop printable invoices based on invoice types - customer invoices go to 8.5x11 and counter sales (quick cash sales) go to the 3" mini receipt format

- Getting rid of all of the extra verbage and explanations on the pages (this is my bad - I was trying to help them know what to do - but it is becoming less and less needed and more just in the way - it may be a great setting to toggle on/off - almost like training wheels)

- Lots of new requests to run the ++ (advanced add or edit to cart line items) off of profit margins vs mark-ups and discounts. This is somewhat industry specific, but certain industries really try to make a certain margin on certain pieces. It actually changes depending on the categories and the items. Pretty interesting.

- Multi-tills and/or cash drawers - how to flag and tag the different invoice payments and transactions

- Vendor discounts and vendor terms - clear out to due dates on the expense and PO side. We also have a huge need for due dates on the invoice side. That project is coming, we just need to get back to it (see code branches BWM-33 and ram-37).

- It sure would be nice if we had a check write queue and/or a bulk bill pay list - currently, most of the bills and checks are done one-by-one. You can trick it and put in a specific phrase and then search the checks for that phrase and you get a quick list, but it may be cool to actually build it out to a slightly better system for paying bills and writing checks. Interesting how everything goes from can you do it once... to can you do it fast and in bulk. It comes down to speed, speed, speed.

Part way through the day, I went to lunch. After lunch and before heading back, I was walking around to clear my head and started thinking... wow, if I could make these requests into corp-wide settings, it would save tons of time and effort in making all of these different corp-specific black box custom code pages. That was a fun concept and I was able to start thinking in an different light/view point. Good stuff.

Steve and Dustin were on the morning meeting. Steve had a quick question about a custom report for owners. We talked about some security hashes that could help the report be more secure. The admin report needs to be outside the secured environment and kinda a quick access link to a quick breakdown report for admin users. Steve has the report built, he is just adding some security and then going to add an access point from inside the secured environment.

I got a call from Russell. We talked for quite a bit about some custom client needs and how best to proceed with those requests. We also spent some time talking about using Bridgerland or BTech to help build out some of the fracture type pieces. The term "Fracture" comes from an idea that Steve had back in June of 2017. Everything in adilas seems to be fracturing and breaking into smaller and smaller pieces. Just discussions at this point, but basically a centralized brain (backend engine) and then a deployable front end that could be hosted on any client server or through a commercial web host. No special setup and a fully customizable frontend interface. The whole thing would talk and/or communicate through API socket connections and back and forth API traffic. We talked about ideas, options, etc.

If I were to put together a small fracture tick list, it would be something like this: (just ideas)

- Customizable look and feel (corp-level, department level, user level, and whatever in between)

- Preset defaults with ability to tweak out the defaults and settings (good starting spot and/or basic structure - starting templates)

- Permissioned out and/or micro permissioned (down to the functions per section)

- Settings for layout, settings for display (show/hide, sort order, aliases, instructions, required yes/no, validation rules, etc.) - As of right now, we are seeing settings on 4 different levels. They are world (corporation or business entity), groups or system player level (customers, invoices, deposits, expense/receipts, PO's, parts/items, vendors, users, stock/units, balance sheet items, quotes, elements of time, etc.), page level settings (what will show/hide, sort order, placement, flow, etc.), and finally, user level settings and defaults. How do I want to play the game (at a personal level)?

- Existing structure and flow, but it could be modified. Basically, a template of the starting procedure and/or process but make it able to be modular (build mini data assembly line type options per procedure/task). Think of our model with the mini bubbles and/or pods. These interface with flow, permissions, time, flex, and mapping clear out to the accounting levels.

- Real in-line database extensions. This allows us to provide a basic starting point (database tables and template flow) but also allows for things to be expanded and/or contracted (lessened) based off of configuration. These database extensions could be data types and allow for numeric, decimals, text, dates, on/off toggles, and even long text or JSON storage.

- Be able to save and build any kinda of report or data export - using existing tools

- graphics, charts, graphs, and other summary type options

- Support of both transactional data (what happens day to day) as well as aggregated (summed or pre-calculated values)

- Digital story telling, using characters, relationships, cause/effect choices, consequences, etc. World building concepts.

- Configurable interfaces and functionality per business vertical - click of button to switch layouts and/or processes.

- Customizable (data or logic hooks or black box technology) on client side, server side, and display and logic sides.

- Responsive and/or mobile ready

- Tons of flags, tags, and special callouts

- Be able to tie everything to time or elements of time. This could allow for groups, categories, types, sub locations, sub phases, sub status, etc.

- The list goes on... Most of the ideas have been recorded somewhere in the adilas developer's notebook pages. A great resource, it just may take some time to review and categorize. 

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Back to other topics, Eric popped in and we made a few more notes and decisions on the sub special account tracking stuff (gift cards, loyalty points, in-store credit, etc.). After that, Wayne jumped on and we talked a little bit about email servers and what is needed there. I spent the rest of the time recording notes and reviewing to do lists. Busy times.

On with Steve and Dustin. We got caught up from happenings over the weekend and both Steve and Dustin had a couple of questions. After that, we then all of us went on mute and started working on our own projects. My first task was buckets full of emails and what not. Setup some sub account stuff for Wayne on the Newtek site to help manage some of our servers, support tickets, and account details.

Eric popped in and we setup some blocks of time to work on the sub special account tracking stuff - first couple weeks in January. This is for things like rewards/loyalty points, gift cards, in-store credit, etc. It will be good to get some dedicated time to work on that project.

On the morning meeting with Alan. We logged into the data 3 server and looked at some database stuff. We had some client questions on the invoice table and it possibly being locked for a client. These are corp-specific tables and only affect each individual client (corporation). Numerous emails back and forth.

Eric popped in and had a few questions. Around 11 am, Steve invited a gift cart company to join us on the GoToMeeting session. I chatted and talked them for awhile. I ended up texting both Eric and Bryan trying to check on some custom gift card implementations. I wasn't able to get much ground there and we may have to reach out to the client directly.

I got a bug report from Kelly on the data 7 server and jumped on that to try and fix it. I uploaded some new code for the fix.

Get Janna new account info to help her with the WordPress site back-up stuff.

Shannon and I jumped on a GoToMeeting session. After we got caught up a bit, we started working on more content for the adilas user guide. A few of the topics of the day were: discounts, discount rules, gift cards, loyalty points, exports to Excel, CSV, and PDF. We are trying to fill in gaps where we don't have much info and/or content for the outline subjects. We setup a time to meet again next week.

Somewhat of a quiet morning this morning. Steve was flying out to Grand Junction, CO, to meet with a new adilas developer. His name is Spencer. My first task of the day was getting a non-compete and non-disclosure document ready for Spencer. Alan popped in and had some questions about discounts for my cart favorite buttons. We went over some options and ideas.

I spent some time adding drill-down links to advanced search reports (PO's and invoices). I chatted with Wayne about digital file uploads and importing inventory for a client. After that, I worked with Eric more on the sub special account tracking project (loyalty points, rewards, and gift cards). See attached for the latest notes.

Eric and I had a work session on the sub special account tracking project. This is where we are going to be allowing rewards, loyalty points, gift cards, in-store credit, and other special tracking needs. We spent most of the block reading over a brainstorming doc and refining it a bit more. We made a few decisions and added a number of new notes. Towards the end of the session, we even added a new payment type (money type) to the data 0 box for "Rewards/Loyalty". Our plan is to hit it again tomorrow.

See attached for a copy of the current notes.

See attached and fill in some info about the meeting. Planning out the next level of the sub special tracking accounts (sub of the balance sheet) for things like loyalty points, rewards, gift cards, in-store credit, etc.

Working with Eric on the sub special account tracking project. This is for things like gift cards, rewards programs, loyalty points, etc (subs of the balance sheet). Eric has been on vacation and wanted to show me some of his progress. We went through some of the master setup pieces and then into the corp-specific stuff. We made a few tweaks, but most of it looks pretty good to this point. Our next meeting will be some additional planning on how the system will start using the new special account tracking and making transactional records hit the database.

Spent some time working on an outline for the adilas user guide. I added about 30 bullet points in the meet the players section. That area had about 50 key topics. I have expanded it to just over 80 topics. I will be releasing them once they are a little bit tighter. Some of the things that were added were topics and subjects such as: API sockets, barcodes, QR codes, black box page technology, check writing, coupons & sales campaigns, email settings, gift cards, GPS & RFID tag tracking, marketing, media/content, merchant processing, mini conversions, sub inventory, third party solutions, etc. I'm excited to work with Shannon and get some verbage and documentation on those subjects.

Jumped on the meeting with Eric. We were working through more flow and logic on the special tracking accounts (balance sheet subs of subs and used for things like loyalty points, gift cards, in-store credit, etc.). We made some good progress on the master level settings and rules (super high up on the adilas admin level).

Eric and I were working on special tracking accounts. He was wanting to know how to create a master list and then have all servers play accordingly. I showed him how we currently use the copy tables and update tables function from the data 0 box to all other serves, including local development boxes. That got him thinking and excited about possibilities.

After that, we went back and started building from where we were yesterday. We are way up high on the add/edit special accounts page (master or universe level for things like loyalty points, gift cards, in-store credit, punch cards, etc.). We finished up the day by having a simple add/edit form, a results page, and an action page. Eric has done tons of custom code inside of adilas. Having said that, most times, he has been tweaking what already exists. This project is a good one for him, because he is building from the ground up. He is chewing it up by leaps and bounds. Really cool.

Eric and I were on the GoToMeeting. He found a small error that was done by another developer. We got him on the call with us and showed him the error. The problem was with a full custom page take over (black box stuff). The paths on the full take over were still referencing the include files as if the file still existed in the previous location (previous file folders and directory structure). We just had to change the paths a little bit, and the page was then able to find the assets and other include files. Minor tweak.

After that, we got Eric situated with his current project and made some plans to hit it again tomorrow on the loyalty points and special sub tracking things for the core loyalty points and gift cards section. We also briefly talked about putting another developer on the project if we keep getting called away on custom side projects. We basically lose momentum and it takes some time to re-transition and get back into the project. Just looking at options.

Eric and I got on and worked on the special tracking accounts (sub of the balance sheet items for things like rewards, loyalty points, gift cards, etc.). Most of the session was spent getting systems updated and new code branches ready to go. There was some small tweaks that we needed to make between Windows machines and his Mac. By the end, we were good to go. He has been released to start coding and making notes on what else if needed. Basically, I setup a super generic file structure, and he will be going in and coding some the pieces and wiring it together. It is somewhat of an experiment. It should be fun.

Working with Eric on the special accounts project (sub of the balance sheet). This will be for things like rewards, loyalty points, gift cards, in-store credit, punch cards, etc. The task today was boiling things down into a small to do list. After that, I made a small clean-up function, wrote some new documentation, and started into the basic page layout and structure. Once that is done, Eric will take the project and start filling in code on the different pages and components.

Eric and I jumped on a meeting. We spent the afternoon working on the special account tracking stuff for things like loyalty points, gift cards, in-store credit, punch cards, etc. Our task today was to build the database structure. I was mostly building things, while Eric was watching and working on some of the next pieces. Once we get all of the pieces ready to play, Eric will be doing most of the wiring of the pages. We created branch elt-2 for the new code.

Steve popped in towards the end after Eric left. We worked on some of his pages and talked about 3rd party solutions and how to help integrate with more of them that offer great functionality and customized solutions. Good ideas. We'd also love to keep up good relations with both Russell Moore and Calvin Chipman. Both are great developers and could bring some fun tools and features to the party. We'll have to see how things play out.

Emails and tech support stuff. Writing updates on the compromised data server from this morning. Light follow-up.

Calvin popped into the morning meeting. We are trying to talk and negotiate between costs and outputs. Some of the discussions had a light flavor between software vs web based. Both solutions are very viable but they do play differently.

Basic rates and such: For Calvin, we are going to be paying $100/month to help him get some reoccurring revenue for his multi FTP uploader tool and his MySQL editor tool. His current commercial rate is between $75 and $150. He is willing to do internal adilas work for $75. That may need to change in the future. We will leave that open.

We went over some short-term and long-term plans for building labels. It gets pretty complicated. We looked at some of the existing models and how they either play together and/or where they could go in the future. Lots of good conversations. We talked about pros, cons, Flash (animate cc), PDF, software, web, API, etc. We talked about fields, tables, mappings, custom sizes, verbage, and tons of other needs.

What angles could we attack this? What about a simple web-based interface where they could basically build the different labels. Name them, save them, and put in basics. We could then use that mock-up (that the users created) as the blueprint for actually setting up the label (a middle person who actually creates it). We could then use Calvin's backend tools to make and/or create the actual labels. Somewhere, we still need to interact with some heavy hitting backend code.

Idea... Go to the label homepage. They get to pick the label size (limited number), they pick where it comes from (source and/or host - 12 main players or web pages - limited number), they pick and build the label based off of data types and mappings (main interface). We allow them to set the mappings and also put in some sample data. We then allow them to save that (just the mock-up), and then we send that info out to the developer. Long story made short, Steve was talking about surfacing some of the building pieces and empowering users. Calvin said - Kinda like making a label order (key word is order - we still need to fill and/or make the order - actual product). That word, "order", was a big key that we got from our meeting. Make a label ordering system as a stepping stone in the process.

Budget wise, we are looking at another $10,000 on Calvin's side (backend code development) and another $10,000 on the user interface (label ordering side).

There are two main sides for labels. Consumer labels and commercial labels. We kinda need both.

Sometimes, Steve likes to break things so that you can come at it from different angles. If it is broken and/or up against the wall, sometimes you come up with other options and solutions.

Overall, a great meeting between Steve, Calvin, and myself.

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Eric popped in around 10:30 am and we then started working on some planning for the loyalty points, rewards, gift cards, and special account tracking stuff. See attached for our latest database design and spreadsheet stuff. He is going to look through things, make a few tweaks, and then resubmit. We spent quite a bit of time talking about pros, cons, and even running fake data through the mock tables. Good two hour session.

Checking in on the morning meeting. I have been out of the office most of the week. Steve and I chatted this morning about the need for new independent developers and getting people into the mix and into the family. There is a real need there. We then merged in some code from his branches and pushed up files to all servers.

Looking over ideas for loyalty points. Lots of good info on element of time # 3778 in the adilas shop.

What is a liability? What are the differences between real and phantom values? We need the values recorded for both real and phantom, the difference is how firm and/or fixed the liability is. Steve mentioned a term called a "shadow account" (that exists, but may not be fully tangible). We also talked about how it is the actual company that is creating these phantom and/or shadow type liabilities. That kinda changes things... it is the company creating their own liability based off of a point system to encourage customer loyalty.

There seems to be two main part of the puzzle. How many points (ins and outs) and what is the value of those points? Lots of balance sheet transactions.

Simple to more complex transactions... simple gift cards or simple gift certificates, basic loyalty points, punch cards, in-store credits, coupons. As a fun side note, some of these transactions are subs of the balance sheet. Kinda like sub inventory but on the balance sheet side. Maybe we need to think about how the transaction takes place. Is there already cash on hand (paid in advance)? or is it just lowering the total owed, like a form of a discount? Who pays for what? What about coupons that a manufacture pays for or pays a part of?

On the main balance sheet items, we may need another switch to help us know if this is a main account and/or a sub account. We may also need to know if the asset, liability, and/or equity account is real or phantom (shadow). This is kinda fun, but we are seeing a fracture that is needed in order to record the balance sheet items. Everything is breaking into sub accounts.

Going back to discounts and special discounts... do we apply the discount to the cart/invoice on a whole or do we have to re-distribute that discount back through the system?

On a different note, we had a request from a client to be able to permission and/or fully turn off standalone discounts. Also, we are seeing that taxes make the discounts more complicated. We have options to do both in-line discounts and/or standalone discounts. Things get really fuzzy as you try to tax, especially with excise taxes and taxing things at the different levels (per item category, per customer type, per inventory type, etc.).

We had a great talk about "bad debt" payments. Don't worry about the words (verbage), think about the concept. That helps to satisfy the invoice (monies owed to us), the taxes are fully correct,  but it is then showed as an adjustment to revenue (rewards, coupons, loyalty points, etc.) on the income statement. Both coupons and loyalty points are similar. It is the internal company basically saying "I'm going to cover that part of the invoice". We claim that that invoice and/or ticket is x dollars and has y amounts of tax. We then cover the invoice by real monies and/or monies that mean something, but no real money changed hands. Look deeper in this. The main difference is the verbage between bad debt vs rewards or loyalty points.

Maybe we should add some new standard payment types such as: Rewards, Loyalty Points, Coupon, In-Store Credit, Gift Card/Gift Certificate, etc.

We are seeing the need for a good mix of user-maintained pieces, system-maintained pieces, and possibly some mixed-maintained pieces (user and system). We are seeing this in the watchers, feeders, standalone declarations, time templates, settings, etc. We need to let them play where they can and need to, but also make sure they have the tools and pieces to get the job done, even if we control the pieces behind the scenes.

Eric would like to check in on loyalty points around 11 am for a couple of hours. He texted me and said that he was unable to meet today due to some things that came up. So, in the meantime, Steve and I had a great discussion and made some good breakthroughs. Good stuff.

Eric and I were supposed to be working on loyalty points and gift cards all day, but we had to postpone due to other pressing issues. I spent the first part of the day merging in files and pushing up new Metrc changes (state compliance API socket stuff) as well as some new general cart/invoice rounding pieces. I then went in and started following an error that was recently added with a target price and a thing called with tax included.

I was following things around in code and then Bryan popped in. He helped me and we tried tracking down some of the new changes. Lots of moving pieces. The biggest issue was keeping track of positive and negative values. For certain things, we needed the values to be positive and then for others we needed to either force and/or allow things to go negative. Pretty deep. As a side note, Bryan and I ended up making a call to Alan who help us out (help, Alan, we can't figure it out). We made some changes and pushed up the new code.

Once we finished with that project, at least we thought that we had finished, we started talking about cross-corp mappings and application flex grid stuff. Bryan and I spent a good half an hour or more going over ideas, concepts, scenarios, and working with sample data in Excel. In the most simple way, cross-corp stuff is like saying x = y, and then you fill in the gaps and/or replace x and y. This could be part categories, invoices to PO's, expense types, or even adilas records to QuickBooks records (cross-application or cross-system mappings)

- talking with bryan about cross corp mappings and application flex grid stuff - lots of drawing, scenarios, and sample data in Excel

- we got told about a new bug with negative my cart favorite buttons being used... similar tax rounding issue.

Light talks about big data and fully tracking all sales clear out to the state, county, and city level. It is amazing how much the word "tax" or "taxes" play into the mix. Lots and lots of changes.

What if we built the application to help record the sales tax information so that it could be world wide. This would have to be on a per transaction basis. We already do this on stock/units and stamp the current tax rates, taxes, and customer location per stock/unit purchase. We also have some built-in functionality where an invoice could be sold from one location and then flipped to a different location and thus changing the full sales tax pieces.

We also talked about some of the underground and black market pieces that will come from some of these choices and decisions. Huge requirements usually drive certain people to a more hidden and/or underground market. Kinda interesting.

This whole conversation is part of what is going on. We at least need to know and acknowledge that some of these changes are going on.

Eric popped in and we switched to talking about loyalty points. One of his main questions was, are we using a line item to lower the total of the cart (redemption points) or are we using some kind of special payment type for loyalty points? Great questions. Eric came back in later and we spent some time talking about line items vs special payment types. What is a loyalty point? Is it a special account that doesn't really play into the financials or does it? Are the redemption of loyalty points a virtual discount or does it affect an actual liability that is recorded somewhere on the financials? Eric is using cart favorite buttons to help setup some of these systems.

We are seeing that most of the people want a standard value for the loyalty point. Some people have wanted variable point values. One of Eric's main question is dealing with the difference between how to accumulate and redeem the loyalty points. Is it a line item or is it a special account or special payment type. We are seeing special payment types coming more into the mix. Are loyalty points a real liability or are they a phantom liability? What happens if the loyalty points are variable? Does that mean that the phantom costs of that liability can change?

We also talked about special tracking accounts... Are these real, like a gift card or are they virtual or phantom like a loyalty point? They could potentially play slightly different. One of the challenged are wanting loyalty points having variable values based on time (dates and times) and/or what is going on in the cart (certain sales, promotions, or campaigns). The variable changing loyalty points could be a problem in tracking what the phantom liability is.

Maybe we could track all loyalty points and gift card stuff in the special tracking accounts. We then allow for the main account types to be real and/or phantom based. That way we could pull a real asset, liability, and/or equity account or a simulated (fake and/or phantom) asset, liability, or equity account. We really need to track all of the in and out values. Then we need to record what happens as those items are used. There may be a point value and a dollar value. They may even be different based on time. The value of time is going to be playing more into the mix on how these points are going to be used. Interesting, the loyalty points are becoming a form of currency and we need to figure out how to apply that. It goes beyond a simple discount and gets into an additional payment type. In a way, the question is what is the value of the loyalty points? Is it a discount or a payment type? We are seeing that people want to have both and even mix things to make it feel like the deal is even better.

We may need some tools that allow them to set things up and then the system will play by the rules that they setup. We need ways to add/edit loyalty points through a virtual interface. Everything needs to be tracked on the special tracking accounts. We can add (manual or automated) and we could subtract from the virtual account through both manual and automated action.

What if we allowed the users to setup the rules if they are using line items to add and subtract on an invoice or if they are using special payment types and how that affects things. Basically, we build the tools that are very generic and flexible and then help the users setup their own goals, needs, rules, and usage options.

After that, we jumped in and worked with both Steve and Dustin on merging in their code branches.

Meeting with Chris - rough budgets - Gift cards (3,500 - 5,000), coupons (1,500 - 3,000), loyalty points, rewards, and virtual punch cards (1,500 - 3,000)

Chris wanted to make sure we got his other details from Russell. Chris is looking for timeframes. We went over what Russell passed over to us on element of time # 3742.

Steve jumped on and started talking monies and strategy for repayment. Possible white label options - going forward. Chris has been a great asset and contributor for years now. The goal is to get the developers funded and pushing on the projects with minimal side tracks (focused). We are looking at $2,000 this month and then $2,000 next month. That would be a great start. Whatever Chris throws over, we'll put it on the balance sheet and then pay it back out at $1,000 per month. Steve will enter things in and then send Chris a screen shot of what was booked.

Different topic - competing with Air B&B - booking timeshares, rentals, reservations, etc. All kinds of people put up their properties and then let it get scheduled out, paid for, and reserved. This seems to be the new way people are booking their vacations and travel. Basically, people have the items (camper trailers, cabins, houses, apartments, condos, etc.) and are willing to rent them and let others use them.

Affiliate programs and referral programs - more extended options - it could go all kinds of ways and get pretty deep. This could also tie into coupons, discounts, campaigns, and even rentals and reservations. Steve and Chris were talking about taking Air B&B type concepts and mixing that with affiliate programs and referral programs.

Working on adilas ecommerce pieces and training details.

Morning meeting. Steve was working on code. I was updating adilas ecommerce stuff. Russell came on and reported on some of his projects.

Information from Russell and Chris Johnnie about coupons, loyalty points, and gift cards.

- Gift cards - be able to get a random number and put it onto a card. The random number makes it harder for someone to use another card (security issues). He needs to be able to scan it and see what is on the card. He also needs a spot to scan the card and have it use that as a payment option. It needs to go full circle. They need to be able look things up, add to it, take away from it, and view levels. Both tied to a customer and not tied to a customer (generic card). Be able to use this in both the normal secure cart and the ecommerce cart. Easy to load card.

- Punch cards - every cart that is $15 or more is eligible. If the cart is a counter sale, they could be prompted to sign-up if they want. Once they are in, the points would automatically accumulate based off of the rules. Once they get to a certain level, say 15 points, they get $10 off of the purchase. They want it really automated and almost a non-thinker type process. They want a quick interface to allow for the sign-up process.Just to recap Notification when a customer is eligible, notification when a customer has points they can redeem. Customers can choose how much they want to pull out. They must pull out blocks of points at a time. For example they have to pull out 15 Points to get $10 off. They cannot pull 10 points and get $7.50 off.

- Coupons - add, edit, copy, delete (permanent hide status), details - coupon code, coupon text or description, quantity, status, type ($'s off or % off), usage (unlimited, limited amount, unlimited no additional discount, limited amount no additional discount) , customer limit, specific item or part id, status (blocked or open or deleted), minimum value to activate, etc. See Russell's page afb_coupons_rules_logic_settings.cfm - branch ram-42. See the link below for the spreadsheet planning.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ANHIdJx6zbV4BM_pZ1biOTmK-SJrKwLUoxuHYMA7BJM/edit#gid=0

10 - 1 with Eric - planning out the loyalty points and special accounts.

Estimated amount Chris is willing to contribute

Gift Cards

$3500-$5000

Puch Card

$1500-$3000

Cupons

$1500-$3000

We talked quite a bit about using the builders and logic (part of the UI) as the master options. The builders might be things like locations, part categories, customer types, and even the item or part id level. Lots of field names and lists to  help us make and generate the rules.

We do have a more complicated issue when we do cross-corp loyalty points. These cross-corp things struggle with pre-calculated totals and such.

We talked about migration paths and getting existing customers into the basic loyalty points as well as getting new customer using our basic adilas loyalty points.

User communities - who wants to join up and put a list of priorities together. We then work and prioritize these features and get them in place as soon as possible.

As part of the conversation, I gave Eric permission to run with the basic loyalty points. He will get a plan ready and then re-present it back to me before going into the coding stage. Good stuff and trying to remove as many obstacles as possible.