Sub inventory and cost controls (packaging) and/or parent/child inventory was started in 2014/2015. The first round was released in December of 2015. Since then, it has gone through a number of tweaks, changes, and sub rounds. There have been millions and millions of child inventory packages over the years since its release. The round 3 project is a rework to make sub inventory and cost controls even more stable and easier to user.

The round 3 project contains the following sub projects:

- Formal Planning – Multiple Converging Projects
- Sub Part Categories & Category Inheritance
- Mini Conversions
- Logic & Output Changes
- Parent/Child Rules & Settings
- Pricing Matrixes & Tiered Pricing
- Simple Sizes & Colors
- Recipe/Builds & Sub Inventory
- Discount Rules & Other Discount Options
- Subs In eCommerce Land
- Custom Labels & QR Codes
- Using Elements of Time To Track Subs
- Sales, Coupons, Campaigns, & Promotions
- Loyalty Points & Special Tracking Accounts

// past funding for earlier rounds

$10,000 paid in by Calvin Chipman of Chipman Software, Inc. Amount was paid in by a loan to adilas, and we have decided to apply it to the packaging project. - Logan, UT. 5/18/15. As an update, the loan has been fully paid back as of 3/26/16.

$10,000 paid in by Adilas.biz to help push the project along.

Working with Bryan on 8/14/19 - took a couple of notes on ways to help speed up the process. See element of time # 4848 in the shop for more details.
https://data0.adilas.biz/top_secret/time_web_gallery.cfm?corp=748&id=4848 - small background mini project that is needed to help us go faster and smoother.

In early working on the new payroll changes that Shawn submitted. This is dealing with county based withholdings and new state calculations for Indiana.

Steve is seeing the 3rd party solutions page extending into a virtual permissions for those outside solutions to get access to any of the 12 main players. We need to show what is available and allow for what windows and doors are open. This is really common for some of the clients that are dealing with oversight or overseeing certain pieces (virtual auditing and such). We need to keep our clients data safe but also need to allow the different parties to allow or dis-allow between themselves. Maybe the secret is allowing the clients to build their own relationships between the possible different solutions and/or outside parties.

At some point, we may need some kind of history of who is opening and closing the API socket windows and doors. That may help later on if we need to figure out who is changing what.

Eric will be popping in around 10 am to talk about loyalty points and gift cards.

Meeting with Anthony Harrington about loyalty points and gift cards. Eric, Steve, and Brandon were on the meeting with him.

- There are tons of daily discounts. It gets crazy in order to manage all of those things.

- There are a number of steps that need to be done in order (on carts and checkout process). One of the things that they would like us to do is - dumb things down and make it more simplified.

- They would love to have preset discounts, sales, and promotions. Also, a lot of the different discounts are based on a day of the week and/or a specific time.

- Eric has done a number of these custom discount and pricing engines. Eric was saying that some of the discounts are not created equal... bogo (buy one get one) vs auto calculating all similar items and then repricing based off of quantity (just as an example).

- Some discounts and promotions will be standard (hoping to catch 80% or more). There may be others that are just plain custom. Those still needs to stay on that level, meaning we may still need the option for custom code.

- Anthony would love to help push the development forward in such a way that the users (adilas clients) could use the system to tweak the system. If they, our clients, need to call a developer all the time, that gets crazy and very expensive. The solution needs to be out to sales and promotions and virtual campaigns. Eric and I have also talked about allowing discount rules and such.

- Anthony has some price grouping and some needs there. Similar to smart group buttons and tiered pricing structures. He would love the cart to be able to keep track of those pricing tiers and virtual groups. He would like the ability to move and manage pricing structures based on groups (even a subset of part/item categories).

- Lots of needs for time based discounts such as happy hour, certain deals, etc. It would be super cool if we could setup all of these rotating discounts and the cart is able to apply those on the fly and as needed. Basically, we need an automated pricing engine.

- Some of these discount rules may need to be built and held in a coupon, sales, and promotions type system.

- Eric was talking bigger volume shops vs the mom and pop shops. They all want that kind of feature but it comes down to cost. If we could build it into the system, it would benefit all parties.

- Eric would like to see a printed list of what kind of discounts they offer. That would help us in the background make sure we can build out the rules that would be needed.

- Anthony would like to know a cost and timeframe. Eric was talking about phases and options for deployment and development. Then Eric talked about building out the standard features, all-a-cart features, and then also being able to customize things if needed.

- They would really like the pricing tiers to work similar to the smart group buttons without having to tie them into a button. Basically, behind the scenes, they have rules (what to do) and assignments (who can play). That is the same basic model that is still needed, just not tied to a button. This may end up being part of the pricing engine. The cool thing would be rules that could also be tied into time and time-based promotions. The higher level (meaning the top level or group level) of pricing really helps with speed to market and ease of use.

- Steve was saying that sometimes it takes years to get a stable picture of what is really needed. That is a huge key.

- Sharing knowledge and helping others be able to run and go forward. Anthony has some great operational experience... we would really love to tap into that. A huge knowledge base of experience. Another huge asset is perspective and vision. Those are both huge assets.

- There is a huge training need. Some people will use what we have but they may not even know we have it. That comes back to ease of use and education.

- Molly popped in - what comes first, the pricing engine or the coupons and sales?

- There are a few main pieces to help everything play in and work together. We are seeing sales and promotions, pricing engines (cart logic), custom labels, sub inventory, mini conversions, discount rules, tiered pricing models, customer loyalty points, gift cards, coupons, etc. They all play together and have similar pieces that need to be coordinated. We know we need all of these pieces, the trick will be what comes first? And how do we pull things together?

- As a side note... when setting up pricing groups, we may need to pull in parent attributes to help us create good groups and grouping.

- Small complaint on packaging and sub packaging, when they add a new one (sub), they have to re-enter the price (every time). They would love it to be tied to a pricing group. They also want to make sure that we keep them in a good process path. They would love the new subs to pull in the price from the group pricing vs setting it every time. They do want to be able to change it if needed, but they would love it that price auto pulled itself into a preset pricing group. This is a big priority to help make it easy and more standard.

- Mini conversions are really needed here soon. The deeper we go, the more we are needing that ability. What they are calling (our clients) packaging is really mini conversions of sorts. There are a number of clients that are doing internal manufacturing inside their systems. We need to help them out with that. Also, when the customers buy things, they want to be able to search for one item (not 50 million), and then be able to buy and sell those items in different sizes, packages, and conversion pieces. In the frontend, they want it really simple. In the backend, we need to mix and blend and cross-tie things in and maintain the correct relationships. That is really huge.

- The more we help to automate things, the less chances for user error.

On the morning GoToMeeting session. Russell, Alan, and Eric popped in at different times. I helped Russell merge in the new WordPress news and updates page. It pulls an API socket feed from our WordPress site. Alan reported on in-line discounts and we'll be pushing more on that project this week. Hopefully, it will be ready and be pushed by end of the week. Eric had some questions about tiered pricing and where we are headed with that. I told him that we may end up using the existing my cart favorite buttons section and then beefing that up in order to handle system-wide pricing tiers.

I spent some time looking over a large email thread that has numerous questions about calculating taxes and how things get rolled together. I was in on the client's site looking around and running my own test calculations.

9009 E Arapahoe Road, Greenwood Village, CO 80112
Phone: (303) 799-4555

See attached for notes, scans, files, and GoToMeeting recordings (videos)

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Day 1

We did some intros and then got started. Danny Shuford did a demo and did a great job. See attached for some notes. Here are a couple of the highlights from what I took away from it.

- Solution for solution minded people

- It can be molded to fit your industry

- Changes keep happening

- Big open view of the whole system - it wasn't made for just one industry

- Brief overview of the framework

- Based on user permissions and valid logins

- All web-based and cloud-based

- Features and benefits - focusing on the benefits

- CRM - log notes, additional contacts, photos, and other media

- We all deal with money, but in the end... we are all dealing with people

- Note to me... Danny went into the customer table and doing the custom page settings on the customer fields. This is for things like the name, aliases, sort value, show/hide, etc. We really need to keep pushing that idea and concept forward. People really want that level of control. It just takes a ton of work to cascade that through the full system.

- He talked about news and updates

- "Our Interface" - what do you want? We don't have a single set interface, we let you choose

- Customer queue

- Lots of moving parts

- Drea - "Adilas is play dough"

- Inventory tracking

- Reporting and building your own reports

- Labels and changes to the requirements

- ecommerce

- Payroll

- Accounts payable and accounts receivable

- Print checks

- emails

- Customize and working with the developers

- Security and back-ups

- Steve - Showing some hidden gems

- Small demo on flex grid

Next, I gave a small section on the adilas model - core concepts - and intro to world building. I will upload my outline. I'm also hoping to upload the video as well. I don't have any notes because I was the presenter, but here is my rough outline:

- We will be bouncing around

- Start with a guy holding tons of stuff

- Talk about the needs and how to organize things

- Go over different tools... head and mind, paper and pencil, word processing, spreadsheets, databases, software packages, web or hosted solutions

- Go over systems and how things start to inter-relate

- Cover the 12 main players

- Cover the 12 business functions

- Cover the 12 main world building concepts

- Mix and blend to get the desired results

After lunch, Alan Williams did a presentation on highlighting and exploring new features. He started out with a fun group activity and a game of sorts. Minimal communication and we had to figure out a path through a virtual mine (bomb) field. It ended up having forward steps, side steps, back steps, etc. We eventually, as a group, got through the mine field. Really fun exercise and it opened up some conversations. Here are some notes from Alan's presentation:

- Little active - mine field - group activity - finding their way

- How does this relate to the adilas process?

- He then showed some of the steps that we have taken to build the application

- Side steps, back steps, and forward steps

- Going into advanced add to cart and sub functions

- Request from the group - no standalone discounts - Make that a permission and/or a setting. Standalone discounts can and do cause tax problems.

Next, Steve Berkenkotter lead an open Q & A section. The first question was asking about any updates with the Metrc (state compliance and tracking system for Colorado). That got pretty deep but exposed some of the challenges that exist between connecting and maintaining dual systems (adilas and Metrc). Here are a few notes:

- Questions on Metrc

- Some new tables and new limits from Metrc

- Auto processors - running nightly stuff to help sync data between systems

- API and server to server connections

- Challenges that exist

- Mixing old and new functionality

- Transfers

- Sales

- Using elements of time to track states, status, phases, and groupings

- Getting back at the data - reporting

- High level vision

- Question from Pat - 280E - new tax and accounting rules - what can we write off as cost of goods? What about unitizing expenses?

- Steve - How the IRS is looking at things and expecting things

- Steve - loves numbers and how he brings his skills to the table

- Work in progress - attributing a value as part of the accounting

- The progression of building and breaking

- The system is able to store the data (huge piece of the puzzle)

- The system may be customized to get the data back out and/or to get the data in (another huge piece of the puzzle)

- Template building

- A consultant spending time and configuring a system before it is released to the end users

- Small questions on CSS and changing certain page colors

The last section of the day was a presentation on historical stepping stones - what have we learned and why do we do what we do? I did this presentation so I will add my outline. Once again, we are hoping to get some videos uploaded to this element of time incase someone wants to watch the videos. Here was my outline:

- Where did we start? Spreadsheets, static web sites, zip disks and sending inventory around from place to place

- Fixing current business problems

- Where is your pain? Start there

- Letting operations lead - Use the adilas interactive map to help show flow

- At some point, accounting will need to follow

- Checkpoints and flowing data

- Gap between operations and accounting - drawing the gap, horses and carts, and old school T accounts - light history of accounting

- How does time play into the mix

- Comparing operations and accounting in a static environment

- Comparing operations and accounting in a dynamic environment

- Progression - drawings of the data assembly line and how it ended up at a 3D data assembly line

- 3D world building - x=time, y=resources, z=space or depth - draw out the box or cube

- Black boxes & white label options

- The whole deal

We didn't quite make it all the way through the whole outline, but we covered a good portion of it. Towards the end, we went around the room and got some feedback. Those documents and notes will also be uploaded. The final request from the class was to have adilas allow the "adilas version" spreadsheet to be shared with the world. It was originally created in order to get a bank loan, but Steve said to release it to the world. Great meeting and good energy on day 1. Good stuff.

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Day 2

We spent most of the day working on and going over inventory tracking and point of sale (POS) features. See the attached videos. We also had some great demos from Calvin Chipman on building custom labels and one from Dustin Siegel on some new code and features that help with plant phases and cultivation. Here are a couple of notes from some of their presentations. For a more complete version, you may need to watch some of the videos from day 2.

- Calvin and the adilas label wizard - He gave a slide show and then started to interact with the label builder. After he was done, we asked him to show some of the behind the scenes pieces of his label builder. Good stuff.

- Vaporware - the product doesn't fully exist (yet) - part concept, part actual, not yet fully functional

- User designs the label (step 1)

- User selects the label from inside of adilas (step 2)

- The label(s) are created and displayed on the fly, based on stored instructions, mappings, and special code. (step 3)

- Part of the demo was showing sheet labels with a data merge, labels with barcodes and QR codes, static text, dynamic text (user can interact and change things), data mappings, graphics, etc. Pretty cool.

- Small talk about PDF's, Flash, & HTML and CSS - printing options from the web - Our choice is PDF currently

- Interacting with printers, browsers, and other hardware pieces

- PDF - actual size vs shrink to fit size

- Questions about font point size and possible limitations for compliance reasons - We will leave that up to the users, that way we don't have to chase all of the compliance rules and regulations.

- We talked about settings and maybe limits that could be stored and looked up on the fly.

- Possible template options

- Be careful saying a compliant label

- A good disclaimer to keep things legal according to the local and/or state requirements - put the liability back on the companies and/or users.

- Small story of a company and internal programming wars and war stories - Different places that Calvin has worked.

- It may take a hybrid solution of both software and web

- Small demo of the actual builder - Calvin is going to be taking that and putting it more into a wizard-type format. Currently, you have to be pretty techy to use it. Round 1 - prototype.

Dustin gave a presentation on some new cultivation processes and some dynamic mapping. We had some technology issues, the demo was going slow (Internet) but the concepts were awesome. Imagine going from a manual one-by-one process, to a bulk streamlined process. Huge time saver, plus tons more data points, capturing the whole story clear down to minutes, seconds, locations, phases, etc. Pretty cool.

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Day 3

Busy day today. We got into sub inventory, why we do sub inventory, customer relationships, elements of time, flex grid, ecommerce, custom emails, group mass texting (GMext Pro), and a presentation by Kelly Whyman (super power user from the Denver area). We are going to be posting the videos and the notes from the day. Good sessions. Here are some of the notes that I took while others were presenting. Once again, see the attached media/content files for videos and other digital notes.

These are some notes from Shari O.'s presentation on CRM functionality

- CRM - The real acronym stands for Customer Relationship Management - Shari O.'s acronym for CRM is - Can't Remember Much - pretty funny

- Good data in = good data out - Fill things out completely and make sure you get good data in

- The client log and how to use it

- Leaving personal footprints in the sand - using the log

- Addin gin a user-maintained history... internal communication

- Cover you own rear-end

- Being business appropriate - have good manners when recording details and data points

- Custom emails

Drea did a demo on how to show/hide transfer packages inside of the adilas/Metrc inventory pages. Here are some notes from that:

- Transfers in and out and how to hide things

- Everything in adilas is flexible

- This new functionality is only a week old

- Talking about manual clean-up and automatic clean-up - doing side-by-side comparisons

- Using the data tables and being able to sort and search data - almost on the fly - re-writing the page based on the data.

- Some of the new CSS cards, tabs, and such - really look super cool and it seems more intuitive - it also makes it look more modern.

- We would love to keep adding new data tables and more options

- As we keep going, we may need more clean-up options

Calvin game a PowerPoint presentation on GMext Pro - This is his group mass texting solution. He did a great job and I think that people really liked it. Here a few notes that I wrote down.

- Pretend like you are a client

- Communicating to a large group or large groups (plural)

- Pitching GMext Pro - great demo and presentation

- Some of the stories of huge companies and how changes have happened and how those big companies weren't able to keep up. WordPerfect and Blockbuster were some of them. Major game changers entered the market and could do things better, faster, and cheaper. People gravitated to those new options.

- Technology happens... embrace it and thrive

- Mass texting and single text notifications - similarities and differences

- Phones and phone numbers - with mass texting, you are basically buying phone numbers so that you can send more texts at a time. Each phone number can only send 1 text per second. So you may need 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 phone numbers to get all of your texts sent out.

- Problems with people giving out the wrong phone numbers (bogus numbers or wrong numbers) - that can break your marketing campaigns - too many wrong numbers and you get reported as a spammer.

- Ways of opting in and out

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Day 4

Final day of training for this go around. We started out day 4 with a group session on tips, tricks, and best practices. We spent quite a bit of time going over settings, permissions, and parent attributes for items. Steve then did a whole session on the three main parts of the balance sheet (assets, liabilities, and equity). The topic was intro to adilas backend office and functions. Steve took the words backend office and tried to flip it to - let's put the owners in the driver seat vs trying to drive from the back of the plane (pretend they are trying to fly the plane from back in the bathroom with the doors closed). Great session.

The afternoon session was talking about BI - Business Intelligence & Big Data. The group talked about databases, data, and how to both get data in and out of the databases. Lots of fun examples. We then has some other Denver power users jump in and do demos on tiered pricing and smart group buttons, and another one on the process of doing a full inventory reconciliation and full inventory count. Great info and good sessions.

The final session was supposed to be on the adilas model - vision, future, and wrap-up. We were all too tired, so we just chatted and went over a bunch of the things that we learned from the training session. We got some great notes and tried to clarify a few items, topics, and concepts. Pretty casual ending. Great people, wonderful ideas, excellent participation, and memories made. A great training session. Here are some of the notes that were taken while others were presenting:

- Molly presented on parent attributes for items - think of tag or ways to categorize things

- On parent attributes - for example: say you have an item but want to show different brand names or characteristics - Say you are selling shoes... You may want Nike, Converse, Adidas, etc. Or running, walking, hiking, trail running, etc. These would be good parent attributes or tags.

- Parent attributes are huge for ecommerce searching and creating tags for different items

- Russell did a great job on so many different features - we would love him to keep building more features

- Easy setup

- Building your own little shortcuts

- Parent attributes are used for labels, sales, ecommerce, searching, filtering, etc.

- Treat parent attributes like a way to build your own database... eight use the flex grid and the custom fields or use parent and sub attributes.

- Both parent and sub attributes are unlimited and they have a proper data type such numeric, dates, text, toggles, and drop-down lists. That really helps when putting data in and also when querying the data to get certain results back.

- As an idea... what if we build out both parent attributes and sub attributes to all 12 main player groups, inside of adilas. You literally could build your own one-to-many database relationships. The main 12 player groups are deposits, invoices, users, vendors, customers, stock/units, expense/receipts, balance sheet items, elements of time, quotes, PO's, and general inventory items. Currently, parent attributes and sub attributes are only available for parts or general inventory items. Think how cool that would be if we pushed it to the next level...

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- Small note from a meeting during one of the breaks... what is the internal adilas funnel to report an error or a bug? Who gets put on that project? We need to figure out our own process and communication funnel.

- Bryan and Molly and others... funding some of the consultant projects - what is the short list and then where are things at. Basically, what do we have to work on and what are the priorities of those pieces?

- Shannon may be part of this funnel that we are trying to build out

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Back to the main training even... The next session was Steve Berkenkotter and Shari Olin - going over financials and adilas backend office functions. Steve pretty much ran with this subject and did an hour long power session on the three main parts of the balance sheet (assets, liabilities, and equity).

- CPA homepage interface

- Inspecting what we expect - you have got to look at what is being delivered as a final product (actual items and/or tasks or services)

- Going back to the beginning - balance sheet homepage

- When you get a new system, we setup a default bank and default location

- Problem with batching... Say trying to remember 30 days back and/or not getting data and information for a long period of time. It kinda leaves you guessing and/or missing some of the details

- Steve - Think of flying a plain... try to be ahead of the plane... where is it going - often pilots try to think 3 tasks ahead of what they are doing

- Views of the balance sheet - a trial balance - working and checking mode

- Assets, liabilities, and equity

- We covered the difference between the income statement (P&L - profit and loss statement) & the balance sheet

- Values and tax laws

- Depreciation and schedules

- Life cycle - length of the life of an object and/or an entity - time and a schedule to lower a value (usage & wear & tear)

- The IRS has setup the tax game... They want you to play and even play up to the lines that have been setup - think of a game - play to the line

- Where you put things in very important

- Small discussion on double entry accounting - history and pros and cons

- Skate to where the puck (hockey) will be

- The formula is the most important part of it

- Passing things like a hot potato... basically moving things along the data assembly line - roll call accounting

- A balance sheet is a snap shot in time

- Talking about the profit margin and where does that come in to play

- Small holes in the ice - things that are either gotcha's or thin ice (not all the way done)

- Some of the guys and gals were saying that we need - big dumb animal pictures - super simple instructions

- Accounts receivables - Think of that as they have your inventory or they have your endeavor (a promise to pay for something) - basically, they owe you money

- You have to know the story - sometimes the numbers tell the story but sometimes the story tells the numbers what they mean

- Liabilities and hidden liabilities - be careful there

- Hidden costs

- Triggers

- Payroll and payroll taxes - this is a huge sink hole

- Sometimes we can't do things due to the technology - as that opens up, we have more options

- Auto processing and calculating needed values in non-peak times that could then be available for other reports

- Fall backs, redundancy, auto-syncs, and re-syncs

- Turtle up, sometimes the servers will shut down and pull in their legs - kinda like a turtle protecting itself

- We need an all encompassing system to help steer the ship - think platform or system

- Owners - who holds the liability

- Steve - analogy of the tail wagging the dog vs the dog wagging the tail - who is in charge & which way do things flow?

- The owner needs someone who is a decision maker and/or gate keeper

- What is the game plan and do you have buy in?

- The POS (point of sales and inventory tracking part) is only a small part of the puzzle. Very small compared to the whole business realm (world).

- Abundant model - you have to imagine a line of people wanting your services and standing in line - next, next, next

- The backend - really, this is the pilot's cockpit and/or the driver's seat

- Absorption (in take) model & attributing sub costs over time

- Dustin - I want "this" (meaning adilas & underlying data) to argue with my boss, not me.

- I need a business tool & now I can run faster & better - thank you

- Equity

- Net Profit - it comes from the P&L - one of the only connections between the income statements (P&L) and the balance sheet.

- Investment - how was this company funded and/or formed?

- Fracture - just having fun - it keeps doing it (fracturing) on its own... maybe let it keep going and play accordingly

- Change "backend office" verbage to the cockpit or balance sheet.

Towards the end of the day on day 4, we had a couple of power users show some demos and such. We had Josh do a presentation on my cart favorites and smart group buttons (tiered pricing). Drea made a suggestion that you make the pricing tiers as dummy proof as possible. They even pushed the ending values clear out to show a visual warning to the person using the buttons. The other major request was for this feature (buttons and tiered pricing) was dealing with allowing these buttons to be time sensitive for sales and promotions.

We also had Drea go through and show an inventory update and how she does a physical count and then an inventory clean-up. She would pull reports, export data, show/hide columns, add columns, print things out, and have her people go work. Then she showed how the system would take those over and short values and push them through an update PO (internal tool for updating inventory counts). Pretty cool. As we go along, we will need more clean-up tools.  Clean-up tools make things look better and help to give users a peace of mind. We also talked about trust issues and how sometimes it is tough to trust and/or trust people. All of that plays into the mix.

My final note about the training sessions is that those who played with us, live and online, really had a good time and we all learned a lot. Good times, great food, and wonderful people. Inspiring sessions. If you want more details, check out the media/content pieces (notes, excel docs, scans, and videos for more info).

Just for fun... Steve, Dustin, and I were talking about the cartoon adilas dog concept. Steve had a colored prototype of the little adilas dog and we were talking about it. See attached for a colored prototype of the little dog adilas. As a question... what will I train my little adilas to do today?

Steve was working on some changes for ecommerce and being able to show tiered pricing out in ecommerce. Alan popped in and had some questions about in-line discounts for my cart favorite buttons. We are trying to see where they need to be attached. We are seeing three possible options. One is on the exact search (known item or known sub item), as a standalone or cart as a whole option, and also as part of the smart group buttons (tiered pricing). Alan is going to check more into this and get with a client who is looking for these options.

Wayne Andersen popped in and help both Alan and Brandon with some server stuff. He is implementing some server monitors that check services, CPU usage, RAM memory usage, database activity, and other monitors. He gave Alan and I a small tour and had us setup some things, in order to play.

On the morning meeting with Steve and Dustin. We started out with some light catch-up on what everybody did over the weekend. Steve had a question on some ecommerce stuff. He is working on getting some tiered pricing out into ecommerce. Bryan Dayton came by my house to get the Dymo label printer. He is working on some custom labels for a client. Wayne popped in and gave us some updates on the servers. Having someone dedicated to watching and helping the servers out will be huge. Alan was on as well, working in the background while the meeting was going on.

Steve was showing us a small demo of some of his tiered pricing out in ecommerce. We had Kelly come on and gave him some feedback. It is literally crazy to hear what they, the users and consumers, really want. It gets super crazy and they want a multi-flipping gymnastic display with super easy functional and beautiful at the same time. The deeper we go, the more things are really flowing and trending towards more configuration settings and then being able to display things in a really simple format. Another thing that I am seeing is the need for specialized and specific interfaces, per business vertical. It is crazy how much people want and how quickly they want it. That makes for a tough mix.

Creating a layered approach seems to work better. The user experience is huge. On that same level, we are seeing a growing need for a developer to code it and a designer to help with flow and the user experience.

As Kelly and Steve got deeper in the ecommerce demo, they, were asking for more searchability, more multi select, more JavaScript show/hide filters and menus, etc. They want the moon and even demand it. Kelly would like to do a different session where they, (Steve, Kelly, and Dustin) go in and do a look around on other ecommerce sites and get ideas of good/bad/ugly and then make a plan from there.

These are some questions that are going on in my head, who is coordinating all of these decisions? How is it all going to work and play out? Who is funding what and who is driving what functions and features? Assuming that we have the funding, who is going to plan, design, and code it? Huge demands and huge questions.

The conversation started rolling over into complaints about look and feel, server up time and/or perceived up time, and other perceptions for the users. They were talking about levels and costs to get to those levels. It then got into a discussion between web, on-sight servers, software, hardware, hybrid solutions, apps, mobile, etc. What are the expectations and what is expected?

Kelly wants us to get pricing on what it would cost for this and that. Steve came back and was talking about how the system keeps growing and developing and who is going to pay for this and/or that. Kelly then was talking about costs and choices that need to be presented to the clients. If you want this and that, you need to pay for this and that. If you only want a smaller set, you would hope that you only need to play for that piece.

Steve was talking about the cost of, even say, your worst employee? It most likely will be $2,000 to $5,000 per month. What is the cost of the adilas system? Say maybe $200 - $400 per month. There is a known disconnect, the adilas system provides tons of functionality, but yet, the price is itsy bitsy tiny and therefore sometimes perceived as less important. The conversation then turned to how do we support the bigger clients and what are their needs.

Wayne popped in and was reporting on servers and server stability. FTP and FTPS - normal and/or secure file transfer protocol issues. He had some questions on how do we keep the servers up to date, synced up, and how do we manage the custom code (things that are different per server or per corporation). Custom code is somewhat of a wildcard piece and/or variable per server. We talked about core adilas code and custom code and how they relate and interact. We also talked about ways to manage custom code and who has what code and/or reports (we need a system of recording who has what and what it does). We have had requests on the client side - am I running custom code? We have also had requests on the tech support side - are they running custom code? We have also had some developers ask the same question - are they running custom code? Kinda interesting - lots of different angles to cover and what not.

I got a call from Bank of America to talk about some term loans and/or revolving business credit lines. I was on the phone for 20 minutes and the rep is going to be sending us some information. They have a couple nice looking products that have way better interest rates as compared with Kabbage and other high interest options.

Steve and I were talking about the future of software of a service is - we do build a product that has as many permissions and features as we can see to solve the needs. The future is that the clients want to customize the results and/or the output. They all want some kind of specialized output. Each client wants to mix and blend the variables in a different way. This could be seeing the data in a certain way (report and/or dashboards) or they have a slightly different process (add/subtract certain steps). Steve is seeing that there is a cost to switch systems, so we are hoping that our clients have basically, choose your platform and then invest in your solution to make it almost your own. Custom solutions that fit people's needs and how they want to play.

Sometimes with bigger clients, you actually get beat-up more and they still may not be happy. We need to find the clients that are happy with us and even bring us donuts... :) We want to find the correct level for us and our company. Bigger is not always better. From Shannon - it is an abundant model. That is awesome.

Picking your battles and multi-concept decision making. That is quite the game. Fun, but very challenging. Question - who wants to play? Great, let's play. Lots of indicators, you just have to make decisions according to those indicators. Adilas is a giant idea farm. We will keep building and breaking things. That is somewhat of our model. We want to help businesses succeed. Those who want to play with that model, we love it, let's play. On the financial side, we are so glad that we don't owe anybody huge amounts of money. That is freeing to the mind and the soul. Good stuff.

This is on a different note, we would really like to circle back around and see where we are at on the accounting side. Most of our current efforts are still focused on operations and operational flow and process. There is some huge potential for future growth in that area. We need to keep working on and refining our plan. The other area that could really use some loving is the user interface and the look and feel. There is a constant progression from one thing to the other. That is fun and exciting to see and even revisit those pieces.

Steve jumped back into a recap of where he started with the coding and development side - simple HTML and web stuff on the old steps to success. As you get deeper and deeper, you keep needing to step outside and get deeper in the complexity and background pieces. Lots of moving pieces under the hood, but it looks super simple on the outside.

 Steve and I are realizing that we can't do this whole project by ourselves. We have a great little team and we are even refining things within that model. That is exciting. It is the team that wins the battle, not an individual. We are learning tons and tons about the software as a service (SaaS) model. Our plan it to keep going at the current pace, keep building, and keep listening. Our plan is to run as fast as we are able within the bounds of not running faster than we are able.

We are happy to keep building up the core pieces. We are seeing numerous outside parties that are catching the vision and building out more and more custom stuff.

On a call with Steve. We were looking over some tiered pricing options out in ecommerce. We did some coding, testing, and playing with the options. We also spent quite a bit of time talking about menu level selling. This is a small analogy to a restaurant menu, but menu level selling is basically saying, what would you like? Once we know that, we, inside or the user fulfilling the ticket, actually appropriates the correct item. The ecommerce part of it is just like a dinner menu, super vague, but it gets the ticket started. I think Steve was really getting it and buying into the menu level concept. Good session. 

Steve reported about his meeting with Spencer yesterday (flight out to Grand Junction, CO). It sounds like Spencer is quite sharp and also really likes to work with CSS, user interfaces, and graphical look and feel stuff (UX or GUI stuff). That would be really cool. We could really use a good designer and maybe even a person to help train us on what to do as well. I would be super stoked on that.

Steve had a question on how to filter some data out in ecommerce land. His current project is a work around for showing tiered pricing out in ecommerce. We started out looking where he was at on the normal big huge pages (ecommerce searches and search results pages). That was pretty deep, so we did a full test page and coded a small sample file to get us the info that we needed (concept and database level). It was a good exercise and we literally went clear back to the beginning and brought up the small test page from virtually nothing. That exercise helped both of us realize more about parent attributes and where and how things are stored in the database. That project was originally done by Russell and Alan, so we knew about it, but didn't really have deep hand-on knowledge. Good stuff.

After Steve and I finished, I worked with Dustin on doing some sub filtering on his custom cultivation pages. Basically, we ran a pre-query to get certain matching records and then then used those records to filter the next major (actual) query. We then worked on some dynamic AJAX calls. It was working if we called his helper files in smaller chunks, but it would break if we passed too many requests to the helper and builder page. We did what we could and eventually I recommended that Dustin get ahold of Alan to work out the deeper details.

Alan and Steve were working on some tweaks for ecommerce. They have some new code that helps generate tiered pricing code and they were debugging some of the pieces. Around 10 am, Wayne popped in and was giving us some information and an update about the servers and what things he was looking at as far as thresholds and matrix. He is really helping things out and is able to watch things and really get things more and more standardized and monitored. That will be a huge help. I'm really excited about that.

Eric joined and had a number of questions. For example: How do we flag the transactions to know what type they are? (manual, double tuesday, normal, auto, redeem, etc.) What about tracking rules and history changes for the rules? What about changing things (rules) right in the middle of the day and/or middle of the transaction? Eric is thinking we may need a way to change things and then publish and/or commit changes in bulk. That would allow small tweaks to happen and then fully wait for all other changes before really committing things (stages). We talked about a few of these things and decided that we will use 3rd party error logs to track rules and changes. We also decided that we would not do the publish and/or commit changes in bulk. For now, all changes will be live as they happen, one by one.

Alan and I were on the meeting and went over a number of projects that are currently in the works. We went over some needs on the sales tax project. We decided to do one more major push on that project and then push up the code and get things going. We have been close on this one for awhile, but it keeps getting hung up with the moving black box (custom code) target.

Alan reported on his permission and user project. This is a project that breaks users and permissions into a more object oriented model with services, logic, and database access objects (DAO's). Basically, our existing code base checks a three-way connection of user to permission to corporation on every page in the entire system. A lot of that data doesn't change very often. So, in the background, we are spending time and resources checking relationships that are fairly stable. Some pages have between 10 and 20 permission checks. That is 10-20 trips to the database for data that doesn't change that often. So, we are starting to cache (temporarily store) the data in the session scope. If nothing changes, we'll start using session or memory checks vs full database checks. If anything does change, we reflush the session cache and then go from there. This reduces the number of database trips by tons, if you take each page, used by x number of users per day, all with active database checks and queries. Great savings on time, resources, and processing.

We also went over a couple of other projects such as a round 4 for sub inventory and ways we could speed up some of the manual processes for reoccurring invoices, reoccurring merchant processing payments (credit card stuff), and tying things together in a better flow environment. Good meeting and lots of good progress on multiple fronts.

On the morning meeting with Steve and Dustin. We started out trying to track down a bug on the data 10 server. We finally figured out that a couple of the database tables were missing a couple of columns. We tracked down the problem and got it fixed. Josh and Hamilton from Full Circle popped in and gave us a small update on their progress. Bryan Dayton joined us and had a few questions about sub inventory and getting correct pricing for an API socket connection. We talked about how prices are determined based on possible options (order of operations). First, does it have any tiered pricing (quantity discounts), then to the sub, then to the parent item. Lots of deferring from one possible place to another.

That conversation and session (subs and getting correct pricing) turned into a small talk about the need for mini conversions and pushing the ball forward in that realm. Crazy how things keep going deeper and deeper and what not. Later on, we ended up talking more about the tiered pricing and how it gets kinda crazy with per item prices and total prices (back into a known total for a certain threshold). Things get pretty deep, pretty quickly.

Emails and tech support stuff.

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

4.46 - My Cart Favorite Buttons

-These are basically preset code that help you to sell things, organize things, or create visual checkout processes. You can tie them to existing searches, exactly to specific items to tie to the cart, you can tie them to recipe/builds, or even stack, group, or turn them into tiered pricing models.

-Originally they were designed to be user specific and they still can be. However many companies want them to be one master set for the company. Either way will work and you are also able to copy, view, and share buttons as needed.

-As far as organization goes, you can name them, add photos, stack them, group them, color-code them. You can tweak out your buttons to whatever fits your needs! For example say you wanted a certain group of items to be orange or purple, or if you were a deli you could have a button that said Desserts and nested under that button you could have pies, cakes, cookies, sodas, ice creams, etc.

-There are multiple different kinds of buttons - you can have Flash buttons or HTML buttons depending on your interface. Certain devices, operating systems, or browsers work better with certain kinds. For example an iPad does not allow Flash and would use HTML. Switching between button types is very quick and easy.

-Some companies even like to run their entire POS with just the buttons directly or something called a split cart mode that allows them to see and click on their buttons while viewing the shopping cart screen.

-One kind of button is called a smart group which allows you to setup your own tiered pricing structures. This can go as deep as you would like to go and one of the secrets behind it is rules and assignments. The rules are where your price breaks come in, typically based on a quantity type model. The assignments deal with which items or product are associated with that set of rules. All of those are one to many relationships and that button is able to hold all of the related functions you have set for that button.   

4.76 - Tiered Pricing & Pricing Engine

-Tiered pricing deals with being able to change prices based on quantities. This can happen in a couple different ways. One you can have a number of preset rules, where certain quantities get certain price breaks. Or two, you can run specific discount campaigns through a discount engine.

-There is a thing called smart group buttons that allow for rules and assignments. Here you can setup rules, price breaks, quantities, custom assignments, who gets to play and what, custom descriptions, and even custom barcodes.

-There are a number of custom availability options as well that can be built right into smart cart logic and/or using sub inventory attributes to help control pricing.  

-Additionally there are some other things planned called mini conversions. This allows you to differentiate units of measure and quantities. For example say you wanted to sell water by the cup, by pint, by gallon, by the barrel, or by the drop. Mini conversions would allow you to do things like that.

-Prices are a variable and we allow that to be manipulated.

-If you are at the sub inventory level we allow you to set different prices on your sub inventory and that can track through the entire system. You have full control over direct sales prices of packages.  

Met with Shannon to go over the tools that we use. This is some research on a topic called new school accounting. We are trying to get some information for the adilas user guide. We were reviewing some notes from yesterday about some topics that I was talking about with a buddy on a hiking trip. See this element of time for some of the details. As we were going through it, I was drawing and showing Shannon what some of the things meant. Fun session.

https://data0.adilas.biz/top_secret/time_web_gallery.cfm?corp=748&id=4736

As a side note, We had both Eric and Drea join our meeting at different times for some internal tech support type stuff. Eric had questions on showing progress bars, spinning loading images for big uploads and data sync processes. Drea had questions on rounding, discounts, with tax included, and smart group buttons (tiered pricing). We ended up going in and doing some math to help us know what was happening and going on. Lots of moving pieces. Also, we recommended to her that she talk to the client and maybe recommend using the corp-wide setting to help with invoice rounding. That way the client could have their invoices go out the door without any extra cents.

We did two new branches and got them all merged in and uploaded to all servers. Bryan also kicked off some graphics my way that need small tweaks to help with white label display stuff (taking off the adilas logo and what not). We talked about another tech support question from a client and how to interpret smart group buttons and tiered pricing structures. We ended up going and looking up some documentation from the web/API socket documentation. Bryan will get back with the client and make sure that they understand what is needed and how to interpret those values.

Bryan and I met up and talked about possible ways of getting and showing discounts. See attached for our scratch page. As part of our conversation, we ended up going out to the server and looking up certain values in the database to see what options were being used. We looked up automated discounts, customer types, individual customers, parts/items and their settings, tax categories, parent attributes, sub attributes, smart group buttons (tiered pricing), different manual and standalone discounts, corporation settings, custom cart logic, menu boards, and black box code. Lots of options.

Dustin, Steve, Josh, Eric, and I were on the morning meeting. Each of the guys checked in and then bailed out to work on their own projects. Eric had a number of questions dealing with showing some of the discount options and data. Discounts are so crazy... We have settings, tax settings, percentages, dollars off, bulk discounts, tiered pricing, customer type discounts, etc. It can get crazy. We are also seeing a need for more documentation out in the API socket land. What do these methods return and how can we get to that quickly.

Shawn and I were touching base on 2020 tax and withholding updates. We also had Josh join the meeting and he asked some questions about tiered pricing stuff out in ecommerce land.

Working on some discount and my cart favorite research for Josh. He is looking at a possible project to add discounts to my cart favorites and also take the my cart favorite buttons and the group options (tiered pricing levels) out to ecommerce. Here were a few things that I found:

searching for "my cart favorite" in the developer's notebook -  from 1/1/7 to 12/31/19 - sort by oldest first - then do a sub browser level search for the word "discount"

https://data0.adilas.biz/top_secret/time_web_gallery.cfm?corp=748&id=3659 - working on in-line discounts and wanting to extend them to my cart favorite buttons

https://data0.adilas.biz/top_secret/time_web_gallery.cfm?corp=748&id=3764 - need to expand the my cart favorite buttons - a client wanted it

https://data0.adilas.biz/top_secret/time_web_gallery.cfm?corp=748&id=4032 - more need and heading towards discount engine with Josh

https://data0.adilas.biz/top_secret/time_web_gallery.cfm?corp=748&id=3666 - mixing of buttons and discounts

https://data0.adilas.biz/top_secret/time_web_gallery.cfm?corp=748&id=4137 - three ways to tie-in discounts on buttons

https://data0.adilas.biz/top_secret/developers_notebook_home.cfm?sort=ASC&q=tiered%20pricing - multiple entries with tiered pricing (may have to sub search in the browser for the words "tiered pricing") - as a side note, some of the tiered pricing pieces started to come into play as early as 2011. Interesting. Still a big need in end of 2019.

4/20: 27.44

from 4/14: 30

Up to 3/1: 26.48

from 11/19 through 1/1/2022: 112.4

11/18: 15.56

11/17/21: 17.5

10/21: 12.08

10/18: 38.04

10/5/21: 27.07

John is working on this:

2/25/21: Notes from today's meeting with KW and SM. Also from another eot that I just found today.

1) Choosing the hour is available for the everyday option. When you choose a day or a range of days, you should have the everyday functions of adding time frames. Multiple per day would be great ie 9am-10am, 10pm-11pm (Happy hours- only Monday through Friday)

2) Settings that allow the discount engine to connect to e-commerce!! 

3) Possibly the discount happens in the cart and not when added to the cart. (In ecomm only adding one item at a time) This will help with the buy x get y. *We did determine that the limit of how many line items can  receive the discount happens in the cart, so it seems there is already coding there for this.
Minimum =needs to pull from the cart info and not from when scanned.

4) Adding functionality that allows for multiple categories and multiple items. Currently, if you choose one category you can assign specific items. If you choose multiple categories you do not have the option to assign specific items.

5) A snow owl pop up so you can sort the vendor list or item list as they are super long. Would be great if the vendor list only included inventory vendors, and even better only vendors who are associated with the categories or items. 

6) Not imperative but an add or edit or submit button at the top would be helpful.

7) Not imperative but would be nice to show in an item if it is linked to any discount engine items. Similar to how it shows that an item is connected to a smart button. Could go right there next to the smart buttons.

**There seems to be a weird scenario, where if you have the wrong vendors populated in the list for the item that you choose to discount, when you add that item to the cart it doesn't recognize the discount. Kind of goes back to limiting the vendor list.

Adding other notes: Everything on this date was quoted at $5000.

6/9/2020: Notes from meeting with Kelly regarding upgrades/fixes to discount engine:

1)Currently for each line item you add through the discount engine, it creates a description in the non printing notes. This can get messy for searches. Possibly make this a permission- do you want this to print? Or, only print once.
2)Most people want to price items more than they want to give discounts. 
3)Needs to work in e-commerce.

Josh will be finishing up phase one of discount engine this week (9/11/19). 

Buy X get Y (a more flexible BOGO). This has been asked for quite a bit by clients. Josh estimates this is a larger scope, as additional fields would need to be added to the database. Estimated time would be 2-4 weeks.

Buy X Get Y
   -  Categories for X
   -  Categories for Y
   -  Parts
   -  Vendors
   -  Time Periods
   -  How many max uses
   -  Make any purchase on Friday, get a free joint

Buy 2 Get 1
Buy 5 Get 2

3/13/20: Molly specific requests: Updates requested, including improvement for: Tiered Pricing, Buy x Get Y. Corrections for Buy X, Get X: not just Line QTY Requirements but Add Total QTY requirements so this works for people who scan. 

11/25/19: Not sure how high on the priority list this is. Putting it down in the list for now.

One client experiences that the discount engine takes quite a while to load (I haven't see this, but Drea did see it on this clients system). Wants to add buy x get y.

Interested in having boxes next to the days of the week so you could run a special Mon, Wed and Fri. 

Have the vendor list after the categories, and if you only choose one category, choose the vendor, and only have that vendors items populate in the list.

Can you exclude specific items from the discount, the way you can include specific items?

Discounting based on key words.

Molly and Spencer were talking about phase 2 in their woo-commerce project. It is a cross between woo-commerce and a backend adilas API socket integration (codenamed wooAdilas project alias). They were talking about some of the newer Adilas features such as customer loyalty points, discount engine stuff, gram tracking, tiered pricing models, etc.

They would like to get their hands on more of the backend database information on some of these newer topics. We talked about possible custom API sockets, new public facing API sockets, or even passing virtual cart data back and forth. As the discussion progressed, we even came up with an idea of a database storage record called a cloud cart that we process and fill in the data and then pass that back to the user through the API socket connections. Just an idea.

At the end of the meeting, we talked about another project and which developer would be the best fit. Molly is doing great and headed in the right direction. She has been interfacing with the different developers very well. That is awesome. She gets my vote. Good stuff.

Meeting with Jonathan to go over some progress. We haven't met in a few weeks due to holidays and what not. The meeting went well. Jonathan and I were on the whole meeting. Steve joined us in the middle for a part of it. Here are a few of the things that we did and covered:

- Review of the education mode - see the screenshots. The education mode allows a user to turn on/off additional helps, tips, help files, verbiage, videos, graphics, etc. The user can turn things on/off to keep the interface more clean and streamlined. If they need more help, it is available at the touch of a button. Side note, added this link to a small video on the education mode on 8/14/23.

- Review of the invoice interface with some fake data. Jonathan is working on showing mock-up data and how it may look and flow, as the user interacts with the system.

- Talking about style guides and standards - design systems - This is how we will end up standardizing the look and feel over multiple pages, components, reports, and features.

- Components and using consistent assets (visual and code resources). Both in the design and in the code - design/code once, use many.

- Talking about mobile development and more needs for mobile ready pages.

- We also talked about the placement of certain eye candy pieces such as graphs, charts, and other stats. Leaning towards the reports pages and/or section.

- We briefly talked about Jonathan's research on fracture and breaking up the system into smaller pieces. Being able to have the mountain of tools and options (features and benefits - current adilas system) but only showing what is needed (turned on/off and properly configured) and streamlined per industry and per company within that industry (making custom software easy). Basically, the ice-burg model. As we got into this, we ended up talking about the core product (the main adilas platform) and how we could allow for industry specific interfaces and settings to play over the top of the skeletal type model.

- The skeletal type model deals with the underlying systems... imagine a person with just a skeleton structure. You could then put normal clothes on that skeleton structure. Pretend this is core adilas (plain jane vanilla). Then you could dress that person with industry specific clothing to get all types of different outputs. Every industry has a different look and feel, verbiage, style, flow, etc. That is like putting on specific clothing on the skeletal system.

- Towards the end, Jonathan and I were talking about the shopping cart and how that part of the system really needs some loving. So many pieces converge on the shopping cart and point of sale interface (POS). It is pretty awesome. Here is a small help file on the shopping cart - click here. We talked about some of the known pieces that converge inside of the cart such as smart cart logic, customer loyalty points, tiered pricing structures, discounts and discount engine stuff, inventory tracking, sub inventory, mini conversions, labeling, coupons, payment solutions, sales and promotions, etc. Once it hits the cart, it gets put into the database and starts its life cycle. We talked about how the shopping cart and things that flow into it and out of it are kinda like the heart of the application.

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

MVP - minimal viable product/plan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Coupons, promotional codes, referrals, etc.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- They love the bulk update cart functionality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Help file on barcodes - https://data0.adilas.biz/top_secret/help.cfm?id=413&pwd=cart - barcodes can really speed up shopping carts and there are tons of options. This is an area that could still be developed out further and enhanced. Just an idea.

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

.3/27/20: Steve will knock out a and c (may need some help and input from Jonathan W. for c) 3/26/2020: a)Currently, when you are looking at an item with tiered pricing, if you click on the image or the name of the item, it takes you to a page where you can add that item to the cart, but it doesn't show the tiers, only has one box. These links should both go to the same page as the "see option" page that has the tiers.

c)where you are adding quantity to the box for the various tiers (currently on the see options page) it would better to have a drop down of 1- 10 or whatever decided upon number so that shoppers knew to put in one number and not ie 3.5, which will mess up their cart.  This would be a default setting. Use a piece that is easier to use on the phone

Working through code logic with Steve. He is working on showing tiered pricing out in ecommerce land. They, our clients, are using parent attributes to make that happen.

I was also doing email stuff and recording notes from last week.

5/7/2020: Tiered pricing logic for specific unit of measurement. see quote for more info.

5/8/2020: 

1. Add fields for Tiered Pricing ( see attached for more info)

6/26/2020: Seems to be resolved

6/12/20: Bryan will work on this

Met up with Danny to talk about his project of adding in assignment options to the add/edit items page for my cart favorite buttons called smart groups (aka tiered pricing). We went over some of his current direction and worked on taking things to the next steps. Mostly a mini training session while working on the project.

Part of the morning meeting with Steve and Danny. We helped Danny with his new code to add smart group button assignments (tiered pricing) to the add/edit parts or items page. Steve also gave a report of some of the things happening on his side of the fence. Lots of moving pieces. All we can do is just keep going and adjusting. That seems to be what we do, daily.

Met up with Danny to go over some of his new code for assigning smart group buttons (tiered pricing rules and assignments) when adding or editing a parent part/item. It's looking good and coming along. Danny and Steve have been working on this project to help Danny with his skills and tasks. As part of our review, we had to get pretty deep into some logic, tables, sub tables, rows, and columns stuff. Most of the logic is in place, we just need to make some surface type changes.

The original goal was to do code sign off for transition invoice project and the restore to cart project. Alan and I met and checked in. He is pretty deep into balance sheet logic and making things match up. I'm so grateful to have someone else looking over that code. Good stuff.

Bryan had a question, so we jumped on and tried to figure it out. He is going to look deeper and then bring it back up. It was dealing with parent attributes out in ecommerce and custom tiered pricing based on the parent item attributes and selections.

Towards the end, I spent the rest of the time recording notes and checking emails.

On the meeting with Bryan and Steve. We got pretty deep into looking at code and ended up finding out that it was a setting (user data) problem not an actual code problem. Bryan took some notes and will get back with the user/client. Both Steve and Bryan were working together for some of the session.

Meeting between Eric, Cory, and myself to talk about order of operations of getting items into the cart. We have a pretty advanced mix and we just need a way to virtually control the order of operations (what to do first and what has precedence to something else). For example: Say someone scans a child barcode. If we find a match do we add that to the cart or do we also check to see if that same child or parent is tied to a tiered pricing structure (my cart favorite buttons and smart groups)? If yes, do we auto add the perfect match or prompt for more info? Anyways, there are a number of decisions that need to be made. Also, not every company wants to play the same way. It comes back to settings and being able to virtually configure, even to the order of operations and/or logic tree, on how the application processes the calls and the data. Interesting stuff.

Eric jumped on the meeting and had some questions. We were talking about auto associating tiered pricing with barcode scans (my cart favorite buttons - smart groups). Emails and tech support.

Eric needed some help with a project to help and search for sub inventory and sub barcodes. There already exists some code that does this. The new twist deals with smart group buttons or tiered pricing. We now need to search by barcodes and have it figure out if it should play into the smart group button stuff. Lots of back and forth and testing his code locally. He is getting super close. Good stuff.

Met with Eric and helped him push up his new sub barcode setting. This new corp-wide setting allows a sub inventory barcode to be scanned and it checks to see if the parent or sub item is tied to a smart group button for tiered pricing. If yes, it prompts for a quantity to tie into the tiered pricing matrix. If not assigned to a smart group (tiered pricing), it just adds one to the cart, like normal.

Emails and tech support stuff.

Danny and Steve were talking about sales and having a buddy along with you. If you are all by yourself, you tend to get depressed and demotivated - in some ways. A buddy really helps to pick you up and bounce things off of. You don't feel like you are alone.

Eric joined and was asking about building out some of the off balance sheet items and off sheet liabilities for customer loyalty points. Basically, a real liability but not part of the main math on the balance sheet. We also briefly talked about watchers, feeders, and triggers. See this link form some other research on the subject. They were also talking about how 3rd party integrations get really tough and you can't take them out the full way just because things get so deep.

Steve and Eric were talking about the pricing engine, the discount engine, tiered pricing - lots of options there. They were talking about expanding parent attributes, smart group buttons, dynamic QR codes, barcodes, and advanced label options. All tied in with pricing, labels, and tiered pricing.

The topic changed into some project management and project planning options. Including a list of requirements, scenarios, design options, and the whole meal deal. Looking beyond the current project and how it, the current project, plays into the bigger whole (system thinking). Once we know the project scope, we could then setup timelines and estimates. You have to have all of the pieces in order to really provide the whole meal deal.

After Eric left, Wayne, Alan, and myself were talking about frameworks and options for code and building code. A framework is a standard way of calling things, linking to things, ways of storing and organizing assets, and all the way into deeper hierarchical levels. They were talking about a product called ColdBox and how that may play into the mix. Most frameworks use some sort of MVC type model. Here are some other related topics to MVC (model view controller). An HMVC is a hierarchical model view controller.

Lots of pros and cons were being discussed. Including who will do the research, experimenting, deciding, training and teaching - once a decision is made? What do frameworks do? What do they not do? How can you customize them and what tasks fit nicely under a framework type model? We also talked about our existing, home grown framework and how that works. Alan had a number of really good questions and seemed very versed on the subject. Good discussion.

Our last topic for this meeting was an error with file uploads and images. Wayne is going to go in and add some logging and see if that helps us figure things out. It doesn't happen all the time, we are trying to figure out what it is that causes the errors. One of the tough ones...

Cory, Steve, and I going over projects. We just got a request to limit the ecommerce logins and the ecommerce hours of operation. Most people want their ecommerce site open all the time, but we got some requests where the client wants to deeply control who is logging and when they can buy and/or purchase things. Kinda interesting.

Steve and I talking about settings and even getting multiple settings (kinda a grid of sort). This would allow for things like, allow login yes/no, allow online bill pay yes/no, allow message marketing yes/no, etc. We already have all of those settings, but what if someone wanted to control when those things happen. Right now, there is just a single master switch for each of those pieces. The matrix (grid settings) would be more of time based thing per weekday. So, basically, we go from 3 or 4 settings to multiple per day of the week. We talked about pros and cons of doing this. Yes, you get more granular control, but you also make it a little bit more complicated. There are definitely pros and cons.

We then got into a discussion on building out the logic for the tiered pricing schemes. currently, we use a set of rules and assignments to make things happen. We are seeing even deeper needs and wants and wishes. Pricing can get so tricky at times. The ground keeps moving under our feet. Some of it is just display and smart logic but some of it is deep deep stuff. We call it smoke and mirrors, but sometimes it even goes beyond that (almost to artificial intelligence - A.I.).

Eventually, the conversation lead to gram trackers, mini conversions, and being able to mix and blend quantities, weights, and deeper inventory tracking options. As we keep going, the boundaries keep getting pushed further and further. Very interesting.

The last topic of the day was in sales. We were talking about what makes a good salesperson. They tend to be really nice and/or a virtual man hunter. It can be really hard to find that perfect mix. We also talked about the pros and cons of small clients vs bigger or medium sized clients. There are pros and cons to each of those options. One thing that we are going to try is to include some training and setup money when pitching the system. Instead of charging $350 to do a setup. It really needs to be up around $1,000, just so that we can get in some good training as well. That is important for the sticking factor (having them enjoy it and stick to it). Anyways, we are learning as we go.

Helping Steve with some looping logic and prefilling arrays to help match with his other math and pagination options.

John, Cory, and Alan checked in and gave reports. We ended up looking up an edit PO cost bug. It was recording an extended cost for the main parent item not the individual cost per item. We got it fixed and pushed up the new code. Small discussions about different projects, new settings, and sub inventory rules and logic.

Steve and Alan got into a discussion about web pricing, tiered pricing, and items out in ecommerce land. Lots of moving pieces.

John, Alan, Cory, and I got on a small weekly update. John and Cory were touching base on projects and priorities. After that, Alan and Cory touched base on some projects. Alan is working on sub inventory, tiered pricing, and had a few questions about sales tax on subs and tiered pricing. Good reports from both of them (John and Alan).

After the other guys left, Cory and I spent some time going over projects, code sign-off procedures, next steps, and cause and effect chains if there are errors or issues. We touched base on the paypod project scope and also the custom data push for Emerald Fields and custom database tables that they need.

Cory and Alan were chatting and touching base on some projects. Alan is working on the transitional invoices project and how to recalculate prices based on tiered pricing. Alan is also working on breaking things into different objects and different levels. Those may be objects that are specific to a subject or objects that exist within a certain playing field (like out in ecommerce land). He also reported on some changes to sub inventory and sub inventory objects and logic (new objects) out in ecommerce land. Lots of refactoring and experimenting. Once we figure things out, at different places, we roll back around and try to implement those pieces in other areas (like the internal shopping cart or within the secure environment).

Alan and Cory then went over some Metrc and delivery bases questions. Some of the discussion was dealing with options for auto processing certain pieces and/or values within the delivery API sockets and functions.

After Alan was done, we switched over to meeting with John and getting a report from him on his projects. Cory and John were chatting about updates and small tweaks that are still needed. We are getting closer on the payroll project for the holiday chooser and timecard flags and total time project for payroll. We still have a few details to work out and refine but getting much closer.

Cory and I touched base on a couple of projects. Alan and John then joined and gave us some reports. Alan reported on his sub inventory model and his unit testing. It was going good but it is currently breaking. He will check this out and push the ball forward. His sub inventory model is being worked on outside in the ecommerce area. Once we get it working good and smooth out there, we will bring it inside and replace some older code with the newer object model based code.

Alan then did some reporting on some Adobe ColdFusion training that he participated in. He had lots of notes. These are a few of the notes that I took from his notes (secondhand notes).

- On the Application.cfc's - using the request scope - great place to put actions that need to be done or checked on every page.

- Lots of info on the cfc's and how the onRequest methods and code works. Also notes on onApplicationStart, onApplicationEnd, onSessionStart, onSessionEnd, onRequestStart, etc. Places to put code that gets called and used over and over again.

- ORM - Object relational mapping

- Lots of new ways to auto create getters and setters.

- Being able to handle mapping in both directions - one-to-many and many-to-one - this was a way of using a cfc (component) as a super simple database type structure without really having the actual database. We may need to look into this one a little bit deeper (need some clarification and more info).

-  Error handling and using try/catch better - Currently, we mostly use a catch "any" to do our error handling. They were recommending that we use special try/catches with type database, type syntax, and then the general "any" catch.

- Security stuff and watching for spoofs and things coming from other or outside sites. There were ways of passing tokens, generated on our site, and then looking for those tokens on the action pages. There were also ways to flip flop and rotate session values. Basically, let them login, set session scope values, and then auto switch certain values just to make sure it was a valid request from our site. Lots of little security ideas and hack prevention stuff.

- They are recommending that we use a new pdf tag called cfhtmltopdf (cf html to pdf) vs the older tag cfpdf - faster rendering and more options to offload the work to another server.

- Setting properties and then getting those properties to create auto getters and setters.

We encouraged Alan to keep checking for new code, keep learning, and keep pioneering some of these new concepts and new code options. Good stuff.

After that, Cory and Alan were talking about ecommerce and subs and parent line items, rules for picking and fulfilling packages assignments, tiered pricing, etc. They got into some order of operations. Cory and Alan were also talking about other ecommerce needs and options.

John reported in. He has been busy moving and getting settled in. He has made a small proposal for the year end payroll and tax forms (W-2's and 1099's) that he would like to get approval on. We haven't had too many developers create their own proposal that want to get approval. Interesting. I think he is asking for more documentation for his projects vs what we normal give him. I think he is lightly asking for more guidance vs flying by the seat of his pants. Lastly, Cory went over some other projects with John that we need his help on. They are the discount engine and the adilas quick search stuff. Good meeting.

Alan was showing Cory and I where he is at with the transition invoices out in ecommerce land as well as the restore to cart functionality inside the main system. He did a demo for us and showed us items with tax included, with discounts, with changes to the cart, etc. He also showed us tiered pricing out in ecommerce, back and forth between the customer facing ecommerce and user facing backend tools. It is looking good.

We went over some light logic and tweaks on the restore transition invoice to cart (inside the secure part of the system). Towards the end, Cory was asking for more communication and even a virtual blow by blow type approach. This has been a long (duration and depth) project and we need to report to the client that wanted it. They have been patiently waiting, as we knew that this one was pretty big with multiple pieces or facets. We are hoping that the whole thing should be wrapped up in 7-10 days. We'll see as there are still some small variables. Anyways, good report.

Alan, Steve, and Cory were going over some rounding options out in ecommerce land. Especially dealing with tiered pricing and advanced cases. Just trying to come up with solutions. They were talking about rounding error buckets, maybe going out to 10 decimals (I was voting against that - we are already at 5 decimals), and implementing certain rules for splitting subs and which ones to use. The subject also went deeper into J.I.T. (just in time) special cases and even into talking about mini conversions and getting into that realm.

Steve and Cory were talking about looking up projects in bit bucket (code repository stuff). Being able to check on commits and branches. They were then talking about different industries and how they are financing some of their developments. Lots of games that people play and how do we fit into that mix. While Steve was still on with us, Cory was reporting in on some meetings that she had had with Kelly dealing with the adilas label builder and sub inventory attributes. Both of those subjects seem to be heating up a bit.

Our current goal is to focus and try to get some small victories (projects being done and across the finish line). Cory and I spent some time going over projects. We talked about the need to test everything. Even small stuff. We have had it bite us before. Next, Cory and I looked into a possible bug in some settings. We looked and looked and couldn't see anything quickly. We may have to jump in deeper, when we get a chance.

Shari O. popped in and had some questions about getting a new internal email server. Our current solution has been giving us some problems lately. We don't change any code on our side and it works great, all of the sudden it will be down, and without any changes on our side, it all of the sudden starts working again. Kinda crazy. Shari O. calls it the gremlins or email gremlins. As a side note, later in the meeting she popped back in to let us know that it was working again. Random.

Wayne joined the meeting and got Cory and I up to speed on a few things that he is trying to work on. Performance tweaks.

Cory and I then started going over her list of possible projects, quotes, and estimates.

- Need quotes for inputting sub attribute data all at one time upon PO creation (start with build page)
- Bulk update sub attributes interface
- Mapping of EOT (elements of time) data to sub attributes (settings for cultivation and manufacturing)

Along the way, we were talking about options and settings that relate to the concepts of the data assembly line, recipe/builds, showing subs in the packaging and production pages, and managing recipe/build output better. Lot of talk about bulk edit tools for sub inventory attributes, batches, phasing, sub locations, and moving subs along a known path or virtual assembly line.

Dealing with the data assembly line concepts, I was telling Cory how we setup both rules and assignments for smart group buttons (tiered pricing buttons). I was mentioning that we could use something similar to help setup and do the mapping between elements of time, sub phases, sub locations, sub groups, and monitoring the progress of certain things. We need the rules (what or how to do things) and the assignments (who or what to connect or monitor). Using the two pieces in combo (rules and assignments) we could then have the computer and/or system help us monitor progression and progress. They are good at that, they just need instructions and the who, what, when, how, and why and they can do those jobs over and over again.

As we keep rolling more and more towards the concept of fracture (future adilas project) I would really like to keep working on the data assembly line concepts and using rules and assignments to get the correct flow and mapping in place. I see that as important as we keep going forward.

Quick sales meeting. We are finding gaps in older systems and seeing needs. We are going to try to fill in those gaps. We can do so much more, but there is a need there and we could get our foot in the door. We are looking for pain points and then help them improve and keep going. We can mix and blend and mix and match between our 12 main system players and 12 main business functions.

Steve and I spent some time looking into a complex data structure that he is trying to build out. This is for a 3rd party menu system. We also spent some time talking about being able to build out a small custom website for our clients. Some of them don't have anything and need some small contact us pages, about us, and sort of a homepage of sorts. We could just add those pieces to the ecommerce site and be good to go. Just some ideas and thoughts.

Steve is going to be playing with parent attributes and tiered pricing. He already has a small, hardcoded solution but wants to build it out a bit more and make it more dynamic for ecommerce transactions. Internally, we use a thing called a smart group that has rules and assignments but in ecommerce, we need to make it a little bit simpler because the users/customers don't have as much control or power.

John had some questions about some of the pages that he is reworking. He is working on look and feel and adding in responsive design and page layouts. After John left, Steve and I had a small chat about elements of time and where we are heading. Working on more time, event, and calendar based settings along with options for online customer facing booking and scheduling. Good stuff.

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.

Back to the main index for the master adilas plan

Master Adilas Plan - Jellyfish Model

Brainstorming Ideas and Topics:

- How big do you want to be? – See also the internal questionnaire responses and survey - tons of good info there - almost a mini plan by itself. Also, question 7 on the survey has a whole write up on the adilas jellyfish or jelly fish model and explains it further.

- The adilas jellyfish model - see attached - covers almost all of the departments and sub sections of what we are trying to be as a company. It is not the main product, but more of our internal and external departments, areas, and general areas that we will keep refining and working on.

- Possible numbers for the jellyfish model. Going from top to bottom and from left to right.
1. adilas.biz
2. Admin
3. Monthly Reoccurring Service
4. Sales & Marketing
5. Setup & Training
6. Tech Support
7. Design
8. Custom Code
9. Consulting
10. R&D
11. Project Management
12. Internal Development & Maintenance
13. Adilas University
14. Adilas Marketplace
15. Adilas Cafe & Community - Adilas World
16. Databases, Networks, Servers, & IT

Areas, sections, and departments in more detail:

** for me - go deeper into each section **

1. adilas.biz

• Are we going to stay the same entity? Are we the same or are we different entities? Are we rebranding? Are we piggybacking?
• What version are we on?
• Adilas.biz or adilas lite? Branding? Marketing? etc.
• The thing that keeps us all together is the reoccurring monthly services subscription for the main adilas.biz system. It has been the glue that keeps us together.
• Offering upgrades from ship A (current adilas) to ship B (fracture or adilas lite)
• What are our goals for ship A? What are our goals for ship B? Are we building it up to sell it? Are we going to be replacing ship A? How do you transition between the two.
• We want to make our current product better. It then grew into a full or bigger rewrite. It seems to be changing more and more. Originally, it was pretty small changes.
• Timelines to get things done? What will it take?
• Ship A will be great salespeople for ship B, once ready.
• If people change from ship A to ship B, there needs to be an increase or at least a re-evaluation of monthly fees and services.
• Ship B, we are planning for tiered pricing and dynamic billing based on functions, sizes, usage, storage, and preset packages.
• Ship B, they can toggle on/off different settings, include other features, and change what they want. All of this will reflect on dynamic billing options.
• Talking about future plans - selling it, royalties, secession, retirement, etc.

2. Admin

• The admin's role is to manage the budget, make decisions as to the direction that we need to go, do HR type functions, payroll, manage the different groups and departments, communication channels, general running of the day to day business.
• This could be one person, multiple people, a board, a council, etc. Somebody or some entity needs to be in control.
• Co-owners, Co-Founders, CEO's, presidents, vice-presidents, board members, etc. We can figure that out.
• If we do one person, we need to have VP's or managers in the other departments.
• One of our problems is that none of us (on the current team) want to be that person or take on this whole responsibility.

3. Monthly Reoccurring Service - aka Billing (new name)

• This is billing, invoicing, receiving, dealing with monies coming in and reaching out to our clients.
• Accounts receivables
• This could be tied in with admin roles
• Debt collection, bad debt, accounting, financials, etc.
• Setting up new corps (currently) and sending welcome emails and collecting business contact info.
• Bank reconciliation, paying bills, prep the budget info, etc.
• We could automate some of this, in the future.

4. Sales & Marketing

• We like that they are together. This is anything to generate and keep new clients to keep coming in and paying for our services. This could be publicity, knowledge about the system, get new demos, entice our clients to buy and keep buying from us. Serving their needs.
• Currently, the main method of marketing is word of mouth and referrals.
• We have used sales reps, consultants, and light networking. Steve and Kelly have been some of our biggest sales type people.
• We want to listen to what feedback they are bringing back. Currently, the sales people and the developers almost live in two different places.
• Sales should have a good pulse on what is working, what is not working, and what people and our clients are asking for. We tend to get lots of good ideas from clients. Sometimes, what that takes or the priority, that can get tricky.
• How big do we want to be? Get everybody or get enough (sufficient)? Keep pushing into other markets or be content with good ROI?
• Helping with market research, looking around and checking out markets, and what do we need to do to penetrate those markets?
• We almost feel like being in no man's land - too big for just a few people to push on it, not quite big enough to really have the team that we need to push it. Do we push and go bigger? Or do we trim down and keep it like it is (not really coasting but strategically developing as we can)? There are associated questions about speed, reliability, and uptime.
• Along with sales and marketing, there are expectations that are set and keep changing (trends and expectations).
• We need to know who we are servicing. Currently, we are kind of all over the place. We have little accounts, medium accounts, and some big accounts. We could go any direction. We just need to decide. Where is the sweet spot?
• If we want to be big and grand, we will need some major funding and thus major sales and marketing. Or do we figure out the sweet spot and really refine and focus in on things.
• Making things more stable and more reliable. Keep improving.
• We have a lot to offer - no one has even heard of us.
• The new and upcoming business owners are going to be fully connected and have certain expectations. If you want to get those guys/gals, you're going to have to revamp things.
• Our current mix is very developer heavy. We really need to switch that focus and get things that people want. Easy, Powerful, and Pretty!
• We need this department to really keep us in the know on what is going on. Currently, we don't have anyone fully dedicated or assigned to this department. We've been missing this piece.

5. Setup & Training

• Originally, we didn't charge for any of this. We just wanted people to get on our system. We are now charging for this and even trying to presale some of the training, deployment, and setup stuff. We are finding and have found, that people who get setup correctly and have the correct amount of training stay longer on our system. It has a learning curve, and that proper setup and training goes a long way.
• Currently, one of our system admin persons has to go in and create the corp, do a bunch of the settings, assign the master users, setup the logos and colors, and get them going. Most of that requires someone from our team to hold their hand along that process.
• Futuristically, we really want to help automate a bunch of that. Have them setup their own corp, let them pick what industries they want to play into, help them with their settings (wizard style), and then even help them pull in their data (without any other involvement). Let them create a test account or a free version, play around, and then either upgrade or get some help.
• Offer services to help our clients. Also have a number of self-help tools and features to let them do it themselves.
• We would love to develop a number of preset packages and industry specific skins.
• We would like the setup and training to be coupled with education and the adilas university side of things. They are very related.
• Getting products, customers, vendors, and other info into the system easily. Currently, we have to do a bunch of that (data imports) on a one-by-one basis. We need to make that more global and self-help level.
• Provide a good starting point to help them succeed. Show them the benefits and advantages of doing it our way or how we help them succeed.
• This department or division could include the adilas university, training, tech support, setup, and training.
• Easy access to get help and direction if needed.
• We see a lot of user error type problems. Figure out ways of helping them stay in their lane better or put up guardrails or bumpers to keep them on track.
• It has only been recently that we have added more focus on the setup, deployment, and training.
• This department could also include on-going training and retention. That is huge. Things constantly keep changing and we keep adding on new features.

6. Tech Support

• Currently, we allow people to email or call for tech support. It's free but often bleeds over into full on training, not tech support.
• We could build out a report a bug or open up a ticket or an issue. Make it easier to get support.
• We could provide better help files, tips, how-to's, videos, tutorials, and in-person training events.
• Everybody uses the system so differently, that makes it kind of tough. It would be nice if we have tech support stuff that was industry specific or catered to a specific industry.
• Tech support really should be part of the training, setup, and deployment stuff.
• Tech support could be a small carrot for deeper training and/or offering other paid services.
• Helping to show the value of deeper training and education.
• Having a standard way of getting to training and even industry specific training.
• Offer some adilas university training courses - covering various subjects on scheduled dates/times.
• Really helping to push the training and education stuff. Tech support should be quick, temporary, and non reoccurring. Show them the benefits of getting properly trained.
• As we move forward, we are planning on simplifying things. That should help with the training needs and the tech support stuff. Helping them figure it out on their own.
• If people (our clients) really want more tech support, we could offer more robust or advanced support packages.

7. Design

• This could be websites, forms, reports, interfaces, dashboards, UI/UX (user interfaces and user experience). This is the pretty and easy part of it. The powerful may be from a feature or backend process.
• Most of our current guys are developers, not designers.
• We don't charge enough, as such, we tend to skimp on the design phases and processes. This tends to get skipped or minimalized.
• We tend to do function over form - however, most clients say that they want function over form, but really, they want form over function - they want it to work and look pretty.
• Our project management tends to be a simple one liner. Do such and such. No other plans, requirements, mock-ups, or fixed specs exist.
• Mock-ups, prototypes, samples, wireframes, flow charts, graphics, videos, etc. We want to show the plan, air it out, and then build to the specs.
• Modern look and feel and user experience keeps changing. We need someone to keep watching and keeping up with trends, expectations, and options. This needs to be monitored and maintained regularly.
• Figuring out and sticking to a style guide. We do have a section called the "adilas docs". We have been working on it, but it has not been fully adopted yet. We need to set those standards and then stick to it. This is our style guide, and we are sticking to it.
• Doing some test cases and getting user/client feedback. How did their experience work out and what did we learn from that?
• Planning in maintenance and upkeep.
• Our clients squawk at things not being consistent. I don't mind change but I don't like some change and other things not being consistent. We could also introduce settings.
• We could allow the users, or corporations, to choose their default layouts. Horizontal forms, vertical forms, stacked forms, or auto formatted. We also want to store those settings and allow them to change it on the fly on per user basis.
• We need some consistency - this deals with who the designer is, what we are designing and outputting, people's preferences and opinions, and where we are heading. We can all be different, but we need to be consistent.
• Allow people to try things out and/or fully switch over.
• There is a point when we need to keep moving forward so we don't have to keep supporting all of the older styles and themes. Help make that as smooth as possible.
• We have some needs for design work out in ecommerce, customer facing sites, portals, and even business websites or web presence stuff.
• We need designers to help with marketing and social media stuff. Once again, consistency, specific plans, strategic campaigns, etc.

8. Custom Code

• This is one of the things that really sets us apart from other systems. We love it and even encourage it.
• We currently have tons of black box options. That was a solution at the time. There are some great concepts there (black box stuff) but we did run into problems.
• The code base keeps changing. We have had people ask for things, we build it custom for them and then wrap back and make it standard. The ones who got the custom version are now off on their own vs being fully integrated into the main codebase.
• We offer a lot of this. Having said that, we don't charge enough.
• We would like to move as much as possible to data driven settings and permissions.
• One of our current issues in maintainability. If it was on the side (like a black box page) it got left behind. The main pages always got updated but anything custom was harder to test, and harder to main it.
• If we do custom code, we need to build in some maintenance costs to help maintain that.
• We could do a community type approach - who ever helps build it out, gets a commission or a usage fee for others using it. Kinda like a sponsorship or something. We just need to get enough to plan it out, build it out, test it, market it, and then do some sort of kickback or reoccurring usage fee. There may be different levels  - one-time, reoccurring, built in, full one-off custom code, settings, combined projects (we pay, they pay, we then get to use it).
• Custom code should be by our internal developers and internal development team. We need to make sure that it works and doesn't affect something else.
• We have had some maintenance issues. Who made it, what does it do, how does it work, what does it touch, what else does it touch up/down stream, where does it live, how can you get to it, and was there any planning or testing done to the custom code? Tons of potential far reaching questions.
• If we build something... we really need to get an ROI and market those pieces.
• We could do some pay as you go build outs. Monthly fees that get added to their bill. They could pay upfront and then get a payment plan, or set it up on a reoccurring basis, or whatever.
• We need to charge enough. We often shoot ourselves in the foot. We charge pennies to build on top of multi-million dollar platforms and applications.
• We need good planning, good project management, good estimates, and then good developing.
• Estimates - take what you think it will take and double it. Then double that. It's almost a 4x ratio. By the time you add the work to get the work, the work before the work, the work, the work in between the work, the work after the work. It all plays in.
• Paying for both quality and speed.
• On the estimates, we also need to think about opportunity costs and what are we not working on, while doing custom code work.
• Approving custom code. Just because someone wants it... doesn't mean we should build it out. How does it fit with our mission statement, goals, and overarching plans and rollouts?

9. Consulting

• Byproduct of the main reoccurring business services. Once we are in, the system starts generating byproducts and people need to know what is next, how to do certain things, where they could go, options, next steps, phases, etc.
• We haven't really tapped into this yet. We do it, but we could do it so much more.
• This could be tied into the training, setup, and education stuff. Teaching our clients the best way to use the system to get the most out of the system or platform.
• You start getting into paying for knowledge and experience and expertise.
• We have seen many of our power-users become consultants. They know the system, they know how to make it run, sing, dance, and play. That provides a value to others. Those people then offer their expertise and know how to help others.
• Currently, some of this is done on the side. Adilas has no part in it, and no kickback exits. We would love to bring this more inside but that takes money to keep those people on call or on staff.
• This could be a great thing to add to the adilas marketplace.
• We may allow some outside stuff to go on, but we need some rules. We could configure this any way we want, we just need some rules.
• This could be part of the adilas cafe scenario - our clients seeking out a professional to help them out.
• Do we want to manage this internally? What would that look like? Once again, we may need some rules here.

10. R&D

• Research and Development - You have to spend time here to move the ball forward. If you aren't going to move forward, nothing will happen, you will live and die. You have to keep up, especially with tech stuff.
• Exploring different avenues - there are costs for exploring.
• Cutting edge, bleeding edge, sweet spot, new ish, or older/classic?
• How much does it cost to be on that cutting edge?
• Vision, plans, and looking to the future. Where are we/you heading? Plans, how are you going to get there?
• It really comes down to where do you want to play (on the spectrum)?
• Training what is new.
• Maintenance for what was or has been developed. Technical debt.
• Stable and known or less stable and new - How quick will the older pieces change and/or be deprecated? If it's so new, it may not even stick.
• We make things and then it sits on a shelf. That hurts. There could be difference between development that didn't get fully funded vs totally new prototyping and experimenting.
• Is this something we should do? On not? Figuring out what it takes to make something happen.
• Looking into speed, efficiency, demand, cost analysis, needs analysis, scope, scale, and reality of doing certain things.
• Beta testing, prototypes, experiments, testing, pushing boundaries.
• Currently some of our R&D is mixed in with our code. We try things to see if it works. Without being consistent with other pages and code. We often have good intentions (prepping for the future - mini stubs or prepping for stuff) but then get pulled on to other projects. We do a lot of experimenting within our projects. Almost a revolving door or revolving code set. Basically, a fully working, living prototype.
• We are seeing a mix between custom code, R&D, and project management.
• Back tracing or reverse engineering things. Sometimes if you know what you want, you can then figure out a way to get there, that might be easier or better.
• Being aware of what's out there? How could I use some of that in my projects?

11. Project Management

• We have really been missing this piece. We do a ton of just in time project management. We are not very good at doing a more full design, plan, or architecture type layout.
• We do a lot of this one-on-one right now. One project and one developer.
• The project manager can and does act as the shield between the client and the developer. Buying some time or deflecting decisions.
• They help with quotes, estimates, and project specs, scope, costs, timelines, and details. Lots of potential back and forth communication is needed.
• We have spent a ton of time and money going back and fixing things that should have been planned out originally. We have also spent money where a developer makes a decision and just does something and doesn't ask or doesn't get any clarification.
• Teams - authority, accountability, and responsibilities - setting up clear expectations. We have played around here a bit. We need to refine things here a bit, based on our needs. We had some people who were so worried about how to do scrum that it didn't actually happen. We also had some problems with free riders. We want to use some small teams, but still need to get it refined a bit better.
• Dealing with teams, we were trying to do some training... and we didn't really have it all defined. Wasted time in meetings, talking about code, and what is needed. We then fall down based on assumptions or just verbal communication. It needs to be just a little bit deeper and more consistent.
• Team sizes and dynamics.
• As a project manager, not assigning yourself to a required task. Actually, make an assignment to do the project management.
• Someone needs to be available and be the virtual babysitter. Getting rid of hurdles and what is expected of them. Helping them stay on task/track. The project manager's job to help other people succeed.
• Slowdown
• We build and build and build... we need to slow down and test it, train on it, market it, and push it.
• Being able to plan it out so that we can reuse as much code as possible. Giving the developers guidelines, handrails, samples, and good instructions. If it's too tight, they don't want to do it (it takes out the fun of figuring it out). Figure out what developer needs what (how detailed) and then play accordingly. Developers need to accomplish something. Not just follow A-Z and you're done. It is a mix and a spectrum.

12. Internal Development & Maintenance

• This internally funded by adilas to work on adilas. This comes from revenue and budgets to keep the system up and running.
• Bug fixes, maintenance, changes, next steps, phases, testing, documentation, code review, etc.
• This needs to be tied into project management and custom code.
• This is the most defined area that we have inside of adilas.
• We get a plan from project management, we then build it out, test it, deploy it, and make sure that it works.
• We have had problems with guys following style guides. Everybody has their own ideas on what a good style guide is. This could be whitespace in code, tabs, naming conventions, etc. It also happens on the look and feel part of page or report.
• Alan had the idea of having a way of helping to force or standardize the output. Almost a forced style guide or validator of sorts. It all has to comply to a certain standard. Whitespace, naming conventions, comments, indents, variable names, components, etc.
• Keeping things separated - backend, database, objects, services, views, logic, functions, classes, etc.
• In object-oriented programming, you need good encapsulation (only contains what is needed) and low coupling (lower number of steps as possible).
• There is some great value in teams and getting different points of view. A better solution because we worked on it as a team. More well-rounded.

13. Adilas University

• This goes hand in hand with the training and deployment section. This is the training arm of the system. It may also tie in with tech support or consulting. We could combine some of this as needed. Similar type people and knowledge resources.
• General topics for training - One, how do you use the system? Two, how do you run your business? Consulting is a part of this as well - what are the best business practices and how to get the most out of the system.
• There could be standard stuff, custom stuff, and internal stuff.
• Each page would have how to videos, quick videos, and options for more or deeper training.
• We also need to offer some custom or live training events.
• For fracture, we experimented with a thing called the education mode. You could turn it on/off and the system would hide or show more options and information. You could turn it on from any page and all of sudden it would react differently. We have some great screenshots on this from Jonathan Wells. Along with this, the help files could be shown, side-by-side with the page that they are referencing. There were also options to toggle into the actual adilas university site as a tab withing the side-by-side help window.
• There is a known missing gap here on the education and training side of things.
• There could be free levels, basic stuff, and deeper more paid type levels of training and consulting.
• There could also be certification levels, requirements, status, and other testing and certification stuff.
• We are hoping that the adilas lite and fracture project will make it even easier to help train the users and because they can tweak everything, there will actually be less of a need for certain pieces of the education and training. They will still be there, just hidden as needed.
• This could be a whole other business entity, if needed.
• A new user really wants to be guided through - holding their hand. An advanced user may not want any of that stuff in their way, just let them do it quickly.
• Link to this from the adilas cafe.
• If we do certifications, maybe show or allow some of that basic info to show to other users, if they are seeking trained professionals to help them out.
• If we have trained users, those become a value to others who are looking for help or pros on those topics.
• Adilas University could be a stand-alone product, or it could be interwoven with the entire site. Both have the same content, they just either have a standalone navigation system or we help navigate for them based on what page the users are on (context stuff).
• There could be levels to the training... Think of a triangle - simple, basic, intermediate, advanced, and deep or backend logic or design level stuff.
• There may be both external and internal training pieces. Along with that, we may have to have permissions or something that open/closes those training modules for certain people or parties.

14. Adilas Marketplace

• Part of the adilas cafe. People could sell their products and services, buy products and services. Including adilas skills and other professional skills.
• Adilas creates lots of byproducts. This is a way to help harness and gather up those byproducts. 
• Options for 3rd party solutions, white labeling, advertising, marketing, etc.
• Online mini marketplace for adilas products and/or our users could sell their products and services on a mini Amazon or eBay type level (mini consignment type shop built for our users and companies that use our products).
• Possible payment solutions with interest, fees, commissions, and other small kickbacks for using the marketplace.
• Limitless potential for other byproducts and additional services that could be added on to this piece of the puzzle.
• This may need a separate team to help run, manage, and administer this piece of the puzzle. Automate as much as possible.
• Here is a rough draft - Russell did - way back - don't get stuck here... It could be so much more. Adilas Market

15. Adilas Cafe & Community - Adilas World

• A landing spot outside of any corporation or entity.
• A corp selector - where can I go (have permissions or access)?
• Get to the marketplace type stuff.
• Get to the adilas university stuff.
• Forum type stuff - ask Q&A type stuff. This could be answered by staff and/or other users. This would need a moderator or forum manager.
• Let people show that they have the skills that others (businesses and/or individuals) could be looking for. This may include direct messaging or some other way of communicating.
• White labeling options.
• Standardized portal - single sign in be able to jump between servers and corporations.
• Dynamic billing and making payments.
• Mini marketplace for adilas products.
• Sales and creation of new accounts - tiered pricing and auto setup options
• News and updates - configure news feed as needed.
• Interface with other companies and corporations. Get assigned, hub type model.
• Work, play (demo sites), buy, sell, training, social stuff, and participate.

16. Databases, Networks, Servers, & IT

• This is the whole backend of the application or hardware side of things.
• Load management, reliability, up time, speed, redundancy, backups, storage, orchestration, etc.
• Lots of security needs and requirements. They will also be majorly involved in implementation of security.
• Code interacts with these things, but they are separate entities or divisions.
• We will need our own documentation, permissions, training, etc.
• Maintenance and upkeep, prototyping, standardizing, testing, databases, servers, hardware, clusters, network, security, IT stuff.
• Patches, updates, protection, hacker prevention stuff.
• Email servers, text or communication servers, web servers, database servers, backend logic servers (ColdFusion or whatever).
• Monitoring services, requests, traffic, load balancing, stats, specs, remote access, database indexing, automation scripts, tons of IT type stuff.
• Migration stuff, off-hour updates and maintenance, backups, restores, and other tasks.
• Move data around, put things into and out of cold storage, special bulk data manipulation stuff, zip and archiving things, etc.
• Future proofing things.
• Offloading bigger or longer processes.
• API sockets, API endpoints, and being able to load balance traffic, requests, deal with sessions, server config, clustering, and managing small microservices.
• We need a way to get rid or purge some of the pieces. The current system builds and builds. It never really releases or virtually poops (dumps).
• We would love to get a full data dictionary to allow our new frontend to be more data driven.
• This could be multiple people - DBA, IT/Server guys, etc. They could cross over, but these are high level skills and high level people or teams.
• Everything on the hosting side of things. This gets deep but just think - what do we need for hosting? - SSL's, domain names, hard drive space, spinning up servers just in time, pointer records, DNS, DSN, puppet, orchestration, bit bucket, code repositories, ColdFusion Administrator, Fusion Reactor, Papertrail, Nagios, tons of outside services and tools.
• Servers - hard drive sizes, backups, RAM, CPU's, configs, and the list goes on.
• This could go deep and deeper... Etc.

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- Alan and I were playing with a mini version or what that might look like (see attached for a mini mock-up of the smaller mini model):

Adilas.biz - admin, monthly billing, and day to day running the company. They could do their own R&D (progress, speed, what the clients are wanting).

Sales & marketing - They could do their own R&D (advertising, pricing, features, marketing materials, etc.).

Consulting, tech support, setup & training, and retention. This could also be part of the adilas university (similar folk). They could do their own R&D (tied into sales, marketing, training, etc.).

Development stuff - project management, custom code, internal development, maintenance, & design. They could do their own R&D (code, frameworks, layouts, look and feel, etc.).

IT stuff - Databases, servers, hardware, hosting, etc. They could do their own R&D (speed, load balancing, redundancy, monitoring, etc.).

Marketplace and adilas cafe - This could be their own little piece or small team. They could do their own R&D (product research, options, pricing, hardware options, services, etc.).

We would love to see each of these sections or divisions (departments) be able to meet and interact with each other on a consistent basis (at least monthly or semi-monthly). Nobody is left on an island by themselves. Communication is huge.

Notes from meeting with HG, KW and SB on 3.7.23:

Has some redirects that aren’t user friendly. 

1. When you sign in, take to the main order or have shop home more prevalent. ** Put a setting to skip the first page. Take you right to the category page. **You have successfully signed in.
   
2. Add item to the cart, should allow you to keep shopping instead of taking you to the cart. 

   3. Setting to show/hide the display mode. Don’t need to show it.

   4. Can’t sort and prioritize by the item. ie. HG first, then Green Dot as it is alpha-numeric.

**Steve talked about icon app for phone. Michael is interested in this. Will need to add the email templates to HG.

**Steve talked about tiered selections. Ex. Sell burrito, choose what cheese they want to add.
Talked about Leafly integration. There will be some changes in how tiered pricing is set up.  We will need to make sure HG’s settings are all good when the new code comes into place.

You’ll be able to have 10 tiers and name it what you want. It can have a variety of amounts ie 1.3 grams, for example.

Kelly mentioned suggested products… lead customer to an equivalent item or suggestion.

Steve talked about related items (that is more like a cord needed for a product that you purchase)

**Predictive… you may want this as well. Algorithm.  Build in a default so something shows up

Showed Mike Message modal: 

Would be helpful to be able to choose people to message in other ways besides customer type.

Schedule recurring messaging off of birthdates. 

Eric can help with bubble that would show up on your icon app.

Another thing would be to have the customer to reply back.

**Not ready yet: Transitional invoice= instead of doing a quote, you can do this so it holds inventory/reserved. Assures inventory is held.