Meeting with Cory and Shari O. to go over projects and questions. Shari O. had a request for being able to sell stock/units and special fees and presets (pack or specific fees or collected values for each sale). We currently allow for 5 preset items to go along with the sale of a stock/unit. She was requesting 10 (increase it by 5). We talked about options, and I gave them a rough quote what I thought it would take. If the client was tech savvy enough, they could recipes. That is unlimited and could be easily configured to add multiple (unlimited) items to a sale (into the shopping cart) from a single button or click. Anyways, just a free option that already exists.

We spent some time talking about payroll and the need for other states, more HR (human resources) options, and deeper payroll/HR functionality. That would be awesome, and we'd love to add that in. It just depends on who is paying for it.

The other main topic was going over some new reports that have been requested. Both for sub inventory and more accounting level stuff.

Looking at Will's pull request for the payee receipt search changes. Made a few changes and pushed up the code changes to the branch on the code repo.

Phone call with Steve. Talking about plans, where we are heading, options, sales, developers, and other staffing areas. We covered a bunch of topics. Here is a quick list of topics.

- AI (artificial intelligence) and what that look like in our industry. We talked about trends that we are seeing and speed to market that other companies are gaining from on their products. This seems like it (AI) is here to stay and really making some waves. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out. In my mind, I think that AI will be used as a tool, not a complete takeover option. That is just my opinion.

- External Reps and how to help manage them and their clients. If we try to support them using our internal people, we get in trouble. But at some point, the external reps will get maxed out and can't help all of the clients. It can get tricky.

- Developers (coders) and who is doing what. We have a number of projects that are 3/4 baked but not yet finished. That makes it really tough to hang your hat on those things. We get super far along, but it becomes hard to really get it across the finish line. We have a number of these projects. Some of deals with testing, dependencies, and rollout/integration plans. Other times we get to a certain point and funding runs out or whatever. We just need to get these things over that virtual hump. Some good stuff to still come down the pipeline.

- Sales, investments, cash flow, and where we are heading - bouncing between topics and just generally doing some catch up. We have a bigger client that was waving some big carrots but hasn't paid us anything. We did tons of work for them and when it came down to us actually giving them a bill, they wont pay it. That is rough and tough... Some lessons learned.

Good chat! We'll keep trying to figure things out and just keep taking the next step. That's about all we can do right now.

Emails and recording notes.

Working on some project planning with Bryan for phase one of connecting the PO's (purchase orders) to elements of time. Going over ideas and touching pages where new code and changes are needed. Bryan was taking notes. We went through the pages, the display options, the database fields, and even some code samples. This was all done with showing screens, talking about things, and Bryan taking some notes. This is phase one, adding a good landing spot to connect the two main players together (PO's and EOT's). Once we have this done and stable, we'll circle back around and do phase two, where we automate things from the PO side to the elements of time side. One thing at a time.

Research on cfmodule and custom tags inside of Adobe ColdFusion. Looking over Will's new code and pages. Checking into how he is building out a custom modal popup window using custom tags. Good code reuse.

Meeting with Mike from Cannapages (3rd party vendor) to see what they were missing on the API endpoint side of things. We found two main attribute lists (parent attributes and sub inventory attributes) that were missing. They can look-up the data and values, but they were missing the master list of what to loop over. We built a quick couple of pages (web forms) and pushed them up to data 7. We will build out the API sockets that go with these. That takes more time. This was just a quick band-aid. They should be good to go for tonight.

Meeting with Alan. It's been a while since we have met. We started out doing a little bit of catch-up. We were talking about direction and goals. It feels like we are sort of scattered and don't have a focus. Alan and I are planning to meet to start working on small goals and projects at least once a week. I was mostly talking and drawing (on the screen) and Alan was chiming in and giving feedback. Here are a few things that I remember - I should have written other topics down as we talked about them.

- What are our main goals? Lots of time spent here hashing over things and lightly stating some of our goals.

- How big do we want to get? How big are we? Are we the right size or do we need to grow or shrink?

- Efficiency - pros and cons to that. Not everything is done purely on efficiency and that's ok, if there is a reason for that. We would love to be more efficient but that is not the total main goal. It will be a mix.

- We need a plan!

- Sometimes we bite off more than we can chew or take on too much. We need to break things into smaller pieces. Basically, get some things across the finish line, even if they are small. That's better than trying to take on a huge monster/elephant and not getting any of it across the finish line.

- We have 10 or so projects that are half baked (or some percentage done but not fully completed). Maybe Alan and I can circle back around and work on some of those projects together as a small team. Just an idea. Maybe plan a day or a time and then chip away at those things. Currently, we are all working on our own or individual projects.

- Talks about teams and sprints, vs individuals and solo projects.

- Cycles and phases - We tend to build up, then have to trim down when things are tight due to a money crunch or money crunches (plural). We recover for a bit and then tend to build up again. We then repeat the cycle. It seems to be a reoccurring theme.

- We are a general business tool. That's who we are. We then try to get too specific and that kills us. We spent time and resources trying to tweak things out for a single client. We have spent tons here, virtually chasing little rabbits. Just being silly, but an old proverb says... A fox who chases two rabbits catches neither. What about a fox who chases 10 rabbits? Just being silly!

- Looking into our goals and direction - where do we see ourselves in 5 years, 10 years, 2 years, 1 year? Really taking stock of what we are doing and where we are heading.

Great little meeting. We are going to meet next week and push on setting some goals and defining our direction. Then chip away at that. I'm excited to see where things go.

Our original plan was to work more on the SWOT analysis today. It ended up being a sounding board session. I was talking and telling Shannon what was going on and she was recording notes. See attached. Lots of fun ideas and concepts. It does repeat itself a lot but overall, great little brainstorming session. The cool thing is that we have some great take aways from our session. Here are just a couple. See the notes for deeper thoughts and ideas.

- AI (artificial intelligence) - Trends and observations

- Who? - Lots of talk about who will oversee and manage what

- Plans

- Marketing - Ideas including being able to cover over 85% of any business. Also some great ideas on marketing adilas' AI (artificial intelligence) aspects

- Company Structure - We really want to nail this down

- Value Add-On Core Model - Industry specific skins and quick aggregates (counts, sums, totals, etc.)

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New note - added on 1/19/24 - see attached for a new or updated version of our sounding board notes. Small edits and tweaks made by Brandon, after the fact. See attached.

Emails and recording notes for the day (1/16/24). Lots of good break throughs for me today. See notes for date listed.

Meeting with Steve. We started out talking about some projects for one of the developers and what is still hanging out there. Will is working on a three-page website, bi-directional messaging out in ecommerce, and a new specific ecommerce shopping cart.

We, Steve and I, went over some things that Shannon and I were talking about yesterday (1/16/24). We had some great back and forth pitching ideas and being pitched to. That was fun. Pros and cons, ideas, internal struggles, laws of business, etc. We know that most of our clients are looking for ways to be more efficient or looking for features that help them with efficiency.

We got into talking about how difficult sales are in real life. You have to jump through a lot of hoops.

This might sound silly, but we talked about how many times we have to have virtual little talks with ourselves - should I, yes, no, shouldn't I do this or that, yes, no, etc. It's not all cut and dry. We have to daily keep pushing the ball down the road.

As part of our conversation, we have decided that one of our biggest goals is to figure out our company structure and really make some plans there. That is huge, for us.

Towards the end of the meeting, Steve had some code questions. We got him figured out and going in the right direction. Good conversation and making progress. I think the fact that we are acknowledging that we need a bit more structure is huge for adilas. I'm excited to see where everything goes.

Jumped on a meeting with Eric. Debugging some code and running some tests for stock/units and wholesale carts for his tip project. As we were working, it was amazing how many places (code pages) that this little project hit. Over 48 pages that needed changes. That is just adding tips to invoices. Cause and effect to statements, deposits, accounts receivable, accounts payable, balance sheets, tons of different invoice versions (pdf, mini, printable, add/edit pages), reports, searches, logic, etc.

Lots of moving parts.

Work and continuing education session with Russell. Quote from Russell, "Design Determines Functionality". We were talking about how design (web or interface design) can sometimes make or force certain backend functionality based on those designs and how things look and act.

We were working on some AJAX training. Today we spent time populating the drill-down data lists and appending that data to the current code. Started working on the infinite scroll functionality. This is where you pull in records (limited record set), as you scroll, you pull in more records (pull in next set of records), up to a certain point. We didn't quite finish it, we will circle back around next week. Good conversations and good learning session.

Debugging the add/edit customers page with Cory. Jumped on a client meeting with Wayne, Steve, Cory, and the clients (a few different people). They, this other 3rd party solution was wanting some custom ecommerce (menu) type stuff. Including a new sub domain pointer, ability to inject meta data, and customer headers on existing ecommerce pages and websites. The whole thing is for more or better SEO (search engine optimization).

Wayne did a great job explaining what we do and how we do it. He also mentioned full take overs on ecommerce pages and ways to interject custom code without rewriting everything. I thought that he did a great job. Good stuff!

Meeting with Shannon to go over ideas for the adilas company structure. We spent the whole time putting together a two-page proposal on where we would like to go with the adilas team, an admin advisory board, and four internal departments. See attached.

We got some of our info from element of time id # 2284 inside of adilas. These were notes from Brandon and Alan as they were doing some brainstorming. Basically, Shannon and I took some of that and put together the small proposal. It still needs a little bit of work but has a good flavor, in my opinion.

Planning meeting with Bryan. Going over progress on the tie-in between elements of time and PO's. We decided to broaden it out to allow any of the 12 main players to tie directly into elements of time. We are harnessing code from flex grid tie-ins, linking main id's and app types. Good stuff.

He is going to create a function that will populate any dynamic link between any of the main 12 players. We already have code in place, but it is hardcoded (embedded into one or more pages). The new function will take an app type id (one of the 12 players) and a main id. It will then generate all of the code and verbiage to make that dynamic hyper link.

Recording notes. Then going over the sounding board doc from Shannon and I, from a couple of days ago. See elements of time # 10777 for details and a copy of the document (both original and modified version).

Training session with Hamid. He showed me some progress on his bootstrap training and then we jumped into an Adobe ColdFusion training session. Nothing too fancy, working on forms, URL's, variables, and simple if statements. I showed Hamid a little bit about XSS (cross site scripting) and how to help prevent that type of thing (web security for URL's and form values). Fun session.

Recording notes and finishing up entries from 1/16/24.

Recording notes from earlier in the week. See notes in the shop for 1/17/24 to 1/20/24.