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Adilas.biz Developer's Notebook Report - 4/19/2023 to 4/21/2023 - (7)
Photos
Time Id Color Title/Caption Start Date   Notes
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Shop 10008 Adilas Time 4/19/2023  

Sean was on the morning meeting. He was using ChatGPT to get some bullet points for adilas as an all-inclusive ERP system. Interesting use of AI (artificial intelligence). Here is what it came up with...

Here are some possible bullet points for an all-in-one ERP system called Adilas:

• Comprehensive Functionality: Adilas offers a wide range of features to support businesses of all sizes and industries, including accounting, inventory management, sales, purchasing, payroll, time tracking, project management, and more.

• Cloud-based Solution: Adilas is a fully cloud-based ERP system, which means that users can access it from anywhere with an internet connection. This makes it easy to collaborate with team members, work remotely, and manage multiple locations.

• Customizable Interface: Adilas provides a highly customizable interface, allowing users to tailor the system to their specific needs and preferences. This includes the ability to create custom fields, labels, reports, and workflows.

• Mobile Accessibility: Adilas is designed to be mobile-friendly, with a responsive design that adapts to different screen sizes. This makes it easy to use on smartphones and tablets, enabling on-the-go access to critical business data.

• Robust Security: Adilas takes security seriously, offering multiple layers of protection to safeguard user data. This includes role-based access controls, encrypted data transmission, and regular security updates.

• Affordable Pricing: Adilas is priced competitively, with affordable subscription plans that scale with the size and complexity of the business. There are no setup fees, and users can choose to pay monthly or annually.

• Excellent Support: Adilas provides comprehensive support to its users, including online documentation, video tutorials, live chat, phone support, and email support. This ensures that users have the resources they need to get the most out of the system.

Kinda fun... Anyways, he will tweak it and make it our own, but that's what the chatbot came up with.

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Wayne joined the meeting and he and I were working on my local machine and box. Somehow my development environment got all messed up. We took things up, down, up, and back down. Trying this and that, rebuilding images, cloning things, etc. We even tried reverting back to an older image to see if that would work. Still had issues. I may need to get a new laptop or computer.

After about 2.5 hours of playing around, I decided to go back to the old non docker image way of doing the local development environment. This includes standalone installations of Adobe ColdFusion, MySQL databases, and other pieces. I was making progress and then got stuck, having to run ton of database updates to get the database up to speed. Ended up stopping and bailing out for lunch. Too much to do all in one sitting.

 
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Shop 10068 Working on my local environment 4/19/2023  

Running database updates to make sure that my local environment is up and ready to go. Doing updates clear back from 2014 to current. Lots of clicking and checking things. Working through some small bugs and small issues. Ended up running into some setting errors. All of this was just on my local box, all of the production servers are up and doing great.

 
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Shop 10016 Adilas Time 4/20/2023  

I joined the morning meeting and Wayne, John, and Sean were on the meeting. Apparently, there was a hack attempt on the data 3 server. Wayne was watching things and putting up blockades. We talked about sanitizing certain variables and keeping things tight (checking for certain mal or bad values). Both Wayne and John were on it.

Wayne was helping me make a few changes to my local computer. Eric popped in and had some questions on vendor stuff. Steve called and I chatted with him on the phone for a bit. Mike wants to meet and talk about SG&A costs and how to virtually load and sell some of those costs as inventory items (moving capitalized expenses into inventory). Anyways, we chatted briefly about that and then jumped on a different meeting.

 
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Shop 10069 Zoom meeting 4/20/2023  

On a Zoom meeting with Steve, Mike, Sean, and Jen going over SG&A costs (sales, general and administrative costs). I was taking some notes while listening to the guys talk about things. Steve had me show my screen and we did some drawing and discussing of possible options. We ended up going over some small scenarios and what not. Here are some of my notes:

Load and sell – SG&A

- Hang it – relationship – what is hanging on what?

- Expense over date range – say over 30 days or whatever

- Expense by percentage – say 5% per day or whatever

- Expense on one time event – everything hits right now

- Lifecyle events – everything starts, lives (whatever that is), and then everything dies

- Variable – some items will have SG&A and some will not – this needs to be a switch and/or a manual

- Selling it and grabbing all of the hangers

- Roots and branches – backwards and forwards

- Two channels – normal inventory channel and the SG&A channel

- Making a plan and road map – beat it up on paper/presentation level first before we go to code.

- Some expenses are forward facing or rear facing (we get billed for things that will happen or things that have already happened).

- The inbound hopper will be a moving, flowing, entity – once again think lifecycle

- Allocating the SG&A – there may be some that is attached and some of that may be unattached

- Ever second the balance sheet needs to be in balance.

- What do you want... ??? we need some scenarios – bring inventory in, what are the costs, what happens over time, what are the relationships and hanger values?

- Inventory comes in through PO's. We are thinking of maybe using a special E/R (expense/receipt) to handle the SG&A as the second channel.

- Steve was proposing a possible new inbound tool to help with those costs, capitalization, and flow of the data.

- Based on Steve's idea of using the PO and inventory route – we talked about selling x (real inventory) and virtually hanging z (SG&A or other hidden costs) to the same invoice.

- Mike was talking about a possible problem with PO costs and normal E/R costs and mixing them. Steve was talking about putting multiple lines or line items on each expense. Steve was also talking about a quick tool to split things out. Being able to do PO's with inventory and then adding in other costs. We talked about being able to move the AP between the PO or on the expense side. For example: $75 in real inventory and $25 in freight = 2 lines on the expense. One tied to the $75 PO and the other will be for the freight.

Scenarios:

1. 100 items for $10 per : now we have 1,000 in inventory and we owe 1,000

2. Rent for 100 – in 30 days pull it down = 3.33 per day per item divided by 100 items = .33 per on day 1

3. Hopper = 100

4. We talked about dates, calendars, and being able to hang things on different inventory item

5. We didn't really finish... we started drawing and got pulled off on a tangent...


 
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Shop 10061 Working on advanced item search settings 4/20/2023  

Light brainstorming on ideas and questions for SG&A costs. See notes below:

After the meeting – ideas and questions:

- I think that we need to be one day after the fact. That way we know how much there is to distribute and how much was sold. We could work with real fixed numbers. If you try to do the whole thing real-time, you may end up with too many variables. If it is allowed, going one day back would help solidify that and/or those values (what was sold, from what category, from what sub package, from what parent, etc.).

- Technically, you could do some of this SG&A stuff right now by using PO's to populate virtual SG&A inventory items (subs would be best to control costs and help each bill get whittled down to nothing). Waiting until the day is done (we have firm sales and values). And then going to each invoice and attaching SG&A items (as many as needed) to each invoice. They would be hidden line items with no price, no tax liability, but just costs and quantities.

- If you used $0 price hidden line items, the inventory levels would be exact, each invoice would carry it's own SG&A costs, you could tweak anything that you want (add or subtract), and it would already show-up in all of the existing reports.

- Question – It would be easier to tie it (SG&A costs) to an invoice vs a single item on an invoice. Is that allowed? Or does it have to be tied to individual items specifically?

- If you had a bulk tool that took yesterdays sales, did the math, showed what the system could do automatically, allow for any tweaks (show local math and JavaScript stuff), and then do it – bulk update all invoices for a certain day. That could be pretty cool.

- I'm curious on the math… how do you get the sums and counts, how do you disperse it, track it, and show the full path and/or pattern of what went where and why?

- I honestly don't know how deep we need to go. It would be awesome if we only had to go to the invoice level. If we have to go to the sub level, we may want to create a new one-to-many off of the sub where we can keep track of the aging and SG&A sub costs that happen over time. Think of each sub package as a place to hold certain values over time. If we get a package in and sell out it really quickly, not much if anything will be there. If we hold on to that same package for a long time, it will have a number of sub entries hung or stuck to it.

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After brainstorming a bit, I got back into some other older projects. On a call with Cory. She needed me to un-void a PO for a client on data 9. We normally don't do that. Working on the advanced part/item search layout settings. Started working on the actual settings page and doing some light testing.

 
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Shop 10058 Intern meeting 4/20/2023  

Meeting with Hamid. He was showing me the progress on the business zipper website that he is building (small side project). I gave him the URL for our old site and told him to read the bottom portion that talked about the concepts of the business zipper. Here is the link and some of the text (you have to scroll down to the bottom portion of the page to get to this info).

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Older website text

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Many people over the years have asked us, what do you guys do? Why do you do that? Where are you trying to go? How long does that take? How can you do such and such and others can't? And what makes you so different? Those are some great questions. The answers vary depending on the time someone is willing to listen. :) This is somewhat of an inside joke, but sometimes we feel like saying "Did you pack a lunch?", meaning it can get pretty deep pretty quick.

To answer plain and simply, we are in the business of tracking people's data. We are a virtual data portal. The word "data" means different things to different people. The word "adilas" also means different things to different people. To some it may be CRM functionality (Customer Relationship Management). To others it might be inventory, sales and POS information (Point Of Sale). To others it might be ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) or backend office functions. To others; general operations tracking, JIT inventory tracking (Just In Time), manufacturing, online expense tracking, business intelligence (BI), paperless office, document management, a CMS (Content Management System), financial data and reports, paperwork, payroll, timecards, scheduling, etc. Because we say we track "data", we need to be as deep and diverse as the term itself.

Our goal is to help you, as a user or a company, get in, get out, and be happy. Along the way, and depending on what you consider to be data, we try to help show you the whole picture of what is going on. If what we have helps you out, great! If not, that's ok. We enjoy sharing what we have learned. The adilas.biz business platform is a huge integrated tool set that allows you to play in multiple different areas. It is very scaleable and caters to custom settings and different permission levels. Your use of the system, depends on you and your needs.

The words "system" or "platform" denote more than one piece working together in harmony. A full system allows you to do things that others can't do, simply because everything may not be there.

One of our biggest strengths is helping you get your data into the system. Once in, it becomes part of the big picture. Data coming in usually means some form of "operations" or the day-to-day business that happens. We love this and have a strong focus on helping on the operation side of the equation. We try very hard to follow a logical or linear model in helping you to get your data in and out of the system as quickly and easily as possible.

We also offer some great backend office tools and accounting features. If truth be known, the reason we are able to offer you accounting-type features is directly related to how we track your data and help you do your operations. We, at adilas.biz, are actively working on a new and more modern model for accounting as compared to the current, somewhat antiquated, double entry accounting system embraced by most companies. We can run your operations regardless if you use adilas for your accounting needs or not. If you are looking for a traditional credits and debits accounting system, we may not be your product other than for your operational needs. However, if you are willing to try a more modern and nontraditional approach to accounting, you will love what we do and where we are headed. Straight up, it is new and different and we are still pioneering on a daily basis.

Here is a little background on the traditional double entry accounting model that dates back to the fifteenth century (500+ years old). Luca Pacioli, an Italian monk (friar) wrote one of the first math text books called "Summa de Arithmetica". In that book he explained about how the Italian merchants kept track of their sales which we now call "double entry accounting". This guy was a genius and a math wizard for his time. Here is the kicker, this text book came out in 1494. Two years prior to that, Christopher Columbus, in 1492 sailed the ocean blue to show people that the world was round. People were just coming out of the dark ages and entering into the age of the Renaissance. The only way that businesses could track their "data" was in giant notebooks called journals and ledgers. They had large rooms with tons of paper copies and went through different processes of recording, adjusting, and posting their data between the different journals and ledgers. Sound familiar?

Basically, they were trying to track different states and statuses of the data. Some of the processes that they used to track these changes and states of the data were called "debits" (negatives) and "credits" (positives). These debits and credits were added to things called "T Accounts". The different T Accounts made up a bigger thing called the "Chart of Accounts". The Chart of Accounts usually had a numeric value and a name associated with it. This is how they tracked things, on paper and in different notebooks. These Chart of Accounts were then added up and used in financial documents called the "Income Statement" (profit and loss statement or P&L) and the "Balance Sheet". The goal was to make sure that everything got recorded and accounted for. In order to make things balance, they had to do one entry on one side and then a matching entry on the other side of the T Accounts. Thus the term "double entry accounting". This standard has been followed for years and is currently the accepted way to do accounting. As a mater of fact, most computer systems that do some form of accounting, have basically computerized the 500 year old model and added their own little tweaks to the process.

So what makes us so different? Well, we spent the first five years working on operations. The original goal had nothing to do with accounting. The goal was to start tracking inventory and other data. We wanted to be able to quickly view things, pull reports, and even be able to show where that data was or what had happened to it over time. Through a step-by-step approach to solving our own business problems, we stumbled upon a new way of doing accounting. Basically, once we had the operations in place (this is a big key), we just kept asking the question, what happens next? We would then build the system out to that level. As we kept going, the path began to be rolled out and we just kept taking the next logical steps. This process took years and years and was only possible because we kept working at it. Concepts that were only a dream or a wish started to be right in front of us and we simply reached out and grabbed them.

Adilas can virtually track objects and data over time without using the old double entry accounting model. We still simulate some of the pieces of that model, but we do not have any journals, legers, T Accounts, Chart of Accounts, and other standard accounting features that are considered traditional requirements. We don't use the words debit or credit and we try to use as few adjustments as possible. We use technology, good data, flags, dates, checkpoints, approvals, permissions, and business mapping to run things in a linear fashion. Every entry or data object has a life-cycle and we simply track it. We are then able to go back in time and virtually ask the objects or items questions. What's your story? Who created you? Where have you been? Where are you headed? Who are your buddies? Where do you belong? When did you finish? What is your value? And the list goes on. We call it "roll call accounting". At the end of the day, we still produce an Income Statement (profit and loss or P&L) and Balance Sheet. We just arrived there through mapping data and running objects over time.

We are still pioneering and developing steps to the roll call accounting process. We've had a blast creating it and we can't wait to share it with you! Although our accounting system is not completely finished (fully automated to the highest level), we have had many companies happily use it for years. We just keep adding new pieces that make it better and better. Remember, our main goal in providing the adilas.biz system or platform is to help you track your data. Adilas can help you with your operations, accounting, or both. The model is open and flexible.

We invite you to check it out. We would be happy to meet with you in person or give you a live online demo. Give us a call TODAY! Call 719.439.1761 and ask for Steve or email us at sales@adilas.biz.

If you want more information, there is a brief history document of the making of adilas at the bottom of the page. It is a short 6 page read that tells the story of what happened when and who was involved. It has been a wonderful journey thus far and we're still going!

Just for fun, we wanted to list a few of the core concepts if you don't want to read the history document. This is just for fun... :)

When we first started, back in 2001, our original goal was inventory tracking. As things progressed, one of our main goals was to figure out a way to help fill the gap or create a "bridge" between operations and accounting. There seemed to be a very large and visible disconnect between what was happening in the field (operations) and what the final output was (accounting and final numbers). In one of our brainstorming meetings, we came up with the analogy of a "zipper". One side of the zipper was operations and the other side was accounting. Our goal was to start bringing them together one cog at a time, like a zipper being pulled upwards until it came together.

We came up with the theory "track every penny in and track every penny out". With this thought in mind, we started to track each penny from start to finish. What we found was that every transaction had a life-cycle that it went through. We decided to enter the items and data as easily as possible on the operations side and then track it through a number of steps until it found itself finished or completed. Along the way, we started time-stamping each step with a flag and a date. Each flag and date combo became what we called a "checkpoint". As each new flag was added, we would lock the prior steps below that based on permissions.

This process of passing data from checkpoint to checkpoint, based on permissions, is how we track your data. A great analogy of this process is if you imagine what it takes for water to turn into ice. This process doesn't happen all at once, it needs to go through different phases, states, or status levels. As your data passes through these different phases, called checkpoints, we simply help you flag and date the data as it runs over time. Just like the ice analogy, the water droplets are very loose at first "operations" and slowly become crystals, then slush, and finally become completely frozen or ice "final numbers and accounting".

We then use a process called "roll call accounting" to virtually map backwards in time to where the data was at a given date or time. Another synonymous term for roll call accounting is data mapping. The reason we use the term roll call accounting is because that is what we ask the computer to do. Imagine data that is flagged and dated as it goes through certain checkpoints. Pretend that the computer is an army General giving out a roll call or a flag/status report. The computer says, "I need all of the invoices that were not fully paid at such and such a date to step forward". Only these invoices would then be counted - based on flags and dates. You could then use the computer to do the math and give you the totals you need. Each time you want more information, you simply tell the computer what criteria to use for the roll call and eventually it will tell you the story of what is going on.

To sum things up "literally", by keeping track of your normal day-to-day operations, we can get very complex results like aging, histories, usage, reports, final numbers, and accounting. Thus the accounting becomes the date sensitive sum of the details. These values are what make up your "Business Intelligence (BI)" or "Big Data" concepts. It all comes back to managing and tracking your data. Because every piece of the puzzle still exists in the database, you are able to virtually go back in time and see what was where and when it moved out of each checkpoint. If the data is correct, let it flow. If a modification is needed, make the correction, lock it down, and let it keep flowing. The accounting becomes more of a check and stamp of approval rather than entering numbers from different journals or locations. When you put it all together, what do you know... All Data Is Live And Searchable.

 
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Shop 10067 Working on the advanced item search layout settings 4/21/2023  

Emails and light tech support. Spent lots of time working on the new advanced item search layout settings. Working on the actual layout page and lots of checkboxes to show/hide certain columns. Finished up the first round and pushed up new code.