John and Sean were checking in. Steve called in from his phone and had some questions about SG&A costs (sales, general and administrative costs). He is working with Mike on some cool ideas. Basically, they are trying to fold in certain expenses into the mixture. Instead of just strait expenses (say a light bill or something like that), you have to capitalize your expenses into the inventory and then show those expenses over time as things are sold and/or held in inventory. In super general terms, you can't just hang an expense on the P&L (financials) and call it cost of goods sold without doing capitalization and utilization (tie the bigger thing into small measurable pieces). This is only true on/in certain business verticals. Sometimes the other, more simple practice is allowed. If a real accountant was reading this entry, they would be rolling their eyes. I'm just talking my language.

Anyways, we were talking about some possible solutions, ideas, and ways to track those smaller aged variable costs per item or per package. Each item or portion within a package may get a different variable, aged, and cost portion/ratio assigned to it. The whole thing gets pretty deep and complicated. That's where we shine. one-to-many-to-many-to-many (or whatever) relationships. Bring it on.

Talks about capitalized inventory levels, smart reports, daily backend processes (auto and/or manual), certain date ranges, lifespans, terms, flags, tags, and automation. Details, histories, drill-downs, reporting, exports, etc. The whole nine yards. We were talking about how certain inventory (that is aging and/or being stored) may be assigned a higher SG&A cost due to how long we hold it before it gets moved and/or sold. Lots of talk about processes that would allow us to load an item with cost, sell it for that new loaded cost, then repeat. We could do this real-time, forward facing (predicting and assumptions), or running a day behind based on what really happened. Lots of possible options. Anyways, we ended up simplifying it and saying load, sell, load, sell, repeat.

This led us to conversations about having a hopper (holding container), loading the hopper, figuring out when and how each new expense should be disseminated or resolved (dates and aging and ratios per day stuff). Steve wants us to start thinking about it and running scenarios through our minds. We'll re-meet up and have a powwow. I recommended that he and Mike play with the financial flow calculator to play with some ideas. We have two different versions of that tool, one if free and public facing (a little older) and one is internal that has an updated look and feel and few other things. Anyways a great tool for teaching, learning, and running scenarios through it.

Shari O. joined the meeting. She and guys were talking about a live event and things that were needed. She had some suggestions on some pages and verbiage changes for some new pages. I'm super grateful for all of the feedback and suggestions, ideas, and requests we get. No way could we figure this whole thing out on our own. We need a village or a community.