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.