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Introduction to adilas.biz

Adilas.biz is an online server-based application where you can store and track your data for your daily business operations and backend accounting needs. The word "adilas" is an acronym for "all data is live and searchable". Adilas.biz is a conglomeration of ideas, dreams, time, technology, and lots of hard work. It is safe to say that adilas and the tools we provide have become somewhat of a community effort. We've had hundreds and hundreds of folks chime in with great ideas, request new features, use the application on a daily basis, and give us great feedback. We are constantly searching for better and quicker ways to help you run your businesses. A huge thanks goes out to all of the people who have had a part in the dream! Keep it coming and we'll keep building... :)

We've been working on this project since 2001. It started out as a custom write-up system for a multi-location used vehicle and trailer dealership. As it grew, we found that tons of other businesses needed the same features and had the same frustrations we had already worked through. We decided to put together a full business package (data portal) and sell it to other dealers, businesses, manufacturers, retailers, distributors, and service providers for a monthly service fee. Thus, adilas.biz was born.

A modern word for what we do is an online version of "SaaS" or Software as a Service. You own your own data and have 24/7 access to the site, through a valid login and password. We at adilas, maintain the code base and the application files. We also provide all of the future upgrades and features for FREE. We use the saying, "Your data, you cache & retrieve it, we secure it".

The monthly adilas fee structure is based on your needs, the size of your business, storage requirements, and expected usage. If you have multiple locations or multiple corporations, we will work with you to help you get a great deal. Our goal is to provide you with tons of great features at a great price. Most businesses can expect to pay between $17 and $997 per month per location. No business is too small! Contact us for a quote. We also have quarterly, semi-annual, and yearly plans available. As a side note, we give a discount if you have more than one corporation using the adilas.biz platform. Switching between corporations inside of adilas is as easy as clicking a button.

The monthly fee is the only required fee to use adilas. If you want or need additional help or something custom, we can help there as well. For a small fee, we do custom data imports (customers, inventory items, vendors, etc.). We can help you create and populate custom documents (invoices, paperwork, reports, forms, pdf's, etc.). We can then tie those custom documents to any of the 12 main application players. We also have a way of setting up a custom graphical user interface that is specific to your needs. The entire adilas.biz platform is built on a foundation of user permissions and settings (corp-wide settings or individual user settings). This allows us to serve your needs without redoing the entire application for each business or industry. It makes things very flexible. Once you say "Go!", we set up your corporation, help you with your settings, and you are off to the races. The entire process is a turnkey solution.

If you would like to learn more about adilas, the system, the tools, the theory, the people, please check out some of the other pages and get a hold of us for a free live demo. We thank you for your time and interest! Give us a call TODAY! Call 719.439.1761 and ask for Steve or email us at sales@adilas.biz.

What is adilas.biz?

We at adilas.biz have been pioneering the future of operations and accounting since 2001. It wasn't our original goal to create a new model for doing business or tracking accounting and numbers. We had a problem and needed to come up with a workable solution. Over the years, our vision has been opened and we feel that we are truly pioneering the next generation of business logic and services. We are calling it "roll call accounting" which is a linear time based model for showing who and what are playing and how they interact. Operations lead the way and each entry becomes an actual physical object that can have different checkpoints, states, and status. The "roll call" comes as part of the function of asking the objects where they were at any given date/time increment or date range. Each state and status of the object is then mapped to either on the fly or as an archived status or value. It is pretty cool!

The words "cloud computing" or "cloud accounting" weren't even invented when we were cutting our teeth and trying to solve our current business problems. Is it perfect? No, not yet! Are we making great progress and can we see where it needs to go? Absolutely! It has been one of the most fun things that we have been involved with. We could see where we wanted it to go, but did not know how to get there. We have been working with that vision of the future for over a decade now. We wanted to bring the day-to-day operations into a fully intergraded business system or business platform application.

We provide all of the tools to secure, organize, and format your data. This allows you to retrieve, view, and request it when you need it from any computer or device that can access the Internet. It is totally in the clouds and yet totally in your hands. We are available and open for service! We have tons of awesome tightly intergraded interactive tools to help you run your business and see the whole picture. We have many companies who are very happy with how adilas is tracking their inventory and providing them with real-time numbers and accounting. Check out our approach and view this revolutionary business platform in action. We are building and adding on new features all the time which are at no additional cost to you. Give us a call TODAY! Call 719.439.1761 and ask for Steve or email us at sales@adilas.biz.

What makes us so different?

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 that may be reached online by clicking here. 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.

Give us a call TODAY! Call 719.439.1761 and ask for Steve or email us at sales@adilas.biz.

Verbage from a flyer created in 2011 about the history of adilas. Click here to get this as a pdf document.

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SUBJECT: Start-Up History of the "adilas.biz" Business Platform

Quick Overview

Adilas, LLC was officially created in January of 2008. The original partners were Stephen Berkenkotter, Brandon Moore, and a corporation called Morning Star Automotive, Inc. The Morning Star Corporation has since been dissolved (2010) in order to more fully focus on the adilas platform. The actual project began in 2001 as a custom write-up system for Morning Star. Originally, the application was created for the used vehicle and trailer dealership industry.

In 2006, the application went through some major changes when Stephen (Steve) came up with the concepts for adilas. At that point, it started to change from servicing just the dealership industry into a more general or open business model. By the end of 2008 adilas was servicing a number of new clients (besides dealerships) with the following business types: self storage, modular homes, construction, manufacturing, professional services, and retail. As of 2011, adilas has added other businesses such as: virtual finance companies, real estate companies, transportation, GPS tracking, computer services, alternative healthcare providers, fasteners (nuts and bolts), catering, consulting, personal accounts, home-based businesses, etc.

The application or platform is set up for future growth and is very scaleable. It is currently geared towards small to medium-sized businesses. The application is in a constant state of improvement. This includes adding and upgrading features and tools, building reports, and automating existing functionality. Each new tool and/or feature is developed and tested locally before being deployed to live servers. All new tools and features are assigned to a permission on a per user and per corporation basis. This makes it so that only persons and/or businesses that need the new tools turn them on and use them. All unassigned permissions and features are dynamically hidden until assigned. The existing core of the application has been developed and tested over a number of years and is currently on its seventh full version.

The adilas platform is web-based and set up on a series of commercially hosted environments with state of the art data centers and 24/7 support techs that monitor all servers and databases. The application is completely "cloud" based and only requires a computer or a device that can access the Internet. All application pages and web service calls are done over a secure socket layer (SSL) with many other security features in place. Daily back-ups are done from within the hosted environments. Current adilas clients may export their own data and save local back-up files at any time. Adilas also performs its own weekly back-ups and then securely stores files offsite. For more information about adilas, please visit - www.adilas.biz

Going back to the beginning...

Morning Star Automotive, Inc., one of the original partners in adilas, was founded in 1989 by Stephen Berkenkotter and his brother David Berkenkotter. It was a used vehicle and trailer dealership. Over the years, they did well over $100,000,000+ (hundred million) in sales. By 2001, Steve and David had been in business for about 12 years and had 5-6 locations in Colorado. Things were going well and they were quite successful. They were managing their used vehicle and new trailer inventories on a spreadsheet that Steve had created. All of their accounting was done on a separate software system called PeachTree Accounting. All sales were done on hand written tickets and then given to the accounting office for data entry. The accounting department entered all sales and inventory items into the PeachTree Software after the fact. The outlying store locations would save all paperwork and invoices and then send a weekly batch via FedEx or UPS to the accounting department. Morning Star's primary headquarters and accounting office was located in Salida, a small mountain town in central Colorado.

Brandon Moore, another original adilas partner, had just graduated from Utah State University in Logan, UT, in December of 2000. He moved with his small family to Salida, CO in the summer of 2001. He originally moved to Salida to be a professional raft guide and kayak instructor on the Arkansas River that ran through the Salida area. As the summer progressed, work was slim and Brandon was scrambling to make ends meet and to keep he and his family afloat. He found a job listing in the newspaper doing data entry work for Morning Star in August of 2001. Brandon interviewed with Steve and his head accounting person for the data entry job. They offered him the job and he offered to help build the Morning Star website.

Brandon had graduated with a BA in Business Information Systems with an emphasis in Office System Management. Prior to that, Brandon had created a couple of small websites in college and worked as a computer instructor for a local technical college. The accounting staff began using Brandon to do data entry work for the parts department.

Soon after starting to work in the accounting department, the company website became part of Brandon's main job. He began gathering information on inventory levels and items for sale. With so many locations and inventory items being sold on a constant basis, it became almost impossible to keep up with the changes. To make matters worse, the company was constantly transferring a large floppy disk (100 MB zip disk) from store to store to make sure that each location had updated information. The process took about two weeks to make a full circle and then it would go around again. Each time a store would get the disk; they would update their files, add any new items, and send it via FedEx or UPS to the next location. This was a never ending loop with time being one of the biggest variables. Talk about a money pit and literally chasing your tail...

The first step in changing this process was to create a centralized location for the data. One of the sales managers in the Salida office would keep the inventory file relatively up to date by making phone calls and trying to record the data. Every couple of days, Brandon would post the file online with a date to let the other managers know how current the file was. Having the data centrally located sped up the time frame from a two week cycle to just a day or two and totally cut out the next day FexEx charges. Even with these changes, work and efforts were being duplicated. Different salespersons were selling items without others knowing about it and new web page files were being made for items that had already been sold. It became very frustrating as a salesperson would have a good deal on the table just to find out that the item was already committed and/or sold. Deals also went the other way. A customer would ask for something and according to the spreadsheet, it didn't exist, even if it was physically available at another location. Eventually, the need was great enough to drive both Steve and Brandon to come up with a plan to create a dynamic web driven application to track the main big ticket items called stock/units (vehicles, trailers, and toppers).

Brandon went back to Utah on a family vacation and was able to take a dynamic webpage class from the technical college where he previously worked. After the class, he returned to Salida and began working on his very first database web driven mini-application. Its only functions were to track the stock/units (big ticket items), stock items in/out, and mark them as sold (basic inventory tracking). Once completed, the timeline for doing a transaction went from the two days between updates to each salesperson making real-time connections and totally eliminating the old spreadsheet of inventory items. At that point, a number of concepts that are built into adilas started to form. These concepts are enter once, use many, and empower the users at the point of action.

Once the first mini-application was complete, Brandon terminated his full-time employment with Morning Star and became a sub contractor and independent web developer. He started working from home and started his own web-based business and began seeking new clients. Morning Star was still one of his biggest clients, but he no longer worked full-time for them.

As things progressed, more and more options, tools, and features were added to the system. It wasn't long before the operations side (sales) was walking circles around the accounting department. Communications improved, sales went up, and the sales staff loved their new tools. Meanwhile, the accounting department was getting buried and management was looking to add new locations because of improved sales.

Because of the load and stress, the accounting department began to ask for reports with specific dates, data, and totals. Prior to that point, the accounting department had had nothing to do with the inventory tracking system other than the fact that they could login and look at individual stock/units and their histories. A very distinct line was in place and operations could not touch and/or see any of the accounting pieces or functions. Each department only dealt with or played in their department and minimal crossover took place.

As the accounting department slowly began to ask for more and more reports, new tools and new features, the two departments slowly began to interact better. Communications, procedures, and flow started to develop. The commonality became the system. As a matter of fact, they even made the system be the "bad guy" to help spell out the rules and say "No" when needed. If management didn't like what the sales staff was doing, they had Brandon open and close virtual doors to accommodate the correct flow process. More and more permissions where developed to accommodate needs on both sides of the transaction. Real time problems and solutions were beginning to be addressed as they happened.

The operational interface began to lightly feed the accounting department certain values and date sensitive reports. Managers and operations folks began to see numbers and reporting that they had never seen before. A cause and effect cycle began to emerge. This may not seem very big, but it was the start of a huge paradigm shift for the entire company. Managers began watching expenses and taking pride in running a tight store and location. Inventory levels were being tracked, purchases made accordingly and accounting was getting their numbers. Things were starting to flow more smoothly. The entire development process was as follows: 1. Find a specific need 2. Figure out what pieces came from where 3. Take a step in that direction by releasing a new tool, feature, or report. The natural consequence of the user actions would then present the next logical step and management would be able to see where they wanted to go. In a way, the horse began leading the cart instead of the other way around.

The next phase of growth was changing from one corporation into multiple corporations. As the dealership grew, they took on different businesses and acquired others. Steve went to Brandon and asked for the exact same web application for some of his other companies. Each new system needed to be independent so as not to mix numbers and items between corporations. All that needed to be changed were names, locations, tax settings, colors, logos, permissions, and a few other minor tweaks. After adding a number of independent systems, Brandon told Steve that it was getting too hard to keep up with all of the different systems. A single update or change had to be tested in multiple places in order to make sure that it worked with all systems. Users were getting multiple logins to be able to work in different corporations (no cross over existed between the systems). An additional load was added because certain users needed certain functionality in one corporation but not in the other corporations. The current system permissions and roles began to morph into user-specific custom code and began to split the application. More functionality was added but upkeep and maintenance became much harder.

Brandon proposed that they pull back and try to put everything under one roof and build with growth and expansion in mind. This new system could include: multiple permissions that could be assigned to different users by corporation, any number of different corporations, unlimited locations within a corporation, and each corporation could have their own settings and virtual sandbox to play in. To top that off, a bridge or interface could be built to allow a user to switch or cross over between corporations without having to login under that corporation. The entire system would be built on a one-to-many relationship model. Steve liked these ideas and began to think on a more global scale. All of the existing systems continued with minimal enhancements for a number of months.

At this time, Brandon was very involved in a business he had started to teach people how to do snowboarding freestyle tricks and moves through an interactive CD-ROM. Most of his time was devoted to building his own business. He was spending very little time working for Morning Star other than minor special requests. Brandon was looking to have someone take over the work he had been doing for Morning Star as their web developer.

Morning Star needed help with Brandon heading out the door so they hired a new computer guy. Brandon agreed to stay on long enough to train the new guy until he could take over. This required Brandon to dive back into what was going on at Morning Star. About this same time, Steve was dreaming up the concept of creating a "super system" - a web application that could track all of the data for different businesses. He could see the potential of selling this web application as a service to businesses with a reoccurring revenue stream. Steve grabbed the bull by the horns and set up several meetings with Brandon and the new computer guy to share his dream and vision.

It was Steve's idea to begin pulling the operation side and accounting side together like the cogs of a zipper being zipped up until each piece fit in perfectly with the other pieces. Some of the functionality was already in place in a very loose sort of way. Steve had many business ventures (besides his dealerships) in real estate, transportation, small investments, etc. Steve was also in the process of finishing his degree with a dual major in business management and accounting from the University of Phoenix out of Denver. Because of his business knowledge, his entrepreneurial spirit, and experience, he knew that a large gap existed between operations and accounting.

He could envision a way that as he did his day-to-day tasks (operations) that they would automatically show up for roll call on the accounting side of the application. Data would be entered once and then passed along until all of its activity was complete. He wanted to track every penny from start to finish. He also came up with the theory of entering pieces on the operations side and then slowly having them become more firm values, solid dates, and eventually final numbers. He used the analogy of water droplets forming into ice crystals. The droplets start fairly loose (sales) and slowly become crystals, then slush, and then finally becoming completely frozen or iced down. This final output would end up being the actual accounting for the organization. Basically, this was the start of tracking a transaction from beginning to end through its life-cycle. Each key date or status change was flagged and dated and all prior steps were locked down according to user permissions. This became a running history of the objects and data as they moved over time.

About this time, Brandon had a small business loan or note that required a significant payment and funds were tight between trying to push his own products and make the note payment. He began to supplement his normal income by helping to train the new guy and diving in on Steve's idea of this business accounting and operations system (accopps). Within a year, the new part-time computer guy had some family problems and was unable to continue. By this point, Brandon had caught the vision from Steve and both were working almost full time on the project.

All of the existing online systems for the other corporations continued with minimal new enhancements as Steve and Brandon developed a brand new system from the ground up. The new system required a major rework and was purposely built with growth and expansion in mind. Every single page was built from scratch to incorporate the new fields and settings. Scripting and database platforms were changed, servers were added, and the goal began to move toward an open business model instead of just a dealership industry business model. Each new development step opened the vision even further. Ideas and concepts that weren't even possible began to become a reality as the process continued. Cogs of the zipper were slowly coming together from the bottom up.

It wasn't long and the new "Morning Star System" was created. All existing companies migrated from older standalone web applications and started to use the new system. Additional companies and corporations were added under the "Morning Star System" name. No marketing was done and all of the new companies were referrals from current system users. Brandon and Steve were working hard to come up with the next steps and still trying to figure out how to keep pulling the zipper cogs closer and closer together. There were no road maps for doing this. They were truly pioneering ideas and concepts with only a vision, brainstorming, and trystorming (planned experiments) to guide them. The deeper they got, the more they started to see that other companies had the same problems and frustrations that they had already worked through. New companies were ready to pay even though the entire application was not yet finished. A definite "need" was forming.

Steve and Brandon knew that the new system would need a name and would need to become its own company and entity. Over a lunch meeting in Salida, Steve proposed the name of "adilas" which is actually the name Salida spelled backwards. Up to that point, the entire application had been created there in the small mountain town of Salida, CO. The name stuck and an acronym was developed - "all data is live and searchable". As time went on and as each new development step was added to the system, the more this acronym became a living part of the application.

Adilas, LLC was officially created in January of 2008 with the first paying customers in June of that year. Shortly after that, the first paying international customers were added. All in all, there were close to 20 corporations using adilas before it even became an actual entity. All of these companies, from the various industries, had asked to be a part of the process. They were all using the service free of charge up to that point. Each company helped tremendously by providing feedback and ideas that were incorporated into the development process.

The feedback and suggestions from their clients became one of adilas' biggest assets (and still is today). The size and depth of the live test bed was another huge asset that they harnessed virtually for free. It would be nearly impossible for a small company to pay for a test bed of that magnitude. It would have cost millions in research, development, and staff salaries alone. Similar to the cream rising to the top analogy, the ideas and suggestions began paving the way to new features and functions. Over the years, hundreds and hundreds of people have chimed in and made a contribution in one way or another. When asked, Brandon said that "Even our most adamant critics have helped formulate our direction and plans.

We are very grateful to one and all. The more holes they would find and point out, the more we just keep trying to fix the problems. It has been awesome!" People from all different walks of life from CPA's, attorneys, bankers, accountants, owners, managers, salespersons, data entry folks, entrepreneurs, and friends have all added their suggestions, ideas, and feedback. Literally hundreds of thousands of hours and millions of dollars have been put into this project. In a way it has become somewhat of a community effort or project.

In seven short years, from 2001 to 2008, adilas went from a mini custom write-up system to a multi-level business platform that is capable of bridging the gap between operations and accounting. The adilas guys have continued to pioneer the way and haven't stopped building. They are working on a master plan that includes a new way of doing accounting called "roll call accounting". This deals with tracking objects and data over time. Operations lead the way and the system is set up to catch and show cause and effect relationships of what was done and how the pieces are tied together. Along the way, each step is dated, flagged, and recorded. The entire story is being captured, mapped, and laid out for users to see. The "roll call" then happens when the user asks the objects and data where they were at any given point in time. The objects and data then virtually respond or report back to the user.

Clients currently use the system to track inventory, manage customers, showcase their products on the web, sell their items and services in an online point of sale system, run retail store fronts, pay bills, track receivables and payables, do their entire backend accounting processes, do payroll, scan and file documents (paperless office), schedule calendar events, run their business, and much more. New features and tools are released almost weekly and the system is gaining momentum and direction. A future training ground called Adilas University (adilasuniversity.biz) is in the works. This will be a dedicated place for training, video tutorials, step-by-step instruction, newsletters, upcoming events, new feature releases, along with a number of other different topics.

The entire application development process is fully paid for and has been through a number of full working releases. It has had hundreds and hundreds of people from different businesses pushing it to see what and where it will go. The story is still unfolding at an incredible rate. The adilas team is still adding new things every couple of days. With each new release, the vision opens up new doors and more options emerge. When asked, Brandon said, "You should see our tick list of where we want to go with this. I can see better training, faster reports, more automation, new custom settings, user defined preferences, and a more visual-type interface. I'm pretty excited about it!" So, it continues... as long as their users keep asking for the next logical step, they will keep building it better and better! The future looks very bright!

For more information about adilas, please visit - www.adilas.biz - If you would like to learn more about adilas, the system, the tools, the theory, the people, please get a hold of them for a free live demo. They welcome questions and love ideas! Contact them at: sales@adilas.biz or 719.439.1761 and ask for Steve.