Meeting with Eric to go over some questions on the system maintained sales tax project. We went over his progress on new expense types and where we are going from here. We spent some time talking about limiting and/or hiding certain pieces that are required for the system to do it's job. We allow so much editing that sometimes we think that we have to allow edits on all of the parts and pieces. In reality, there are certain high-level things that we need to guard and maintain behind the scenes.

Eric brought up some questions dealing with certain drill-downs (links from one page to another page with more details) and whether or not we needed those same options for some of the new code. We followed a few of the pieces around (method calls, pages, and drill-downs) and determined that what we are doing is different and doesn't need to play along those lines that we setup for other processes. As a side note, we often do what is called "following a handrail" in our code where we find something similar and then do searches for everywhere that certain pieces are used and expanded. That gives us a good idea of what else or what may be needed for the new pieces without going line by line by line. That can be really tough.

At the end of the meeting, we were talking about aggregates and other ETL (extract, transform, and load) options for data and databases. That seems to be a growing topic as we keep pushing forward. The daily transactional data is great, but at some point, you need to roll things up (and down) to get faster and faster responses and data (counts, averages, summaries, maxes, mins, etc.). The scary part is how much needs to roll up so that things become fast efficient and nimble.

Eric and I also talked briefly about accounts receivable and accounts payable and the cash flow games that go on - chasing monies and paying different bills and expenses. A constant battle.