Cory and I going over different projects. One of the new things that needs to be done is some new code to help with emailing invoices as PDF's. Currently, we send emails with links to web based invoices out in ecommerce. We have a client that has to get their emails as a PDF invoice. Anyways, we talked about needs for that project and being able to automatically email clients who owe us money with the PDF invoice, be able to save it, attach it, and also do a clean-up routine for keeping things tight on the server. We talked about some new settings to make all of that happen.

Along with our conversation, we were talking about being able to do these things asynchronously so that the user doesn't have to wait. Also, as a side note, if we did this, our client would be happy and Shari O. would have an easier time. She does all of our billing stuff.

We flipped over to recipe/builds and a custom report that mixes elements of time, recipe/builds, flex attributes, and inventory planning. We made a small bug fix for the USAePay EMV chip transaction stuff. After that, we spent the rest of our meeting going over custom report requests. It's amazing what people want to search by, group by, and what things they want to mix and blend onto a single report.

As we were talking, Cory had the idea of building a big robust report builder that allowed for all kinds of stuff. Basically, a smorgasbord with options, filters, and such. We then put that power in the hands of our users and let them go at it. In rough terms, it will be let them pick and choose, save it, run it. That would be really cool. We also talked about linking and mapping things internally for sub inventory, kinda like family groups for sub inventory attributes. What are they paired with, how are they related, etc.?

The last subject was dealing with mapping, relationships, groupings, and aggregates. Everybody wants all of the data (details) but they don't want to have to wade through it (sums, counts, maxes, mins, averages, etc.). Those are the aggregates. Everybody wants sales data, inventory, and sub inventory data.