Jumped on a meeting with Cory and Shari O. Going over yearend payroll stuff and tax forms. We then got into a discussion on average costing and a thing called internal cost corrections (ICC). We have some of our older clients that came on (started using our systems) before we had sub inventory. Some of them are wanting us to add in either average costing options or be able to virtually update the COGS to match-up what has come in/out of the system on a per item basis. The best solution would be to get them to buy into and/or use sub inventory or parent/child inventory. Anyways, we were talking about some options.

Checking on some Bear 100 runner counts. It looked like there was a problem. It ended up being that some of the data team (HAM radio folks) changed some records after the race started. Here is what happened. There were a number of people who didn't show up on time to start the race. They were marked as DNS (did not start). Later, at some time, they showed up and wanted to still run. They allowed them to start running with the original group start time. I had already seen the counts, so I had a specific number in my mind. When I checked some of the reports the numbers were different. We got it all figured out.

Phone call with Eric going over the pros and cons of sub/child inventory and parent inventory. We talked for quite a while about the needs, wants, and ins and outs of both options. I put in a plug for the ICC or internal cost correction project that would help allow us to use parent inventory (when needed and there are specific instances where that is better). Anyways, we had a good chat. It comes down to what is best for the situation and for the users. As an analogy, not everyone likes class V (class 5) rapids. Sometimes that's a little too hardcore.

Recording notes from the day. I've been bouncing all over the place today. Part of the gig.

On a Zoom meeting with Kelly, Cory, Steve and I. We were going over a number of different topics. We started out on expense/receipts and logic on limited expense types per vendor. Kelly was saying that we should only limit things if we know enough information to actually limit things. There was an error where a vendor had been assigned to a single expense type, but then that expense type got made inactive. She couldn't get into the expense/receipt. We had her go to the vendor and remove the limit by expense type value and everything worked fine.

We then switched over to talking about sub inventory and sub inventory attributes (sub attributes). We spent tons of time and I took a bunch of notes. Here are my notes:

- Kelly went through things to find the gaps

- Parents and children are so separate - you have to know what goes where

- She started on the grouped inventory report (just shows counts from the parents).

-- She was hoping that those quantities and costs would be able to show the same values.

-- Investigating and auditing - Going deep

- Cost of sold adjustments - 2 sides on an invoice... one positive and one negative. ICC - internal cost corrections (future project) - cleaning up the dust - bulk tools are needed.

- On big reports, we need to look at the size, and maybe do backend data pulling and then showing data.

- She has to go to the usage on each one to look at what is going on.

- Accurate inventory values - this is a big lift

- She needs an extended cost per - cost * qty = extended. We just show the cost and the quantity, not the extended cost.

- Clients are saying that their reporting is way off.

- Disconnects between PO line items - parents and subs

- She was using Excel pivot tables to get super close details to what we were showing.

- Cost changes, rounding errors, some parents and some subs, negatives, etc.

- In order to find all of the possible problems, you have to get so deep in the usage and details.

- How do you help clients fix items, quantities, costs, and usage, etc.

- When auditing subs... it would really help to show which ones have which costs

- Part status - active and allow sub only - could be both.

- The knowledge level to do an audit.

- Multiple tabs open and pulling data at one time.

- Level of trust... - I could pull more data but is it even what I'm looking for?

- Pagination of the data - say 40 pages - I need it all summed up - with what was what... in/outs, cost changes, etc.

- In Excel, she had to do find and replace, build special comparisons, standardize the data, etc.

- She had to figure out what was off and then go in deeper. Basically, she would love to see the known issues or sub sets of the data. Maybe even comparing things and helping them find the issues.

- Some of the dates... in the past - you can't even fix something - How do you fix it without adjusting things going forward.

- It would be nice if there were alerts, notices, or somehow finding those problem children.

- It becomes so complicated that they skip it. It is very manual on the fully deep audit.

- Locking things down - ice-down dates - being able to lock/hide things. We need this on all of the main players.

- If there is a difference between po line items and subs, we could show the problems... all at once. Similar to the bank balance helper report.

- Read them and weep numbers - too bold

- Our basic user's comprehension is not very deep.

- There is a need for oversight, maintenance, etc.

- Helping all our users to know what the problems are. It seems like it is coming down to known issues and disconnects.

- The cost field is so important... we allow that to be changed. Kelly was saying, the cost runs downhill.

- We talked about the balance sheet homepage and that it should run a number of checks before it does it stuff, and/or we need to let people know that there is a possible problem (or problems).

- Talking about some other check fields (aggregated values) that could be held on the main to show problems, disconnects, or whatever.

- On E/R's and deposits, we allow posting and locking. Most of our PO's and invoices can lock lines, but never get to the posted level.

- We rely so much on PO's. We don't have a ton of control over them.

- People are looking for the easy button - things keep evolving and users are expecting the system to help them along that journey.

- More guardrails

- Huge need for aggregates, counts, sums, averages, maxes, mins, and other values. This is a huge need. Bigger than we can say... We are very good at getting all of the data (transactional level). We need the aggerate levels. We have so much data. We need to get it summed up and other aggerate levels.

- Controls - at all levels

- We have seen users create more issues trying to correct other issues... Tons of cause-and-effect relationships.

- Inventory that goes into the negative. Ideally, this shouldn't happen. If it does, we need to show it.

- Visibility - start here - helping our users see what is going on.

- Parent/child issues - looking for disconnects.

/////////////////////////

Switching over to sub attributes

- Kelly has a client that has sub inventory and existing categories and wants to re-categorize the inventory. Category to category moves, in sub inventory. This totally creates a disconnect.

- People want to consolidate their categories or break things into smaller categories. We didn't know that people would be flipping the categories. That's a higher level of flipping but it has cause and effect drop-down effect.

- Currently, all sub attributes are tracked on (or off of) the column number (not the sort order or name, literally just the column number), not the id number. This can make things go off the rails.

- Is there a quick solution? Personally, I think this is going to take some time.

- One of the biggest problems is - we can't get the reporting out that we are needed. Because of this, they start altering things to solve their need. That can cascade potential problems. They want quick reports, quick exports, etc.

- We need to be able to cross over categories.

- We think that we need a master list for sub templates. In Kelly's words, maybe build above it. Along with that, we may need to build on both sides, build above it (master list) or build below it (custom cross category mapping).

- Build and break - build and break - part of the cycle

- Steve was talking... what about the next version of sub inventory. What would this look like?

- What about bulk tools?

- Kelly's goal was to show the different sides of what we are learning.

- Software has to evolve! What is the next step?

- From Steve - It keeps feeling like our users are wanting the software to go to the AI (artificial intelligence) level.

Cory and I looking into an inventory disconnect. She was calling it a ghost cost out in inventory. It had a similar feeling to a project that we would like to call internal cost corrections (ICC). Anyways, the error ended up being that the company had duplicate vendors and the code was grouping things based on the vendor's name, thus creating a missing vendor and its data.

The fix is to make sure that the vendors don't have duplicates or redo the code and make it loop over vendor id's vs vendor names. The id's would always be unique. Anyways, we talked about work arounds and ways to fix the data and get the vendors and items fixed and merged together. There already exists a tool for that, we just have to talk the client into to using it.

Cory jumped on the meeting. She had some questions about servers and new changes. If everything goes smooth, she is really happy. If it has any hiccups or goes badly, she seems to get the brunt of the deal. That's no fun. Anyways, she is just being cautious and trying to make sure that new development and deployment goes as smooth as possible. I'm really grateful for that.

She was going through emails and going through a virtual to do list. We touched base on projects, new permissions, verbage changes, and small possible bugs. We also went over some new and upcoming news and updates as well as techy talk for deeper how to's. Other topics that we went over were internal scheduling settings, client data export (custom work), and looking at sales reports and associated drill-down links - trying to make sure that everything matched up and we were getting consistent data back.

Cory and Wayne were going over data 16 server issues. It seems to be quieting down but we have little hiccups here and there. Wayne reported on the new corp-wide settings and corporation model object stuff that he and Alan are working on (DAO's and services). It is getting pretty close, and we expect to get some new code tested, pushed up, and fully deployed by end of the week, or first part of next week. When it is ready, we will launch it on the Herbo server for doing some live testing. We went over a couple of other server related projects. Small updates and reports.

After the server meeting, Cory and I briefly looked at the bank drill-down bug that Kelly had reported. We decided to make a small change. After that we talked about a client's need for some maintenance on a merchant account type that we are not really wanting to support. We will look into it but may or may not commit to doing the maintenance. Currently, we only have one client on that particular service and it may cost of a couple of thousand to do the upgrades. We'll have to see. We will commit to getting a guy in there to check it out but we will wait until we hear back from them before taking the bigger commitment step and repairing everything. This wasn't our fault, the vendor of the merchant processing code made changes and thus are forcing us to make upgrades and do unscheduled maintenance, on our dime. Not very fun. We'll check it out.

2/8/23 created video.

1/24/23 created video.

1/23/23 checked and pushed with Brandon

Through 4/14/: 46.29

Through 3/1: 173.39 hours

12/21 through 1/22: 62.93 for JM

2/3/21: 35hrs
1/4/21: 15.59 hours for JM
12/14/2020: Brandon and John M will start meeting this week to get the ball rolling.

We met and talked about a number of projects.

- There were some requests on the customer loyalty program stuff. They want a new permission, be able to handle voids, and also fully map and finish the backend accounting.

- Lots of talks about the ICC's (internal cost corrections) and getting that project going. Research on ICC's.

- Menu boards - take our existing pieces and push it to the next level.

- Talking about project costs vs helping with seed money and getting things started.

- We need to build a tool to help migrate customers, similar to part numbers or items. This is one system to another system on the same server. We already have a migration report for general inventory items. We will just build one for customers between corps.

1/21/20: Steve wants to tackle this project. He is familiar with Molly's process and can see his way through it.

1/16/20: This is called an ICC- internal cost correction. Needs to work with both subs and parents: See ID #460 and ID#1015.

From Molly on 1/15/20: when someone enters incorrect costs prior to sales .. 

Meeting with Chuck. Alan joined us and Wayne joined part way through. We started out by going over new corp admin mock-ups, talking with Alan about projects and files, and then looping around and introducing Wayne to Chuck and vice versa. Wayne has been working in and on computers since 1979 (long time). Towards the end, we had Chuck show Wayne some of what he is doing on the camp adilas project. Nice meeting. See attached for a couple of screenshots.

- Both Chuck and Wayne have worked on the hardware and networking side of the IT world - As a funny side note, they don't like the pressure of "It's always the server guys fault" - Pretty common for IT guys. They get the blame. They don't get remembered when it runs correctly, they just get the blame when it has a hiccup or an issue.

Multi-vendor cross corp invoie to PO. We had Bryan, Molly, Cory, Brandon, Alan, and Steve on the call.

Currently we can do cross corp invoices to PO's. The hiccup seems to be with multiple vendors and making sure that the mapping is correct.

Molly logged in and showed us some examples. The goal is to be able to move inventory between systems without creating or setting up the items on the new system. Basically, they want to grab the info from the system and then use that info as quick as possible. The main source is the outbound invoice. It contains, potentially multiple items from multiple vendors.

Mapping on the main vendor (at the corp level). This is where the main invoice comes in at.

Then mapping on a per line item level. Each line item needs to be mapped to a different vendor based on what the invoice has. They want the line items to default to the same vendor name as the source invoice line. There is already a custom map option. The new functionality just includes a possible vendor switch as part of the mapping. They are looking to get a vendor drop-down on a per line item level. Currently, there is only a drop-down that allows you to select the item category. They still want the mappings... to help speed things up, but they want a vendor assignment to be part of the new mapping process.

If the vendor doesn't exist, be able to add it in on the fly and set the vendor type to inventory.

There is a new vendor based flag called the default vendor type (created by Steve but not fully cascaded through the system). They want to be able to use those flags to show up as a possible vendor option, vs just checking to see what vendors do have real items. They would like the vendor list to either look-up existing items or be flagged as an inventory vendor. Another possible option is show all vendors or do a perfect vendor name match.

They are using this cross corp functionality to setup new systems. They basically have a master corporation, that already exists, and then they just start transferring and selling back and forth and the items get pulled from master corps to the new corps.

An idea was submitted by Steve to go into the existing systems and flip vendors and vendor flags as a background task to make sure that the new feature is fully used. We may also want to add some code to help flip that switch as a vendor is added and then used on a PO.

There were some discussions on conditioning the application to help protect the companies. Sometimes the deeper we get, the more we actually have to code in some protection and safety measures.

See attached for a video recording of the meeting.

Molly and I met for about an hour to talk about options and possibilities for ICC's or internal cost corrections. She started out saying that she has worked with a number of clients and sometimes it takes up to 20-30 hours to do some clean-up (depending on the size of the client and how long its been since the last cleaning). As a side note, we see bigger problems with normal parent inventory due to the last known cost that is held at the parent item level.

Sub inventory is much tighter and works pretty good. The only known problem with sub inventory deals with some rounding error problems over time. Basically, by the time you split up certain known costs over and over again, clear down to 5 levels of decimal accuracy, there becomes a small rounding error for certain items. It is just math but it still ends up looking like a problem.

The catch 22 is on what it takes to look things up and fix them. On parent inventory, Molly goes and looks at the usage per item. She can then fix things fairly quick. On subs, there are much less problems (originally), but sub inventory is even harder to clean-up due to closed packages, parent item settings and status, and some of the math.

The main goal is to get the cost of goods perfect and/or help the user get to a perfect level. Ideally we would like to build out a new core tool called ICC's or internal cost corrections.

Molly would really like it to follow a FIFO (first in first out) type model for costing. This would require us to be able to go all the way back in time and see what came in and at what cost. It would then try to reconcile itself based on how many have been sold and at what value. For example: if we start out with a 100 at $0.45 per, ideally, we would sell the first 100 items for that $0.45 cost. It gets complicated as things change over time, we don't fully sell out of a specific quantity based on cost, or a person buys multiple things from different cost levels. We have also had problems with users just going in and randomly changing item costs.

- At some point, we need to make an adjustment and/or update to the COGS (cost of goods sold).

- Molly was talking quite a bit about the in/out extended cost. We had some discussion based on FIFO vs last known cost.

- Molly and I were trying to figure out basic rules - only grab items that have an in/out extended cost that is not zero and a quantity that is not zero (don't worry about items that match perfectly or have zeros). If an item has a quantity (+ or -) - we need to look at it. We may need to work backwards to get our numbers.

- We also had some discussion about are we trying to get super detailed (matching PO's with invoices with costs) or be more general and just get the grand totals correct per item? Good discussion. We left off with Molly going to reach out to Eric to see if he has more time to meet and work on a tool/report to help fix things. I am supposed to think about options and come up with some ideas. Lots of moving pieces.

Talking with Molly about adjustments to the inventory values (current inventory) as well as cost of goods sold (items already out the door). Some new questions coming up with sub inventory and how the details are being spread into smaller and smaller pieces. We would like to look at a quick calculator type tool to help out with problems and/or adjustments. How could we use an update PO to help adjust costs diffs? Does it belong on an update PO or some other tool? Great questions.

I put a couple of links out for her through chat to help with research on ICC (internal cost corrections)

https://data0.adilas.biz/top_secret/developers_notebook_home.cfm?q=ICC - research on ICC's

https://data0.adilas.biz/top_secret/community_funded_projects.cfm?projects=1015 - rough quote

She showed me her current process. She started out by going to the grouped inventory page.

- The grouped inventory page is where they (our clients) then to see the cost problems - quantity of 0 with an existing cost

- She is pulling every usage page (per item) and going page by page to see if she could find the problems and/or issues.

- Per location, current quantity times the current cost should equal the in/out extended total - see screen shot

- She adds a positive and a negative (no change in quantity overall) but we need to alter the cost diffs.

- If we could check if the current cost times the current quantity matches, then great. If different, show a flag and allow the change/update.

- She would really like to have a tool that allows for a recalc of the extended costs (both on the inventory side and the cost of goods sold - both sides of the fence).

On site to help with a huge physical inventory count at Industrial Tool & Supply in Logan, UT. Big store with tons of items and a big warehouse. We gathered together and I did some light training on what we were going to do. Then, as we got the different people going, we found tons of issues. We had been give a digital upload of their items and products. We had uploaded 31,000+ items. As we started to do the inventory updates, many of the items weren't there and/or had bad data (provided to us). Their Internet was limited, one of the queries inside of an adilas page was running slow, and we had laptops on mobile carts hooked to barcode scanners all around the store and the warehouse. The items that were in and we had good data went fairly fast. However, you would do 3 to 4 good ones and then hit a wall (time wasters looking for the item, items not found, bad data, Internet connection problems, slow queries, etc.).

The owner was about to call everything off. He had 15 to 20 people there wanting to do things but it kept having hiccups of one kind or the other. In order to keep people working, we had to go to a paper model while we made a plan. We divided up the team into small 2 person groups and some 1 person groups (depending on knowledge and skills). They then went about recording part numbers and quantities on paper with clipboards. A few of the admin team met and decided to use either Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets (spreadsheets) to do the same thing but to use the barcode scanners to help eliminate double entry and human error. We went team by team and got each one transitioned off of pen and paper and into Excel or Google Sheets. That was much quicker and faster and was already in a form of digital data.

Two of the ladies started taking the paper sheets of items and quantities and entering them into Excel. We tried doing it in adilas, from the paper copies, but we ran into the same problems with items not found, bad data, slow queries, etc. At that point, I went in and fixed the slow queries in adilas and added a new filter to the main query. That helped out a ton on the speed of the queries and the filtering of the data. I uploaded new pages and tested live. Big improvement.

After that, I went in and built a temp page to help update and reclaim some of the barcodes that were given to us via the digital upload. Basically, Microsoft Excel had removed any preceding zeros (0 padding at the front) of the 12 digit barcode numbers. For example: Say the number should have been 0123456789, well it would remove the 0 and just make it 123456789 (treating it like a number instead of a string or general value). Anyways, this was causing problems. If you scanned a barcode and it had a 0 at the front, it couldn't find the item because the data stored in the database (after the upload) didn't have the front 0's as the placeholders. In order to find it, you had to remove the front 0's and then search again. This would break you out of the normal rhythm of the page flow. Kinda frustrating. Anyways, I built a temp page and ran it to update over 5,000+ bad barcodes. That also helped a ton.

Meanwhile, all of the teams were entering digital data into Excel and Google Sheets. It then became my job to start gathering up the data into one giant master Excel file. I went around and either emailed, shared via Google drive, or grabbed via jump drive data from the different mini teams. When I wasn't doing that, I was working on a new custom tool to import a CSV file (comma separated values file) and then do the inventory count update from that data. I got fairly far on that project by the end of the day. The goal there is to use the Excel file data to do a digital upload of the inventory counts.

By the end of the day, everybody was happy with the progress and we had done a full physical inventory on the whole store in record time. Not exactly what we had planned, but we learned a lot and made some great progress. Long day.

For my record - here are the two temporary files that we built during the day to help with some of the barcode updates and CSV file upload tool.

- extras/barcode_update_helper.cfm

- extras/industrial_tool/csv_item_qty_upload.cfm

On the morning meeting. Pretty quiet. Russell popped in for a bit but most of the session was a work session. I was working on building a sales tax calculator page for users to test out sales tax and location settings.

Small note on global simple getters and setters... As I was hiking this morning, I was thinking about simple getters and setters. As I was doing that, I would really like to make one super generic setter. Imagine a corporation id, a table name, an id number, a column name, and a value. It could be that simple. Then we could use it over and over again. We might beef it up a bit by allowing lists and arrays of name/value pairs but it could be pretty simple. On a simple getter, what if you could pass in a corporation id number, a table name, a list of fields to pull, and any special criteria. You may also need an order by clause, a group by clause, a limit clause, etc. All extras would be optional and well documented. If you wanted everything, you could just use key words such as all, auto, etc.

Here are a couple advanced SQL methods that we may end up pulling ideas and info from: "tableRecordCounter", "getCustomersSimple", "adminGeneralSQL", and "getSpecificCorpWideSettings". See also these pages for dynamic SQL stuff: developer_update_tables.cfm, test_page.cfm. These are listed to help with getters and setters. Just concepts of what we are trying to do.

Another small thought... While working today on a new calculator page... I was thinking that it might be good if I were to help go through the application and do some maintenance stuff. Don't do huge big projects, but do some code, get it done, merge it in, and push it up. Tons of mini projects. This could be checking pages, writing help files, doing web/API documentation, testing things, adding black box code, checking icon menus, etc. All kinds of stuff that needs somebody to look at it little by little. Just a thought.

On the morning meeting with Steve and Russell for the first little bit. Steve and I were talking about the balance between custom code and internal code and development. We spend a lot of time on custom stuff. However, it also helps to pay for our guys and we gain some benefits by allowing it to happen. We do need to be careful, but if we keep it balanced, it can and will work great.

We talked about using the Ice-down dates and ICC (internal cost corrections) per locations to help keep things straight. This could be done to help close things out and keep parent costs in check. The real answer is in sub inventory and cost controls, but we have met with some resistance, especially from older or prior clients. They don't want to take the jump and do that extra step. Anyways, as Steve and I were talking, there was a definite undercurrent of the users need to use the tools provided and/or pay for future development. We would totally wear ourselves out if we did everything that was asked of us by our clients. We simply can't do it all. We need to make the dreams meet reality, on both sides of the fence. Good conversation.

Russell and Steve chatted about changes to adilas ecommerce while I started paying bills and fixing a small bug on the BSI (balance sheet items stuff) to expense/receipts. After that, I jumped off the GoToMeeting session and did my own stuff. I did a bunch of emails, paid bills, and got Wayne setup with Newtek as an authorized adilas rep to open and check on support tickets and such.

After that, I started to work more on the sales tax by customer type changes that Kelly is waiting for. This is a smaller part of the bigger sales tax expansion project. That has been a long time coming.

Morning GoToMeeting

I was working on sales tax expansion project for Kelly - tying in the tax by customer type stuff.

Alan and Steve were working on some Leaf Data and Metrc API stuff

Russell and Steve went over the new WordPress news and updates section (adilas university, help files, media/content) for adilas features and such. Lots of good ideas and what not. Good meeting between Steve and Russell. Lots of questions and answers.

Michael with McCorvey's Pro Shop jumped on and chatted with me on some needs that they have. Below are some bullet points from the conversation:

Indiana - need this asap - county specific

North Carolina - I didn't know about that

FUTA - check Florida calcs

Employees clocking in at one store but they really want that value to be split between locations. We talked about departments and how the internal setup goes. We also talked about a combined P&L between multiple locations (across states) and across multiple departments. Maybe relate the employee taxes to where the person lives vs where they work. Somehow we need to combine some hours and maybe even allow for cross bridging of hours between different departments. They would really like to be able to clock in/out at different locations and have the system calculate things properly.

Problem with the cost of goods sold - they get items at all kinds of costs (sales, promotions, bulk, etc.) but they sale things and the system uses the last known cost. That creates all kinds of problems with the P&L.

ICC - internal cost corrections - this is important to do for items and usage under the bridge - bring things back to 0 quantity and 0 costs, where appropriate. This needs to be managed going forward. This needs to be done location by location - per item.

Michael would really like to get some data and the code for the part usage page and inventory adjustment pages - this would be database tables, data, code and page logic and also methods that are used.

Possible black box code for average costs - tied to the add to cart logic - this is a new twist and/or option since we last talked

Michael would really like it built in with a corp-wide setting that says something like - use last known cost or use average cost - this could be huge... it creates a nice alternative for similar businesses.

There size and the number of locations complicates the issue. Some of their managers are paid based off of the percentage (back to the P&L)

Item life cycles - at some point, the product will reach the end and/or die out.

• Prep for the packaging project
• developer's notebook
• GPS + RFID tag
• Subs of time
• Icon menus-merge with master
• Stock/Unit pages
• HTMIl Buttons/Flash
• ICC's + average cost

Deals with parent inventory and certain items running on previous or current costs instead of true cost model.

Adjust costing down. Does not change quantities.

Michael from Alabama has contributed to these ideas. Would love to help with coding.

https://data0.adilas.biz/top_secret/developers_notebook_home.cfm?q=ICC