PORTWAI template and SuTable pack in Coda

Inspiration

While running businesses and households, we realized that unless done correctly and efficiently, purchasing can drain our financial resources. Though traditional documents and spreadsheets are great, they are not sufficient. After seeing the Coda platform, we felt that a good Coda template (and a good Coda pack) can definitely help us and others in purchasing activities. This led us to our project on the PORTWAI template and SuTable pack in Coda.

What it does

Corresponding to the four stages of purchasing, this template has four pages: Plan, Order, Receive, and Transact.
These pages use the same layout, but different columns.
Each page has a list of items in its lower section and a form view in its upper section.
Entries can be added or edited in either section.
The template employs OpenAI pack to get item descriptions, sourcing answers, draft emails, and draft notifications.
The template also employs SuTable pack [under development] to understand items' taxability and tax rates.
The template can help purchasers in keeping track of their use tax liabilities and claiming refunds where appropriate.

How we built it

Lalit and Vishnu's extensive and first-hand experience in purchasing enabled them to create an architecture of these template and pack. Coda's excellent click-and-drop gadgets made it easy to add nuts and bolts as needed. Krish's experience in Java helped the team in prototyping the pack.

Challenges we ran into

Coda's Free-tier membership did not allow us to add more pages or content. Due to a lack of time, we could not develop the SuPack pack as much as we desired.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were indeed very thrilled to find that the template is speedy, the OpenAI pack generates very useful responses, and the SuPack pack (when developed) can be quite useful.