Concepts


Scouts & Assets

The core unit in Pilfer are scouts and assets.

Scouts document thoughts, intentions and research on items the company is looking to purchase. This can be equipment, software, machines, furniture, books. Scouts help articulate purchasing as an investment decision by framing them through relative market value, infrastructure coherence, maintainability and project impact. These can be created using autofill by pasting a URL link into the create scout dialog, or via the editor.

Assets hold details, specs to keep a single source of truth for assets owned in your company. Maintenance logs can be attached to each asset to document past problems, fixes to improve future purchasing decisions.


Organisation

Projects operate above the core unit providing an organisational framework to group together scouts and assets, and can be configured with select member permissions. This can be useful for sandboxing and modelling spend projections for new projects or for organising sourcing and existing resources.

Spaces operate within and alongside projects allowing cross cutting functionality and organisation of scouts and assets across the company. For instance multiple projects may require the same piece of 3D printing equipment, a space would allow scouts and assets targeted towards this to be shared amongst multiple projects such that projects do not operate in independent silos, and can share resources where possible.


Projections

Pilfer also allows founders to build models to project burn and spend across the company and relative to a project.

Recurs allows founders to model recurring costs (such as salaries, software subscriptions, insurance etc.), allowing a clear view of monthly and annual burn. These can be scoped within a project to allow visibility of burn on a project by project basis or can be scoped to the company.

Projections, accessible via recurs or projects, pull together burn rate data with asset value and scouting projected costs to allow remaining runway to be modelled holistically. Projections can be configured to include or exclude certain assets/scouts, so different scenarios of a project or the company can be modelled for comparative and decision making purposes.


Observability

Each entity (project, spaces, assets, scouts) has 3 basic views: list, grid, kanban alongside detailed display configuration of each entity's properties to allow the information to be reformatted and filtered as needed.


Institutional Memory

Each entity has activity logs that track the change of important properties over time alongside comment threads to allow discussion to be documented alongside the ideation, research and sourcing process. This serves as a single source of truth to anchor reviews and to refine future purchase decision making.

As items and resources are documented alongside actual business operations, this can also act as a clear knowledge base for improving future sourcing and budgeting, project scoping, as well as anchor data for financial functions such as tax and R&D reclaims.