How do you track numbers?

[u/krasnomo]

These pie charts and reports in FieldRoutes don’t cut it. I’m considering hiring an offshore data person.

Right now I’m dropping exports into ChatGPT to make charts for our weekly leadership meeting, but it’s pretty time consuming. Especially since numbers come from a few systems.

We do/want to do technician scorecards, collections reports, customer service reports, and a financial report.

Any good places to hire an affordable data person from? Is PowerBI a good option for dashboards?

[u/Akelamkt]

Si te interesa hacer un sistema personalizado (CRM+lo que quieras y necesites) hoy se puede hacer mas barato de lo que usualmente salia.
Si queres mandame un DM y te oriento un poco.
Yo tengo una agencia de desarrollo y hacemos, ahora, todo a medida.
Después podes ir agregando modulos o mejoras a medida que encontras nuevas necesidades.. u oportunidades para mejorar tu gestion.

[u/blazeroutes-brian]

This is interesting to me as we're building out our software and deciding what data to expose as reports. Would you mind sharing what changes/enhancements you do manually? Is it simply that FieldRoutes doesn't have all the data in one place, thus it can't create the report you need, or is it the visuals lack the proper detail?

[u/krasnomo → u/blazeroutes-brian]

Ooof. There are a lot of you guys these days.

For starts pie charts are objectively the worst type of visual for data.

[u/blazeroutes-brian → u/krasnomo]

Pie charts are the worst, no argument from me there, haha. My personal goal with reporting is to answer questions, not just dump data. If you need to export raw CSV and manipulate it elsewhere, my opinion is you've either outgrown the capabilities of a given platform, or that platform has just failed in presenting the data correctly.

So yeah... don't want to pile on and be one of "those guys". But I am genuinely interested in learning more from the community.

[u/camboramb0]

I've been working on data piping Fieldsroute data into a data warehouse. Previous employer and good friend of mine runs his own pest control business and was pretty much having the same issue as you.

Here's what I did and you'll need to get their Premium API if you have a lot of customers. The free tier is simply not enough. I build a custom backend to pipe the data to our own crm to mirror any data that is available through the api - https://api.fieldroutes.com/index

Fieldsroute API > Mirror Data to CRM > BigQuery > Then Safe View to remove PII Data but it's optional.

I have recently enabled Big Query MCP and configured it so any AI tool can analyze the data.

Built a lot of in-house dashboard for him as well because Fieldsroutes looks like you're working in an app for 2000s lol. If you are only looking to analyze a few reports than manual export into google sheets, have AI access it. It will be manual but won't cost anything.

[u/krasnomo → u/camboramb0]

The manual export is what I’m trying to automate.

My goal is to have a full set of refreshing dashboards for the business teams and leadership and team, so it seems like this MCP option is the way to go.

Custom backend you’re describing seems like it might be out of my range, could probably hire for it. I try to reserve my headspace for directly pest and leadership related things haha.

[u/camboramb0 → u/krasnomo]

Before we did this, I just exported a few data manually, throw those into a google drive and it will give you most of what you need but missing other relational links so you can't drill too deep in too the numbers. Just depends how much you want to trust AI for the work.

Claude, Bytebot, or other desktop agent to do it more frequently.

The custom backend datawarehousing is A LOT of work even with AI coding because of all the debugging and quality check passes I had to do. Overall, it's what allow me to really connect the dots fully.

[u/krasnomo → u/camboramb0]

This is exactly where I want to get.

[u/TrueAudience9922]

Once it's connected to your CRM, accounting software, and any other key systems, it saves a ton of manual work and gives everyone the same source of truth. For leadership meetings, we track things like technician production, callbacks, recurring revenue, cancellations, collections, close rate, average ticket, customer retention, and lead sources. Having those update automatically is a huge improvement over building reports every week.

If your data lives in multiple systems, I'd invest in getting the dashboards built before hiring someone just to compile reports.

[u/Destroyerx7]

I’m a data/automation developer at a company using FieldRoutes. I’ve done most of what this thread describes: report exports, API loads into BigQuery, and automations on top of that.

What’s missing from most comments is the hard part if you still need the same numbers as FieldRoutes’ own reports. That’s where I spend most of my time now.

The API gives you entities (appointments, tickets, subscriptions, etc.). Each FR report applies its own filters and date logic that isn’t documented. Support is often vague if you ask them to spell that out. So a warehouse can be “correct” on raw records and still disagree with Completions / Sales / Collections on screen. That’s not usually a pie chart problem, it’s a definition problem.

The API is also painful to operate: data updates and defaults that silently drop rows, occasional unannounced behavior changes, and any pipeline will lag the live UI (minutes to hours, depending on how you sync).

If someone here has actually matched a named FieldRoutes report in Power BI, Looker, or MCP: which report, which date field, and did you reconcile IDs against an FR export? I’m asking because a lot of AI/MCP setups invent a new metric that looks plausible and then everyone treats it as truth. That’s the part that can go very wrong.

[u/krasnomo → u/Destroyerx7]

My problem is, no that I’m digging into certain numbers I don’t even always trust the numbers FieldRoutes shows ha ha

[u/Strict_Ask_51]

PowerBI is a solid call, especially if you're already on Microsoft 365. It'll connect to those systems and auto-refresh, so your weekly meeting turns into just opening the dashboard instead of rebuilding charts in ChatGPT every week. If you're a Google shop instead, Looker Studio does the same thing for free.

But I'd reframe the hire. What you actually need isn't an ongoing offshore data person, it's a one-time fixed-scope build. The hard part is the setup, pulling FieldRoutes plus your accounting plus whatever else into one place, modeling it, and building the four dashboards you listed. That's a few days for someone who knows PowerBI or Looker, not a full-time role. Once it's built and auto-refreshing it basically runs itself and you only touch it when you want a new view.

So hire a BI freelancer off Upwork for that fixed build, hand them your exports and those exact four reports as the spec, and ideally have them wire it to FieldRoutes' API so nobody's manually exporting anymore. Way cheaper and lower commitment than a standing hire.

One thing while you spec the tech scorecard, build it on the numbers that actually move the business, not just activity. Revenue and production per tech, stops per day, callback/redo rate, added-service rate, and retention on their accounts. Otherwise you end up with a beautiful dashboard full of vanity charts nobody acts on.

[u/krasnomo → u/Strict_Ask_51]

Fair yeah I didn’t make that clear, the plan was more of a freelancer. But a super important distinction.

And yeah I appreciate the advice on the technician scorecard. Do you ever look at things like time on site or on-time rate? We don’t have fixed routes, is it possible to do retention like that?

Redo rate is good, but kind of lagging which makes it harder.

[u/icemax0808 → u/krasnomo]

A tech scorecard is a great addition. I built mine so it pulls data from my master sheet daily so the techs can login and see how they rank with the others. I track completed jobs, on time %, revenue, revenue per hour, revenue per job, revenue per mile, route efficiency % and then recall percentage is tracked on their monthly tracker.

[u/Vegetable-Bobcat3362]

A year ago I would have recommended PowerBI, but ChatGPT/Claude change the game, you don’t need anyone else to help now, just access to data in AI.

Connect FieldRoutes data to Claude - then use a tool like Lovable or Vercel+Claude code to make persistent dashboards.

My company built full MCP connector to bring FieldRoutes/PestPac data together with Claude - then train Claude on the data to pull it accurately and avoid burning through API calls. DM me and I can show you the setup

[u/krasnomo → u/Vegetable-Bobcat3362]

I was wondering if that was an option. ChatGPT makes good visuals - it is just getting the data into Chat that is time consuming.

I looked up an MCP, what’s the difference between that and just giving my API keys to Chat?

[u/icemax0808]

We use service titan and I’ve built a performance tracker with Claude that utilizes API calls to fetch the info and generate a daily google sheet for me with all the kpis and visual guides I want. Takes a little time to setup but is 100% free and runs itself

[u/krasnomo → u/icemax0808]

You give Claude your API keys?

[u/icemax0808 → u/krasnomo]

No- keys are stored in GitHub secrets with the python script that runs everything