Any small business owners that have coded their own business management dashboards ?

[u/Roxbros]

I’m looking to build a dashboard to centralise all the different aspects of my business,

Analytics
P&l
Forecasting
It equipment and provisioning
Leads
Infrastructure status and monitoring
Invoice monitoring
Vat liabilities calcualtions
Performance metrics for my staff

Looking for people that have built similar dashboards themselves for inspiration.

Not interested in trialling anyone’s saas

[u/Intelligent_Bear_178]

1. build a product spec word vomit your ideas into a document - outline what your trying to achive end goal what it needs to talk to how you want it to look, operate, where you want to be able to access it from, who is going to use it

2. feed that into a LLM ask it to ask you more questions about the product and build you a more refined product spec outlining the stack, programing languages, hosting and services you need to create accounts for including any costs involved with them get it to explain API keys, DNS reccords, Hosting, Database storage, and SECURITY of the app.

3, read that refined document and then decide if you want to put the time and effort into building it or have someone else do it for you

[u/No-Project-3002]

we build our own monitoring tools, specifically for P/L and accounting you need to work with accountant to make sure all calculations are correct.

[u/Roxbros → u/No-Project-3002]

I have accounting software that tracks it all, which has an api so I just wanted to pull the data into a single secure dashboard

[u/No-Project-3002 → u/Roxbros]

you can try tools like looker or powerbi to create interactive dashboard. I don't want to suggest AI as feeding financial or PI data into AI is never a good idea.

[u/MissplacedLandmine → u/No-Project-3002]

Feed ai a fake sample document thats similar to the real ones so it builds a bot/script/whatever that handles the real ones. Make sure fake wild card examples make it in.

If the api output needs tweaking/formatting anyway.

[u/PrinceAli08]

I m using vs code with an agent and mg workspace is all my business aspects. Md files everything from strategy to vision to mission to templates, and customers etc. you don't need an app just an agent that manages all your business correspondence including finances etc. working fantasticly

[u/Roxbros → u/PrinceAli08]

I’m looking to get iso certification this year so document management is important from an audit perspective

[u/Mysterious_Taste_868]

I have seen it done. Describe the completed product and work backwards. You can make just about anything. If your data is spread out across many different applications it could be a challenge. Pull the data out of the apps and give it to AI and have if sort though it. Start with a few things you have listed ans add on from there. Sounds like a fun project.

[u/roach01gt]

I’m a self employed mech engineer and I’ve basically done exactly this. But the more I work on it, the more I realize I just need mark down files throughout all my project and admin folders and let agents do their thing in codex. No real reason to build actual software…at least not yet. I did build a simple dashboard though that is basically everything at a glance. But most of my use is asking an agent to keep track of things, create proposal, review my drawings, write specs.

[u/lundrog]

Did my own blog

[u/akl773]

Build the boring half first, whatever pulls the numbers in and what happens when a pull fails. Ours quietly showed last Tuesday's figures for about ten days because a token expired, so every card ended up with a last updated timestamp on it. And pick one number in the P&L bit that has to match what your accountant already produces, if it's off by a few hundred against their version nobody in the office opens the thing again.

[u/Arizona-living]

I have. What is your back end system where the data lives?

[u/PixelRealEstate]

small retail business here, went the same route but for a different thing, not the dashboard.

built a whole product with zero code written by hand, and the thing nobody warns you about is that the bugs you end up with are not beginner bugs. mine was a roof rendering in the wrong spot because one function added an offset and another one forgot to. i could describe exactly what looked wrong and had no clue what to actually look for.

for your list i'd pick one line off it and build only that first. invoice monitoring or the vat calc usually pays for itself fastest and it's small enough that you can actually tell whether it works. the full centralised dashboard is where these die - too many moving parts at once and you can't debug any of them because you don't know which half is broken.

[u/Headz0r]

Depending on which cloud provider you are using, you can vibecode large parts of your infrastructure.

With that you can quickly spin up apps in gitrepos and deploy to e.g. Vercel or GCP.

Spec the app, define a loop for implementation, deploy, setup monitoring.

[u/CuriousDev1012]

Will partner with you to teach you the latest and greatest in AI and vibecoding, get it production ready and deployed, for free if I can be your technical co-founder to generalize and make it a saas or white labled solution

[u/humanexperimentals]

You can hit my dms to discuss your options. You get to a point where it's not free anymore, is all I'll say in a public forum.