You built a solid internal tool. It manages customers, tracks orders, handles operations. Your team lives in it every day.
Then someone in leadership asks: "Can we get a report showing monthly revenue by plan type, broken down by region?"
And you realize — your tool has no reporting layer. No charts. No exports that make sense. Just raw data sitting in a database, and a Slack message you're trying to figure out how to answer.
This is one of the most common pain points for developers building internal tools. The app works great. But reporting gets bolted on as an afterthought, and you end up spending a week building a half-baked export feature, or worse — someone starts maintaining a spreadsheet manually synced from the database.
There's a faster path. Tools like Draxlr connect directly to your database and can have a working dashboard up in minutes. But whether you use a tool or build it yourself, the approach is the same — let's walk through it.
