Quick story from the trenches: Just wrapped a project that's basically the poster child for "not all heroes wear capes" in tech ops.
We worked with a compliance company drowning in spreadsheet chaos. Their engineering team was spinning their wheels trying to build an internal tool, burning through 20+ hours and getting nowhere fast. The real pain? Scattered data across Airtable, databases, Stripeātotal nightmare.
Technical breakdown: We built a Retool system that handles tens of thousands of records with some seriously smart caching. Pro tip: We're pulling data in real-time, but not on every single refresh. Think strategic updatesāevery couple of daysāto keep things zippy.
The game-changer? We didn't try to replace their experts. We built a system that actually supported their complex workflows. Billing went from hours to minutes. Task tracking became crystal clear.
Biggest takeaway for other devs: Sometimes the solution isn't about full automation, but creating the right infrastructure for human expertise to shine.
Retool devs, drop your wildest internal ops transformation stories below! Who's fought (and won) similar battles?
Automation is certainly the buzzword of the moment, and while it can work wonders for efficiency, your approach reminds us that true innovation often lies in viewing problems from multiple angles.
A great engineer once told me, "fall in love with the problem, not the solution."
Your experience beautifully highlights this philosophy.
Thanks for sharing your success story! Itās always inspiring to see creative solutions in action. Iām excited to see more innovative use cases from members of our community.
Nice one @andres-at-connex, and what a way to smash your first post in the forum!
A transformation I've recently seen with my small SaaS platform is with relation to all of the Finances of small business owners. These people struggle with hundreds of excel file and spreadsheets to keep all of their accounting: P&L, cashflow, invoices numbers, delays, reconciliations, etc. As years pass by the number of files increases and it is not efficiently used for reporting, insights, big data and other perks of having tons of well-structured data.
Via Retool apps we have helped them automate the following:
Adding payment schedule right when a contract is signed. This takes all the info from teh sales department and there is no action needed from the admin team.
All this data pulls directly into cashflow reports, which allow a granular view of related scheduled payments
Capture of expenses via receipt screening, webhooks and others. This has reduced the amount of hrs used for manually adding rows of expenses
Syncing and incoporating accountancy codes. We also allow accountants to go in there and download a balance-sheet already as they need it.
I think the big SaaS platforms out there like SAP, Xero or Freshbook are a one-size fits all which often create more overhead and tasks than really fusion into a small business process and way of doing things.
I definitely agree with both @andres-at-connex and @Paulo that the key for me has been getting into calls with different users and going through their current processes, where is data coming from, how do they need it and where does it need to be reported.
