Custom dashboards and internal tools
We build the board your team actually opens each morning. Order management, conversations, whatever the business genuinely runs on, connected to your real systems rather than a weekly export. It replaces the spreadsheet nobody trusts and the platform you rent, and the code is yours.
Solar Vista runs two of ours: one for orders, one for WhatsApp.
The WhatsApp one took the place of a platform they had been renting and paying for by the conversation. The board does the same job, sits next to their order data instead of in a separate account, and the fee it replaced scaled with how well the business was doing. That is the moment building beat renting, and it is an arithmetic question rather than a philosophical one.
What makes a dashboard worth building?
Somebody opens it without being asked. That is the whole test, and most internal tools fail it.
A board earns its place when it answers a question a person already has every day, using data that is live rather than copied. The ones that die are the ones built to display everything, because a screen that answers no particular question gets opened twice and then never again. Before we build one we ask what decision it is for and who makes that decision. If there is no clear answer, the honest advice is not to build it.
When does building beat renting a platform?
When the fee scales with your success and the tool still does not fit.
Per-conversation, per-seat and per-order pricing is reasonable when you are small and punishing when you are not: the better the business does, the more it costs to keep doing it. Set against that, a build is a fixed piece of work and a running cost that does not move with volume.
The other half is fit. A rented tool gives you someone else's idea of your workflow, and your data lives in their account. A board built for you holds your stages, your language, your exceptions, and sits beside everything else you own.
We are not the cheap answer here. If a standard tool genuinely fits, rent it, and we will say so.
What goes on it?
What someone acts on. Nothing that is only interesting.
For Solar Vista that means orders and their state, conversations and what is waiting on a person. For a different business it is entirely different, which is the point of building rather than buying. The one rule we hold to is that anything on the board should be something a person can do something about, and anything requiring an explanation before it makes sense probably belongs in a report instead.
Where an agent is doing the work behind the board, the board is also where you see what it decided and what it escalated. A system that acts on your behalf without a place to watch it is a system you are trusting blind, and that is the thing we audit.
What do you pay for after it is built?
The build is priced on how many systems it has to read from and whether it writes back. A board that reads three systems is a smaller project than one that places orders.
After that, the code is yours: the repository, the documentation and deployment access. It runs on infrastructure we manage, and one yearly fee covers maintenance, hosting and the AI usage behind it. Stop paying it and you keep the code, but it stops running until you host it somewhere else.
Tell us which screen your team has open at nine in the morning, and what it still does not tell them.