Think fast
Thoughts and ideas on how to build tools, automate workflows and speed-up the workplace.
How to Build a Secure Timesheet
We need an accurate record of the hours worked by our colleagues for all kinds of billing, payroll, HR, and other processes. For instance, paying salaries or invoicing clients for project hours. But in doing so, we can’t compromise our employee’s privacy or the integrity of our internal data assets. So, we need secure timesheets. See, the majority of companies handle this using spreadsheets - or even pen and paper. This is manageable for smaller teams, but it also introduces a whole range of problems around security, accuracy, usability, and integration options.
Ronan McQuillan
Feb 1, 2024
How to Build a Change Request Form in 5 Steps
It’s a fact of life that projects don’t always play out 100% the way we expect them to. Circumstances, budgets, priorities, and requirements can all change on a dime. Therefore, it’s vital to have an effective way to gather and manage information when this happens. That’s where change request forms come in. See, we need a systematic way to deal with new requirements or amendments to projects. This ensures that we have a centralized record of all of the relevant information, as well as improving decision-making and communications between stakeholders.
Ronan McQuillan
Jan 29, 2024
How to Build an Employee Information Form
Employee information forms are some of the most common data collection tools around. They’re a crucial part of onboarding workflows in just about every company in the world. But, the majority of teams use dated tools, like spreadsheets, fillable PDFs, email chains, or even pen and paper, to gather details about new colleagues. This creates all sorts of problems, including inaccuracies, disorganization, and security issues. Today, we’re diving deep into how to build a dedicated tool for capturing employee information.
Ronan McQuillan
Jan 26, 2024
How to Build a Manufacturing Dashboard
Manufacturing dashboards offer a real-time snapshot of the state of your production processes. The goal is to provide decision-makers with a fast, easy way to access KPIs and other important insights. Crucially, this replaces the need to manually crunch numbers each time you need the figures in question. Any time we set out to build dashboards, the biggest challenge is getting all of the different data that we need into one location, formatted compatibly.
Ronan McQuillan
Nov 10, 2023
How to Build a Supply Chain Dashboard
Supply chain dashboards provide much-needed access to real-time insights about a whole range of interrelated inventory, cost management, and procurement processes. The challenge is getting all of the data we need in one place and compatible formats. Today, we’re exploring how Budibase empowers teams to build custom dashboards around all kinds of existing data sources. Along the way, we’ll see how we can create and save custom queries to transform data and present the results in professional UIs, with minimal design skills.
Ronan McQuillan
Nov 10, 2023
How to Build an Inventory Calculator
Managing inventories - especially the finances surrounding them - can pose serious challenges and create mountains of admin work. Custom inventory calculator apps are a powerful solution. We might need to regularly perform calculations around stock changes, valuations, efficiency, warehouse utilization, or other KPIs. The trouble is that these kinds of calculations are often deceptively complex - with many of the figures we need stored in different locations, in different formats.
Ronan McQuillan
Nov 10, 2023
How to Build a Procurement Dashboard
Sourcing raw materials and handling incoming stock are some of the most fundamental challenges that logistics teams face. The right procurement dashboard can make all the difference here. See, a huge part of the problem is visibility. Procurement processes draw on a number of different types of data - across inventories, supply chains, finances, and more. Without unified, coherent reporting, it’s almost impossible to make sense of all of this.
Ronan McQuillan
Nov 2, 2023
How to Build Inventory Automations with Budibase
Inventory automation is potentially the most transformative tool that logistics teams have at their disposal. See, managing inventories can be incredibly tricky - owing largely to the complexity of the data and processes involved. Not only does this make it difficult to understand the current state of our inventory - it can also create mountains of administrative work and introduce unnecessary scope for error. Inventory automation seeks to address all three of these problems simultaneously.
Ronan McQuillan
Nov 2, 2023