ReportsHQ compared with building it yourself
A table, a cron job and a chart library is a weekend. The second year of it is not. An honest account of what you would end up maintaining.
| What you are comparing | ReportsHQ | Building it yourself |
|---|---|---|
| The first three charts | About an hour once a model is described. | A day or two, and you own every line. |
| The fifteenth chart | Same as the first. Describe, drag, publish. | Each one is more code, and they start to diverge. |
| Getting a number wrong | Refuses a query it cannot answer honestly. | Answers whatever you wrote, including the wrong join. |
| Comparison ranges and grains | Built in, including the empty previous period. | Yours to write, and easy to get subtly wrong. |
| Exports and share links | Included, with revocation and expiry. | Another feature, arriving when somebody asks. |
| Scheduled email | A row and a console command. | A queue, a mailable, and a way not to send twice. |
| Dependencies | One package and a licence. | None. This is the real advantage. |
| When it is the right call | When reporting is not the thing you want to maintain. | When the reports are few, fixed, and unlikely to be asked about. |
Building it is genuinely reasonable
A handful of queries, a chart library, a Blade view. Two days of work and you own it entirely, with no licence and nobody else's opinions in your codebase. For three fixed charts that never change, this is very likely the right answer.
What it costs later
The fourth chart wants a comparison range. The fifth wants a different grain. Somebody asks for CSV, then for a link they can send to a client who has no login, then for it in their inbox every Monday. None of those is hard, and all of them are work you did not plan for, arriving one at a time.
The part that bites
Getting a number wrong quietly. A revenue-per-product chart that joins line items counts an order once per line, and the total is a plausible number nobody questions until it is in a board pack. Knowing which questions cannot be answered honestly is most of what this package is.
What you get instead
The grid, the drag behaviour, the exports, the share links, the schedules, and a compiler that refuses a query rather than answering it wrongly. Written once, tested, and not your problem on a Friday.
When to build it yourself anyway
If the reports are few, fixed, and unlikely to be asked about. That is a real situation and this page is not going to pretend otherwise.
The honest version
If your reporting needs are one number on one page, build it. That is genuinely a weekend and this would be overkill.
Start free