I found a way to have geeky coding and business fun at the same time by coding up a small TUI (Terminal User Interface) dashboard for some of our CRM data. I've been wanting to have a business dashboard for some time and intended to use Google Data Studio (which is apparently now Looker Studio) but just never got to it. At the same time, ever since I saw terminal.shop selling coffee using a TUI behind ssh I really wanted to play with a terminal interface: I'm a big fan of lighter weight things that aren't always in the browser. Finally, a recent SmartMarketer show talked about the concept 'Customer Value Velocity', which gives us an idea of how much risk we can take (i.e. how much we can spend) to acquire the next customer in our business. Finally, I just wanted to do some recreational coding after a bit of a hiatus.

I ended up with https://github.com/bdobson01/simplero-dashboard after a few sessions playing with the code (avoiding writing on my novel) and I'm happy with it. It uses php-tui for the simple user interface. I set it up so that I can easily create new display pages with different views of that data I pull out of Simplero (our CRM) into SQLite, and it's straightforward to pull in tabular data from other CSV exports and manipulate those.

I showed the graph of total membership subscribers per month to Minette and she was immediately able to see some concerning patterns.

The CVV data was fussy to calculate but now that it's done I have a way to see how much to spend on customers.

So, a fun little project to scratch some itches that turned into something that I can rely on and easily expand.