Why Use Low Code No Code: 3 Great Application Examples From Coach Management To Database Admin Panels
When it comes to finding the right CRM, ERP, or Coach Bus Management System the question often is, buy or build. For a long time, but has been one of the better options. This is why companies like Salesforce and Workday rose so quickly in popularity. However, there are other options now besides these two tools. Especially in the build category. Just as Neo4j who just recently switched their renewals process off of salesforce and onto ReTool. This didn’t just provide them with a cost-effective and easy to customize solution but it also helped reduce churn. The RCC is already paying dividends after being in production for six months. Churn due to late renewals has improved many-fold, and last-minute forecast surprises (the enemy of renewals) have been nearly eliminated.
The way Mike sees it, Retool is his team’s special sauce. “I’ve got my secret weapon,” he says. “I’ve got a Retool.” There is a lot more you can do besides rebuilding CRMs. ReTool provides companies the ability to quickly spin up internal tools to help improve workflows.
You can say goodbye to trying to manage Excel and Google sheets if you’re a smaller company and take advantage of a more automated workflow. In turn, this can lead to easier reporting and more standardizing processes.
In this article, we will discuss a few reasons why low code no code tools like Retool are great as well as go over ideas that your team could implement in various industries to help automate workflows and get away from some more arcane solutions. So let’s see how Retool Could help you.
Why Low Code/No Code Is Great
Low code solutions are more than just hype. They provide developers and business owners the ability to quickly develop products and solutions with lower overhead. Low code can take weeks maybe even months off of application development by providing easy drag and drop solutions that developers can quickly iterate on.
This is great both for prototyping and internal tooling (at least with the current solutions in our opinion). Also, these tools not only help software developers focus more on the business problem but they can also improve communication between tech and business. One of the long-standing problems between tech and business is a lack of cohesion.
Having tools like Retool can provide a medium for both sides can come together and discuss a solution. All while working to orient movable components around.
Overall, low code can help reduce development time and provide the customizability your team needs to manage your business processes.
Of course, low code is not a great solution for everything and we believe it has its place.
Here are a few great examples of where your team can implement low code solutions like Retool to help improve your workflow.
Coach And Bus Management System
The Coach Bus industry is nearly a 4 billion dollar industry and growing. Especially as more companies are trying to improve their carbon footprint by providing their employees with an alternative method of transportation. Now there are plenty of popular Coach Management Systems that exist. But sometimes you need the flexibility to develop and manage your system. Instead of purchasing a system like Distinctive or RBS, you could build your own. Now, there are a lot of reasons why you might want to do this. For example, yes, it’s more customizable, but you can easily also create a customer 360 dashboard and other tools to help improve sales and retention. Also, you could create tools to better manage and optimize pricing. But talk is cheap. Here are a few examples of what you could create. First, there are several areas that Coach Systems looks to manage.
- Billing
- Quotes
- Analytics
- Drivers
- Accounting
- Etc.
Now using Retool let’s mockup the billing and analytics portions of a possible Coach Management System. Billing in particular for Coach Bus companies can be very tedious. Many companies are still utilizing manual processes to track down their invoices. But that doesn’t have to be the case. Let’s look at this tool we have put together. For this tool, we will be using Stripe to automate Billing as well as an invoice creator. Stripe will allow us to automatically send bills to people as well as easily let us set reminder emails. Below is a basic example of what your Coach Invoicing tool could look like.
You will notice that there is a button that allows you to send invoices. There are multiple ways you could do this using either Stripe or another custom API end-point.
Also, you could set up a quick script separate running on some form of regular basis to automatically email reminders at set dates. But that’s out of scope. You could also create a Customer view so you could both track invoices but also get information about a customer.
This could be used to help coach management companies quickly search and find their previous customers, see their previous invoices, trips, etc. In turn, you can have a customer 360 view of a single customer and manage their account from a single place.
This was a quick example that we put together in a few hours. You could further develop this into a full blown Coach Management System and add tons of your features.
You could also add in a module for analytics and insights you might not currently have so you can improve your overall coach bus business strategy.
Create A Database Management Portal For Users
One important tool when it comes to having a subscription service or SaaS like product is being able to have an easy-access dashboard that helps provide insights into your users. For example, you might need to disable or renew accounts depending on how manual your processes are.
This is more common for services that don’t have standard pricing and require lots of contracts and pricing based on specific usage vs. clear cut basic and high-level services. In addition, you might want to be able to see trends of that specific user or perhaps a company that has multiple users. In turn, this can help provide a lot of insights as well as functionality.
The examples below are both various forms of a database admin panel. One tab is for users another is for products. These are actual templates provided by Retool and can be found here.
Overall, there is no need to develop custom code admin portals with tools like Retool around. Admin panels are just meant to provide functionality with custom websites. So spending hours upon hours developing an admin panel that will mostly be used to moderate and track usage can be a waste of time.
Product Or Service Complaint Investigation System
Often companies need to manage complaints and cases for products, employees and just about everything in between. Instead of utilizing a tool with limited functionality, design can piece together their own version.
Below we put together a template of a possible case management tool. This tool could be used to manage product complaints, employee complaints, and general customer problems.
Low Code No Code Can Help Both Replace And Improve Your Internal Systems
Often companies feel stuck to buying prebuilt internal tools. However, with more robust low code no code options such as ReTool, suddenly companies can solve many of the customizability problems they may have had using systems like Salesforce or Workday. Like our earlier example of Neo4j. But this isn’t limited to recreating CRM style systems. If you’re trying to create some sort of case investigation system or machine learning tagging system. Retool even can allow you to do that. Retool is not the only Low code no code option out there. However, it does currently have a lot of traction thanks to its billion-dollar valuation. So we wanted to show how these tools could be helpful to solve your business problems and possibly get out of Excel.
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