Square and Stripe Analytics Dashboard (RunRate)

Published by Austin Gray
November 14, 2020

The current idea I'm sending out this week came from a personal problem in my business I decided to solve.

As of last Friday, we have V1 of an app built and it's been a ton of fun to go through the software development process from idea to MVP in 2 weeks.

Here's the backstory: 

As I'm running both coworking spaces and the coffee shop, I'm always interested in where we stand from a revenue perspective.

We use two separate platforms for payment processing for each business.

For the coworking space, we use Proximity. It's a management platform built on top of Stripe's open API specifically for coworking owners and operators. This software helps us manage our member accounts, billing, invoicing, conference room bookings, and door locks.

For the coffee shop, we use Square. It's a popular POS (point of sale) system which acts as a register to take payments in our brick and mortar location. We like Square because of the amount of data it provides on the backend. We can follow our sales reports and sort by filters like year, month, week, or day.

My business partner and I are both numbers guys so we tend to spend a ton of time logging in to our Proximity and Square dashboards to track our sales and revenue.

We're usually pretty consistent with knowing where we're at from a total top line revenue perspective, but sometimes we go a few days without checking.

Problem:


At any given day of the month, our investor will call and ask me the following questions, "What's your total run rate for coworking? How about for coffee? What about combined?"

When this happens, I frantically get to my computer as quick as I can and log into both accounts.

I'll do some quick math in my head while I'm buying time with small talk over the phone, but being the straightforward guy he is, small talk doesn't buy me much.

My current problem is that it takes me too much time to log into two separate dashboards and do the addition in my head to come up with answers to his questions.

When my investor calls, I want to know exactly where we're at with revenues, and I also want to state quickly and confidently so our relationship is strengthened and he's confident in me as an operator.

Solution:


After going through three of these calls not having a quick, straightforward, and confident answer, I brainstormed a solution.

"What if there was a web and mobile app to pull data from Stripe and Square and display all of the important metrics in one dashboard?"

I spent some time thinking about this, and realized this is a large enough personal pain to solve. I reached out to some developer friends and one agreed to help me build V1 of my solution, RunRate.

So, as of Friday 2/7, we have our MVP built.

I built this specifically for entrepreneurs who own multiple businesses running on Stripe and Square.

Here's a link to the landing page of RunRate, if you'd like to join the beta group and give me feedback along the way.

Shoot me a reply and let me know what you think. Would love to show you the backend of V1 and get your feedback.

As always, feel free to reach out with any questions or feedback on Twitter.

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