Internal Tools Guide: What They Are, Why Your Business Needs Them, And How To Build One

It’s hard to track dozens or even hundreds of processes happening within your company at a time and promptly report on them. It’s always a challenge for your team. Especially considering that all the processes are distributed across multiple systems.

So why not build an internal tool and connect the data sources you need under one UI to simplify and speed up your work?

The internal software is developed for use strictly within your organization by your employees. Under internal tools, they usually mean dashboards, GUIs, CRMs, ticketing systems, and etc. They are meant to power your business processes – meetings management, data analytics, resources management. Google and Stripe know how it works for sure: they use internal tools to automate the microprocesses for their employees.

Internal tool examples

Let’s cover the most commonly built and used internal tools in businesses today.

Admin panel or dashboard

An admin panel allows you to manage user access, process essential data. Companies use admin panels to manage retail or sales back-end operations. Most often, out-of-the-box solutions can’t meet these specific needs due to their limitations.

Graphical user interface (GUI)

More and more businesses are digitizing and going online. With their growth, they collect and have to process large amounts of data. To provide the needed insights, the data need to be interpreted. It’s not convenient to analyze the data obtained from multiple data sources. That’s why companies build custom internal tools, dashboards, or GUIs. They use them to visualize the data pulled from their databases. Using modern internal tool builders, you can visualize the data you get from various data sources – MySQL, MS SQL Server, MongoDB, Firebase, PostgreSQL, Google Sheets, and more.

Customer relationship management (CRM) system
This internal tool is tailored to help your product, marketing, sales, and other teams better manage their clients. CRMs are available out-of-the-box (Salesforce, HubSpot CRM, Zoho CRM). However, they generally either offer the features you don’t need or lack the necessary functionality. That’s why a lot of companies prefer to build custom CRMs with the feature set specifically tailored for their activities. Customizing an off-the-shelf CRM solution is much more expensive and time-consuming than creating a custom CRM system.

Support app

Any IT support team needs a support ticketing tool to manage support tickets faster and more efficiently. A support app allows you to gather all the requests coming from different sources in one place. Not only it reduces your support team’s stress but also structures and organizes the entire support process.

Inventory management app

An inventory app helps you keep track of all your stock and inventory data in one convenient place. In simple words, it serves as a centralized database. Via an inventory app, you can visualize and manage sales data (orders, payments, transactions), prepare reports, and more. It usually consists of a database connected to a handy UI with a dashboard where all the data is visualized using tables, forms, charts, graphs, etc.

Who build internal software

When a company needs internal software, they dedicate a team or a developer to build it. However, it’s not the most favorite part of work for software engineers, especially when they need to build an internal tool from scratch. However, with internal tool builders like Retool, UI Bakery, Internal.io, they don’t need to spend days or weeks developing internal software. The development process is visual and takes hours depending on the internal software complexity.

Internal tool builders ensure high speed, development simplicity, low costs. Using them, backend developers, product managers, IT managers, database architects can build an internal tool with no front-end skills. They need to have only general web development understanding and JavaScript knowledge. They can use JavaScript if they need to modify their internal software with custom code.

How to build an internal tool fast

To speed up the building process, save development hours and costs, I advise using low-code or no-code development platforms. Here are simple steps to follow if you decide to build your internal software with a low-code internal tool builder:

1. Choose an internal tool builder
Luckily, there’s a great variety of them today. They usually do not require strong development skills. They offer a convenient drag-and-drop building interface, predefined building blocks, data connectors, templates, and more.
Retool and UI Bakery are the powerful ones. You can check their comparison and choose between them.

2. Choose a template, or start from scratch
If your internal tool builder has the template you need, use it as a starting point to save your time. All you need is just customize the chosen template as you need and move to the next step. This will significantly cut down development time.
If you’re motivated enough and have plenty of time, you can always start building your internal software from scratch. With an internal tool builder, you can still do it fast using ready-made layouts, widgets, UI components (Tables, Forms, Charts, Buttons), and in-built data connection functionality.

3. Connect your data
The essential part of your future internal software is the data sources you need to integrate with. Usually, low-code internal tool builder provide in-built integrations to various databases and third-party APIs in a few clicks. Here’s what you can integrate with:

• MySQL
• PostgreSQL
• Firebase
• MongoDB
• Redis
• Salesforce
• Airtable
• Stripe
• Slack
• Twilio, and more.

Moreover, you can connect your own HTTP API to your internal tool.

4. Publish your internal tool & invite users
Once your internal app is ready, you can publish it (one-click deployment is available in a number of low-code platforms). After that, invite end-users to test your internal tool. You can create user groups and ensure the needed access level for every user. You can define the viewers and editors of your internal software.

To sum up: consider the benefits – and start building!

There’s hardly any valid reason to further postpone internal software development. You can simplify a great number of microprocesses. No more need to spend too much time, money, and effort on internal software development. Here are only some of the benefits you get:

• Improved internal processes.
• Cost effectiveness (if opt for an internal tool builder instead of custom - development from scratch).
• Centralized control over your business processes.
• Higher team productivity.
• Happier employees, and more.

All you need is to take your database, choose the most suitable and fastest internal tool builder, and start building.