Custom report builder for engagement data exports

The moment someone realizes this is a real problem is when they're preparing a board-level people report and the engagement tool they pay for gives them three pre-built report templates, none of which match the org chart as it actually exists — so they export everything to a spreadsheet, manually add a tenure column from the HRIS, and spend a Sunday afternoon building a pivot table.

This keeps happening because engagement vendors define 'reporting' as visualizing the data they already collected, not as a flexible workspace where admins can define their own fields, join in external data, and output in the format their audience expects. The complaint 'ad hoc reporting is not self customised' and 'I wish you were able to customize the report options to add more applicable fields' are describing the same structural ceiling: the data is there, but the tool won't let you reshape it.

The broader reporting tools in this space are either too generic (built for BI analysts, not HR admins) or too tied to a single data source. What HR admins actually need is a template system where they can define a report once — pick the fields, set the filters, choose the groupings — and then re-run it every cycle with updated data, without rebuilding it from scratch. The comparative angle is particularly unserved: 'improved reporting for pulse surveys, specifically with comparative reports' is a direct ask for trend-over-time views that most engagement tools don't surface at all.

This is a business because every reporting cycle, at every company, someone rebuilds the same report manually. The cost is time and error risk, and it recurs monthly or quarterly forever. The buyer is anyone who has to present people data to leadership and currently does it in Excel.

What to build

Build a report template builder that HR admins use to define reusable report layouts — picking fields from connected engagement and HRIS data sources, setting org-level filters, and configuring comparative views across time periods — then schedule those reports to auto-generate and deliver as formatted outputs to specific stakeholders.

Where to start

Start with companies using a single widely-adopted HRIS and one engagement survey tool by building a tight, reliable integration for just that pair — deliver one high-quality comparative pulse report template out of the box so the value is immediate on day one without any configuration.

The hard part

The product only works if it can reliably connect to the engagement tools and HRIS the customer already uses — which means building and maintaining a growing set of integrations before you have enough customers to justify the engineering investment.

How it makes money

Subscription charged per workspace (one per HR team), with usage tiers based on number of connected data sources and number of scheduled report deliveries per month.