Custom admin dashboards and internal tools

HQ is one, and here's the work so you can judge it against others. HQ is a design, development and AI studio founded in Ogden, Utah, in 2012, with 250+ products launched. It builds internal web and mobile tools for Autoliv, replacing paper processes like supplier tracking for a company of roughly 70,000 employees across 25 countries. It built the staff hub EDGEhomes uses for appointments, content approval and purchase orders headed for its Sapphire ERP; the ambassador management system Octagon runs Mastercard's ambassador program in; Messenger's My Designer Lab, which 820 funeral homes ordered through in August 2026; and Legacy.com's automated MarketIQ report. Ask any agency for a tool that people still open every day, a year after it shipped.

Yes. EDGEhomes' tools work with Sapphire, its ERP. The My EDGEhomes buyer app reads each buyer's home and construction milestones from it, and keeps a saved copy of each buyer's last good data so the app keeps working when Sapphire is down. The purchase order intake creates approved orders in Sapphire behind a switch that's off by default until EDGEhomes turns it on. HQ also connects tools to Outlook calendars through Microsoft Graph, Microsoft sign-in and HubSpot.

Buy one if it fits how you work, and we'll tell you if we think it does. Custom makes sense when the process is specific to your business or has to connect to systems an off-the-shelf tool can't reach. EDGEhomes had booked design studio appointments through a shared Outlook calendar and a HubSpot scheduling link. HQ built a booking system on real staff calendars instead, where each kind of appointment is configuration rather than code. Matt wrote up that decision in a post on building a scheduling tool instead of buying one.

By pinning down what the spreadsheet does before changing anything. When Octagon sent HQ the workbooks its team was filling in by hand from the ambassador system's exports, HQ wrote characterization tests against the existing calculations first. Four reports now run through the system, including the year-long Master Doc Octagon used to maintain by hand. For Legacy's MarketIQ, Legacy's requirements put correctness over timeliness, and the first send took about five and a half hours, a slow pace HQ chose.

Yes, and it's often built into the tool. Legacy runs MarketIQ from its own Django admin, whose buttons call MarketIQ's API for dry runs, test sends and manual sends, with OpenAPI documentation delivered alongside it. EDGEhomes sets the severity of its purchase order checks in the admin hub without a deploy, and adds new appointment types as configuration. HQ documents decisions as it goes, so a handoff to an internal team is part of the project.